In Which I Read That Dragon Book — The Final Chapters
In Which I Read That Dragon Book — The Final Chapters
December 8, 2022, 9:40 pm
Filed under: art, writing, Creative Process, anger | Tags: fury, rage, anger, Nice, When Women Were Dragons, dragons, Reading Journey, The Final Chapters, Nobel Peace Prize, eye rolling, The end of war
If this is the first one of these you’ve encountered, just know that this is the fourth in a series. To sum up: I’ve been reading When Women Were Dragons because it rang a lot of bells for people in its similarity to my dragon blog and my audio drama. I recommend reading Part One, Part Two and Part Three. If you’re the kind of person who reads the end of the book first, start here!
THE FINAL CHAPTERS
Nov 12
Finally, after three more endings, I have finished this book. In addition to the last chapters, I also read the acknowledgements. If I’d known how furious the experience of reading all this would make me, I would not have read it before bed — but alas, there I was at 3:18am, raging at the ceiling.
The book itself turned out to be pretty low impact. The sister turns dragon and wins a Nobel Peace Prize. The dragons put an end to war; All war is over. (I may have injured my eyes rolling them at this point.) But even though the dragons have changed the course of all human events by ending war, we still end up with Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan as presidents. It’s just that they have to be political with dragons, too. I don’t know — it just feels to me like if you significantly shift the course of human history (by, say, including dragons and I don’t know, ending all war?!?) the American people might make better presidential choices.
But also — the dragons end war? I mean — cool, I guess — but it feels like the old chestnut of “if women ran the world, there’d be no war.” Which — maybe so — I sure would like the opportunity to find out — but also women like Marjorie Taylor Green exist and so does Amy Coney Barrett and also Lauren Boebert. We’ve got a lady fascist in the highest office in Italy. I just don’t buy the women are naturally more peace loving thing, which this book feels like it’s leaning into.
SIDE NOTE: After telling us about all the dragon scientists and giving the dragon sister a Nobel Peace Prize and listing all the accomplishments of all the dragons, the protagonist tells us she chose not to be a dragon because she wanted to be a scientist. She just told us many dragons are scientists. If you didn’t WANT to be a dragon, just SAY that. This protagonist is so repressed, I cannot deal.
But aside from my eye rolling injury, I don’t think it was the end of the book that triggered my fury so much as the acknowledgements.
The author lays out how she set out to write a book about rage and marvels at how it turned into a book about “heart” and “memory” instead. Really?! I hadn’t noticed. JK. I totally noticed. And I actually have shifted from rage to pity for this woman. Because she set out to write a book about rage and started to do it but then she put the rage in a box, hid the box in a closet and never opened it again. I can’t help feeling like this woman could not be present with her own fury. She felt it, like so many of us did during the Kavanagh hearings. She started to write through it and then had to repress it. She turned all those women into dragons — with powerful bodies, protective scales, dangerous talons and teeth, the ability to breathe fire and then she gave them some knitting and sent them to PTA meetings. She started the aunt out as a bad-ass lesbian fighter pilot and then turned her into a domestic dragon who occasionally fixes a car or two. The four dragons in the quadruple all sleep in a nest together but there isn’t a whisper of sex among them and they never get angry about discrimination. I feel like this author betrayed her own idea and all of her characters. Why make them dragons if this is what you do with them? They could just be seals or otters or moths or whatever cool creature. She set up an idea that all the women fled to a whole new society and then brought them back after a few years. There’s a lot of set up in this book and there was not one single pay off. She explicitly set out to write about rage and then somehow scared herself out of it.
As a formerly nice girl, I do understand how this could have happened but I also suddenly want to scream something at her that I have heard my whole life and never thought I would ever want to say to anyone else; “You’re too nice!” And like — it would be fine if she’d set out to write a book about a nice society of nice dragons who live together and have nice times — but she did not set out to do that. She wanted to lean into rage and then couldn’t do it. And that’s kind of sad, actually. Like, so many women have been so deeply socialized to NOT feel their rage — an entirely capable writer couldn’t even do it when she wanted to. I’m rooting for her to actually open up that rage box and see what’s in it, to feel the energy of fury, to let rage loose and see what happens.
And then there was the origin story of how this novel came about. Turns out, it was some guy. Some guy asked her to write a story about dragons for his anthology and so she agreed. That’s it. Here I am with dragons emerging out of the depths of my very being, identifying my heart out with fire breathing beasts and this lady gets a whole book deal out of some guy asking her to write him a little dragon something.
She wasn’t visited by the dragon idea daemon or muse; She just did what a man told her to do and I know this is a dumb thing to be mad about but I actually know how to feel my rage now and I know that sometimes it really is the little things. Somehow, I could deal with the idea of the muse delivering a dragoning to both of us. But learning that this wasn’t even an inspiration for her but just a little assignment from an editor, that this book only exists because the writer couldn’t say no to a man, well, that pushed me over the edge. And also — it doesn’t eliminate the possibility that reading my blog or listening to my podcast could have been a factor. The dude could have read or heard it and rather than ask ME to write a dragon story for his anthology, asked the award winning writer, instead. She herself could have read or heard it while looking for dragon material and just conveniently left me out of her narrative of how this book happened. Or my work could have nothing to do with any of this which is weirdly worse because I’m even more insignificant in that scenario.
And I’m sorry that this lady couldn’t hang on to her rage long enough to write her book about it but I have PLENTY of rage to spare. I have an abundance of anger and some of it is for the bus under which women have been thrown, as well as the people and society that threw them there, and some of it is for my own sense of impotence in creating things in a world that is entirely indifferent to my work.
You want someone to write about dragons and rage? I am RIGHT HERE. I am right here breathing fire and ready to tear things apart. I can do nice. But now is not the time for nice, I’m sorry to say. Now is the time for rage. Someone give me a damn book deal.
And another thing! (Did you think this was over? So did I! But fake out endings were a hallmark of this book so I feel entitled to one.) How dare you write a woman dragon book without teeth? How DARE you. Right now? What do you think? That all the men in charge are just going to give us our rights if we’re just nice enough to them? If we knit them some comfy sweaters they’ll just hand us a guarantee of bodily autonomy? Come on. If there ever was a time for claws and teeth, it is now. We need fire. You could have given women some fuel, some fight and you gave us a series of dragonish historical events. Boooo! Try again.
I’ve put a small portion of my rage in this box for you, only thing is, you’ll have to actually open it.
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Originally published at http://artiststruggle.wordpress.com on December 9, 2022.
