Announcing the Winners of Reading Women’s 2020 Award
Congrats to Carmen Maria Machado and Bernardine Evaristo!
In this episode of Reading Women, the full team—Kendra, Jaclyn, Sachi, and Sumaiyya—is here to announce the winners of the 2020 Reading Women Awards in fiction and nonfiction: Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House and Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other.
From the episode:
On In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado:
Kendra: One of the things that she captures is when you’re in a relationship like that, you don’t realize it in that moment. You don’t really understand what that relationship was until you’re out of it. And then she also has these moments where she’s thinking back on it and something will remind her of that abusive relationship, and it comes back. And I think that is something that a lot of particularly women have experienced in relationships like that—you have that voice in your head of the person you used to be in a relationship with, and how that kind of haunts you. And that haunting is woven throughout the book as well, where you can see that this has deeply affected [Machado] in the way that she sees herself. That’s something she has to work through, and I think this memoir is part of that.
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On Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo:
Sumaiyya: There’s this fluidity in the form; it flows like poetry. It’s like a deep inhale sometimes. And what I really love is the way that that fluidity is also translating in the different themes in this book. So, we are seeing fluidity in the form and also sexuality, gender, and class, and also in the way that the lives of these different women are interconnected and flowing from one to the other. That was really beautiful to experience.
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This episode is brought to you by Chanel. A visionary woman who’s influence on the arts continues even today, Gabrielle Chanel created her life and her legend on her own terms. Discover her story at InsideChanel.com.
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