Woman Determined

by Jean Swallow

Book Overview

When Margaret is hit by a car on the day she discovers her partner has embezzled thousands from the health clinic she runs, she hires attorney Laura Gilbert. Their search for justice shows truth as a... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1883523281
• ISBN13: 9781883523282
• Release Date: October 1998
• Publisher: Spinsters Ink Books
• Length: 206 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.4" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

wow

i can't get over the serendipitous good luck that brought me to this book. i picked it up at the used bookstore because it had a unsexy title and an interesting publisher, spinsters ink. in what is doubtless giving too much credit to the rationality of marketing strategies, i thought that since the publisher had decided to go with such a bland title, the novel must be able to stand on its own two feet, without the need to bait readers. well, this novel doesn't just stand, it towers. it is a fictional collection of interviews done by a journalist writing a piece on the history of a women's clinic in seattle. the interviewer appears only in the first interview, and the "published" interviews are only those of two women, margaret, one of the clinic's founder and its ex-administrator, and laura, her lawyer in a personal injury case. so, at a svelte 200 pages, the book consists of twenty alternating monologues, ten by margaret and ten by laura. the formula is intriguing enough, and the book delivers in spades and then some. margaret and laura come powerfully alive, bringing to this potentially dry subject (the history of a women's clinic? a personal injury case? hmm) the full force of their personalities and their personal baggage (which swallow constantly and skillfully intertwines, showing that our personalities are inseparable from our histories). the way in which swallow brings the self of these characters to bear on their narratives is so well done it made me tingle with pleasure. narrative, she shows, springs from the narrator's inner world, and two different narratives of the same event have at least the potential of being convincing and accurate, because what their narrators bring to them is part of the story itself. so this is about memory, truth, truthfulness, and emotional honesty, but it's also about reading, listening, and interpreting, about opening oneself up, as the recipient of the story, to the full import of what someone says when she tells her story. it is also about pain, loss, women's friendship, and political activism. and since it is in large measure about a lawsuit, it is about personal vs. societal responsibility, money (very much about money!), the place of the lawyer in society and in the lawyer-client relationship, women lawyers, women administrators, injury, the body, justice, and the infinitely complex issue of reparation. i could go on. this book is about a lot of things. i am amazed that swallow managed to pack so much in such a small and apparently simple book. she manages to do this because she makes the characters deep, and their depth inevitably makes them rounded, complex, like real people are when you take the time to listento them. although they are very different texts, while reading this i kept thinking of henry james' "the beast in the jungle:" same simple story, same tension between what happens and the amazing depth of what goes on inside, same preternatural capacity on the part of the author to invest