This book is for anyone who has ever doubted women’s ability to embody and impart genius and innovation while concurrently dealing with the complexities of loss, motherhood, academia, politics, ailments, and how these hurdles can consequently fracture sisterhood and human connection.
The Flattery sisters, Olwen, Rhona, Nell, and Maeve, tragically lost their parents at a young age, quickly plunging them all into early adulthood, and deep into academia
and self sufficiency as coping mechanisms.
Beginning the book and throughout, we meet these four sisters while they are all in their 30s, all currently choosing not to be in relationships, and all graduates of PHDs. Yet despite these similarities, all 4 sisters complicatedly yet tenderly intellectualize life differently, and internally propose to provide change in the world and meaning to their lives in their own ways.
These women, known intellects of deep renown,
joined in their search for Olwen, who has gone off the grid due to an existential crisis, when together so nonchalantly ponder thesis level topics with thoughtfulness and care, more comfortable pointedly exploring Geology or arguing the causes of global warming than endeavoring into their own emotional traumas, or confronting their joint fear of change and the world of personal, life altering alternatives.
There is a conflicting pointed softness to conversations had between sisters, especially ones of intellectual basis.
Curiously parsing through topics such as Climate Change, sustainability, government politics, birth control, etc. while cooking each other dinner, changing their nephews diaper, looking for something for the other to borrow; as women, and as sisters, they, and we, provide thoughtful and important conversations of academia and intellectualism with a range of complexity that these subiects’ pontifications don’t naturally have on their own.
I think women of intellect, possessors of doctorates, professors, scientists, etc. are so often seen as less woman than they are, pressured to downplay their innate female qualities in order to be universally acknowledged in their fields. To be taken seriously, often women cannot afford to adopt the same nonchalance around their intelligence that men assume men can; god forbid a woman be intelligent while also being loving, intelligent while beautiful or especially tuned into her appearance, intelligent while also being funny; god forbid a woman contain nuance in her behavior and immense variety in her emotions and feelings. A woman’s intelligence must constantly be turned on, it’s existence always at risk of being questioned by others.
As women, we are constantly feeling as if we have to moderate ourselves, while also deeply feeling the suffocating
moderation imposed by the rest of the world, and these women are tired of living in moderation, alone, victim of their own attempted intellectualization, their shrugging off of their own feelings, ailments, and relationships, and desperately need this chance to come together to be forced and guided in their attempts to puzzle through their increasingly disparate lives.
Hughes doesn’t ask much of the reader, just simply to keep pace with the conversations and thoughts presented, to carefully listen and understand, and it becomes easy to forget you aren’t really there, that you could help but join them. She genuinely just asks of you to care, positing that “it’s impossible to be in the world, devoid of care.” and that’s, at the end of the day, all they ask of each other as well.
portraitofayoungwoman 