Girl, Woman, Other

by Bernardine Avaristo

This book won the Mann Booker Award this year along with Margaret Atwood and her book The Testament.

It was an interesting book, I like the way the author writes, at times the words seem more like poetry.

The book is about 11 black women, most of them immigrants, and their lives in England and beyond.
As the book goes on we see that the women are all connected in one way or another.  The first story is disturbing, it is about a lesbian who gets lured to the U.S. by another woman.  They live in an all female commune.  The American woman ends up dominating and abusing the British women until she is finally helped to escape by other women in the commune.

Some of the other characters include a playwright who rejects the status quo, a young woman who is raped at 14 and starts to fail in her studies.   She finally decides she will have to fight to succeed.  One of her teachers encourages her an helps her.  She goes on to a successful career in banking.  Her teacher started out as a very idealistic well loved teacher but all the bureaucracy that developed in education wore her down and she is now considered something of a joke by the students. One woman has a daughter from IVF and has several people serve as the girls godparents.  One girl feels she is not a girl and via the Internet hooks up with an Indian boy who has had a sex change to a girl.  The first girl does not want to go through operations to become a man but she does shave her head and have her breasts removed.  The girl and the trans boy become lovers. Another girl is shocked when her parents tell her that she is adopted, having been left on a church doorstep.  Another woman had a child out of wedlock at 16.  Her parents made her give up the child.  She grieves the loss of this child and wonders what has become of her.  At the end of the book they get connected thanks to a DNA test.

The author does a great job of portraying the experiences, the hopes, fears and disappointments of the women.  Sadly many of them are not happy in how their lives have turned out. Several of them are pregnant after one night stands. Understandably there is a lot of discussion about what black people experience in the UK.  I guess I feel there was too much of an emphasis on lesbianism, etc.  Do that many women really struggle with their sexuality? 

I guess I have to say that after reading the book I have to ask, so what?  I guess it is partly about the desire to find love and acceptance and that nonstandard relationships are an option.  A lot of them were trying to find out their background/roots or felt incomplete because they didn't know their origin.  One of the women, the one who had the DNA test is shocked to learn that a small percentage of her DNA is from Africa.