The Girl and the "Booya"

“The Girl” by Meridel Le Sueur sets it’s setting around 1930’s and the center of life is being told in what seems to be a bar in German Village. The drinking life being oppressed by the government, now has people creating bars to have upstair bootleg rooms where people sneak in late at night and meet with a man like Ganz. The twin cities of “Sodom and Gomorrah” as the unnamed narrator's mother called them becomes the center of life for the runaway young women. It’s interesting the way life is built in the bar. The way the restaurant gets packed that five mugs are carried around like its nothing. And the way a “home run” was a thing to lookout for when taking up beer to those men that seemed to be gangsters in the upstairs room. The story unravels the main characters or Clara and Hoinck a couple, Belle a waitress and Bill the brother of the steamy Butch both what seem to be as bartenders. I got an intense feeling as the author proceeded to express the interest of the narrator towards the bar man Butch. The use of imagery like, “Butch leaned over me and I felt like a bird on a barbecue spike”. Not only made me the reader see the blush in the character but kinda giggle at the situation of the characters own reaction. It reminded me of a show called “Bomb Girls” as to where one of the characters is a runaway child and every men she likes she creates these illusions of them being muscular and handy in her head. I enjoy the fact that the author has created the a first person omniscient character. It provides insight on the thoughts and reactions on all characters even herself, kind of like a play rather than a fiction novel. I believe that the plot is not entirely showed on the first few chapters of the book however the want of a new life and beginning to the narrator creates a bit of a foreshadow. I think this is great because it leaves the reader wanting more, it creates a sense of believable life as well. The way the narrator's emotions of anxiety are expressed when she is told that Ganz wants "Booya" a famous plate at the restaurant begins to make her  shy, and creates a sense of innocence in the  character making her question her life decisions. Her nervousness tells the reader that the man named Ganz is old and gets his own way in life creating a conflict for the narrator to work at the bar because she's young and new.

In Between

In the book “Telling Women’s Lives”  Wagner Martin is trying to explain how as a writer we can become great biography writers, and as readers how to find a great biography and autobiography. However the purpose is not to teach step by step but by giving non-stop examples and showing evidence of it. On page 70 there is an example used about a character in the Lillian Hellman’s Memoirs which represents the unknown character in her lifetime. The author purposefully creates this character to confused the reader. The confusion isn’t about who the character is, or where it came from, but what it represents. Is it someone in the writer’s life? or is there fiction being created in a biography. But the real question Wagner Martin focuses on is whether fiction is allowed in a biography or not. The example of this story connects to my life existence by questioning my dreams and the meaning they have in my life. Because no one else sees them, and don’t appear in real life would it be adding fiction to your life? pretty crazy in some sense. Wagner Martin quickly changes her focus on fiction in biographies to family and reflection they show on authors biographies and autobiographies. She says, “Women are reflection of family”(page100). At first it intrigued me because it made me think about the things i’ve learned through my family but then she gave an example about another writer and it changed my concept about that phrase. She used writer Catherine Bateson and Mother Margaret Mead as a focal point for this section. Both mother and daughter write memoirs however the mother writes about her life before, during and after a divorce. Mead doesn’t write about the struggles but the passage and phases she went through because of the divorce, she tries to write out her daughters perspective without asking but just noticing. However Bateson later writes about her perspective as an adult on the situation. She goes from the guilt she felt, the shame and the sadness to the actual feeling of understanding. Both mother and daughter got the learning experiences from one life even that included them both in two different roles. I think this intrigued me because it must have been challenging for Mead to write through the eyes of her daughter and how Bateson must have felt while writing her memoir while not trying to contradict her own feelings.