About This is what happens:
How is it that the girl who got the top marks in high school ends up, at fifty, scrubbing floors and cleaning toilets for minimum wage, living in a room above Vera’s Hairstyling, in a god-forsaken town called Powassan?
__________
Feminist theorist Dale Spender wrote, in Women of Ideas and What Men Have Done to Them, “We need to know how women disappear….” Although Spender spoke of women who disappear from the historical record, all too many women seem to disappear from any sort of public life as soon as they leave high school: so many shine there, but once they graduate, they become invisible. What happens?
Marriage and kids is an inadequate answer because married-with-kids straight-A boys (of which, let’s acknowledge, there are fewer) are visible. Everywhere. Even the straight-B boys are out there. So what happens?
Tracing the life of one woman through three juxtaposed voices—the fresh, impassioned protagonist speaking through her journals from the age of fifteen; the sarcastic, now-fifty protagonist commenting about the events of her life, occasionally speaking to her younger self; and the dispassionate narrator—the novel will resonate most with older women, but it is younger women, and men, who most need to read it. Because this is what happens.
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Author Bio:
Chris Wind is the author of This is what happens, dreaming of kaleidoscopes, and Satellites Out of Orbit. Her prose and poetry has appeared in numerous journals and magazines, including The Antigonish Review, Ariel, Atlantis, Bogg, Canadian Author and Bookman, Canadian Woman Studies, Contemporary Verse 2, The Copperfield Review, event, Existere, (f.)Lip, grain, Herizons, Herstoria, The Humanist, The New Quarterly, Other Voices, Poetry Toronto, Prism International, Rampike, Shard, The University of Toronto Review, The Wascana Review, Waves, Whetstone, White Wall Review, and Women’s Education des femmes, as well as several anthologies, including Contemporary Monologues for Young Women, Clever Cats, Visions of Poesy, and Going for Coffee. Her theatrical work has been performed by several companies, including Venus Theatre and Shoestring Radio Theatre, and read on CBC Radio. She has been awarded sixteen Ontario Arts Council grants. chriswind.net