This month we’re talking about “Blueprints For Building Better Girls” by Elissa Schappell.
The slut. The good girl. The party girl. The anorexic. The starving artist. The single mom. The childless wife. The reluctant mother. Are these women that you know? Are you one of them?
Schappell set out to write a book that used female archetypes and subverted our ideas of who these women are. She wanted to write what we all know, but never talk about. One of these archetypes is the “good girl.” In a story about a college student named Charlotte, we meet a young woman who believed if she was a good girl who played by the rules, nothing bad would happen to her. Yet, this good girl went home with a good boy and was raped.
“There is no such thing as a good girl or a bad girl; there are human girls with difficult choices,” said Schappell. “The problem is when the culture says this is what it means to be a good girl, a good mother, a good girlfriend. We’re holding women up to a standard that we certainly don’t hold men up to. A lot of women get poisoned by this idea because we can’t be that person. The rules that exist for us—it’s maddening.”
Women are multidimensional. Yet, oftentimes, our cultural depictions place them in little boxes, assigning them clearly defined roles that are easier to understand. Take the mother character. “So often what we get as mothers are either all-sacrificing, the Medea who is out to kill her children, or they are relentlessly annoying,” Schappell said.
One of the stories, “The Joy of Cooking,” examines a mother-daughter relationship in which the 20-something daughter has had a long battle with anorexia and now seeks help from her mother on how to cook dinner for a new boyfriend. “In every after-school special, it’s always the mother’s fault,” Schappell noted, adding that she wanted to portray a real mother in a difficult and heartbreaking situation. “In the same way there’s no such thing as one kind of girl, there’s no such thing as one kind of mother or one kind of relationship.”
Readers: In art as well as life, are multidimensional women often collapsed into limiting archetypes like good girls, bad girls, sluts and sacrificing moms? Do these labels become a part of our personal identities? How might we begin to allow women the breathing room to be real people?
The ForbesWoman Book Club will meet LIVE on our Facebook page every Wednesday at 12:30 ET in April discuss Blueprints For Building Better Girls by Elissa Schappell.
4/4: Intro: Q&A with Schappell on her inspiration
4/11: Female archetypes: Good girls, bad girls, sluts and moms
4/18: Girl-on-girl hating and friendship
4/25: Reader comments
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