The women Mayhew Bergman chooses to focus on in this collection come from wide-ranging eras, but all led creative and passionate lives, sometimes causing them to make reckless decisions. For many, this also meant a life of loneliness. Mayhew Bergman uses these women as a starting point for each of these historical fiction stories \u2014 intimate, imaginatively told tales that explore the figures\u2019 muddled relationship with fame and greatness.<\/p>\n
The book begins with its strangest story, which warns the reader that this will not be a book of comfortable narratives but rather of darker ones. The story, \u201cThe Pretty Grown Together Children,\u201d features Violet and Daisy Hilton, English conjoined twins who toured in sideshows and vaudeville circuits in the 1930s in Europe and the United States. It is a bold choice for Mayhew Bergman to inhabit the voice of one of the twins, and a moving one, as the inner-workings of Daisy\u2019s mind reveal the intensely human and sensual side that everyone denies the twins of. They were so beautiful and strange that they were admired, but also ridiculed and abused. The story of the twins sets the tone for a book that explores the lives of unconventional women, told always with a remarkable, and intriguing, sense\u00a0of sympathy.<\/p>\n
Beryl Markham (image courtesy Wikipedia)<\/p>\n The second story does not alleviate the uncomfortable feeling aroused in the first, but rather dramatically increases the book\u2019s pace. \u201cThe Siege at Whale Cay\u201d tells the incredible adventure of M.B. \u201cJoe\u201d Carstairs, known as the fastest woman on water. The story is reminiscent of F. Scott Fitzgerald\u2019s The Great Gatsby<\/em> <\/a>(if Gatsby were a woman named Joe). It takes place on a private island and is packed with scenes of enormous, celebrity-filled parties; complicated, tense, and ambiguous relationships; boats gliding at top-speeds in the late of night; flowing whisky, guns, and even a mermaid. The story is told through the voice of a very young American woman whom Carstairs plucked from a theme park in Florida based on her looks and incredible strength as a swimmer, and whisked to Whale Cay to be her next lover. As in \u201cThe Pretty Grown Together Children,\u201d \u201cThe Siege at Whale Cay\u201d reveals the extreme vulnerability of our main protagonist, the seemingly invincible M.B. \u201cJoe\u201d Carstairs, as the evening culminates with her breakdown.<\/p>\n One of the most interesting aspects of this entire collection is the perspective that Mayhew Bergman takes with each near-legend, embodying either the women themselves or a close caretaker, lover, or friend. Equally compelling\u00a0is the way in which the characters\u2019 invented inner lives diverge, intersect, and at times even surpass the historical figures\u2019 outer lives. Mayhew Bergman writes in the acknowledgement section of the book, \u201cWhile I absorbed facts about these women\u2019s lives, I did not stay inside the lines: each of these stories is unequivocally a work of fiction.\u201d Also in her acknowledgements is an excellent list of references and other books from whence these stories were inspired \u2014 fodder for those women in history junkies like me. In browsing this list, for instance, we discover the author\u2019s encounter with \u201ca stunning photograph of Lucia Joyce\u201d \u2014 the daughter of the Irish writer James Joyce \u2014 \u201cin a hand sewn costume,\u201d inspiring\u00a0Mayhew Bergman to write \u201cExpression Theory,\u201d which tells the story of \u201cthe moment the family members decided Lucia was deeply troubled\u201d and sent her\u00a0to live in a mental institution.<\/p>\n A number of perturbed\u00a0women figure in Almost Famous Women<\/em>. There\u2019s the eerie tale of Romaine Brooks, an American painter who lived mostly in Paris and who is best known for her paintings of women in masculine or androgynous dress. Mayhew Bergman begins with a quote from one of Brooks\u2019s notebooks: \u201cWe are what we can be, not what we ought to be.\u201d The story is told through the voice of Brooks\u2019s live-in nurse, who alternates between wishing Brooks would die and longing\u00a0to express the painter\u2019s under-appreciated talent. As in her other stories,\u00a0Mayhew Bergman takes an unapologetic walk into the darker parts of\u00a0Brooks\u2019s\u00a0psyche, often through\u00a0those who surrounded\u00a0her.<\/p>\n Megan Mayhew Bergman, cover of \u2018Almost Famous Women\u2019 (image courtesy Scribner)<\/p>\n One of the strongest, but also most tragic, stories, \u201cThe Autobiography of Allegra Byron,\u201d is set during the depression of the 1820s and vividly describes the confluence of what was happening in the larger picture of history and how it affected people on a very personal basis. The story follows the life of Lord Byron\u2019s illegitimate child, who was sent to live in a convent in northeast Italy, where she dies at the young age of five. The narrative is filled with the haunting absences of those who have been abandoned. The narrator is a nun who takes\u00a0care of Allegra at the convent, and whose husband and child have both died from typhus. In the beginning of the story she explains, \u201cAt the convent I\u2019d nearly found what I was searching for: blankness.\u201d In her daily recitation of prayer, which she admittedly practices\u00a0to not have to think about her grief and loss, she explains, \u201cprayers were dead songs lodged in my head.\u201d<\/p>\n Mayhew Bergman\u2019s\u00a0writing is economic in style, and what is left out creates the unmistakable tone of mystery. Most of the stories left me wanting more and sent me to the internet rabbit hole, researching facts, looking up more images, and questioning more about these women\u2019s lives.\u00a0Despite Mayhew Bergman\u2019s fictional take, the stories have an intense feeling of reality, perhaps because their historical backbone is so strong.\u00a0Yet\u00a0the command of Mayhew Bergman\u2019s characters, pacing, tone, and language certainly does more than just aid history \u2014 it\u00a0ignites it.<\/p>\n Almost Famous Women,\u00a0published by\u00a0Scribner<\/a>, is available from Amazon<\/a> and other online booksellers. Published on Hyperallergic on February 13, 2015 Megan Mayhew Bergman\u2019s short-story collection, Almost Famous Women, I admit, would have caught my attention simply by its title, as I have an insatiable fascination with eccentric women in history. This is also exactly what the book delivers, but in a surprising and intriguing package. The women Mayhew […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":2,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1877","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/sarahwalko.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1877","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/sarahwalko.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/sarahwalko.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sarahwalko.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sarahwalko.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1877"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/sarahwalko.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1877\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1879,"href":"http:\/\/sarahwalko.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1877\/revisions\/1879"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sarahwalko.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/sarahwalko.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1877"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Beryl](\"http:\/\/hyperallergic.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/2.jpg\")
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