When Women Were Dragons

Excellent! Imagining the world she paints as happening in today’s world makes me LOL. I enjoyed this book so much!

‍

School principals and head teachers did not take kindly to potentially unruly students with the ability to breathe fire. The thinking went that the risk of insubordination with dragoned students was incalculable. How on earth could they be educated when they couldn’t be subdued? principals wondered.

‍

The story follows a single person through her rough childhood, the college years, and, finally, at the end, as an old woman. We see her morphing from a good girl who always keeps her eyes to the ground to a science-loving woman who co-habitats with dragons.

‍

The first part of the book made me squirm as her childhood echoed my own in the way in which the adults never talked to her, never told her anything - except how she was expected to behave. That kind of childhood creates a leaf in the wind, not a grounded, thinking person. Which, obviously, creates difficulties that are inevitable.

‍

I thought about my mother’s rules. Her silences. The sudden anger. The slap. She told me I would understand someday. But I didn’t. Instead, that slap came out of me in oblique and unexpected ways. In my explosion of anger at Mrs. Gyzinska that day in the library. At Beatrice when I saw her notebook full of dragons. It came out in my terror of being alone. My mother’s fear became my fear, whether I wanted it or not. The realization of this made me gasp.

‍

When the protagonist finally cracks and begins to accept the truth, I felt a great sense of relief. Acceptance really is the magic pill that gets one through life.

‍

I have used books as a way to learn about other places and times, and to fall into the emotional reality of other people. I’ve used books to enrich my understanding of history, and to learn practical things. But I never considered that I might turn to books as a form of catharsis. Yes, of course, I’ve read plenty of self-help books, but I’m talking about something different.

‍

I am here to point you to the fact that once upon a time, humanity worshipped the Divine Feminine, and that in that time all of humanity was in the thrall of her power and strength, both procreative and destructive, both fecund and barren, both joy and terror, all at once. If there is one thing I have learned in my years of research, it is that the answer is never just one thing. The particle is the wave, is the particle, is the wave. In the end, the entire universe is the marriage of opposites.

‍

Reading this book made me realize that there is now a whole genre of books that could be shelved together as "Catharsis Reading for Women Who Have Been Burned at the Stake (and Other Atrocities)".

‍

Noemi Alderman's "The Power”, Christina Sweeney-Baird’s “The End of Men” (which took it too far), and this book have served as a form of deep catharsis for me. How much I would love to turn into a dragon and roast whatever dude needed it in the moment! To live among my own kind helping, loving, beautifying, making things whole again! I’m grateful to the author for filling my mind with these thoughts!

‍

But here’s the thing, Alex, my love. This isn’t new information, and your mother isn’t alone. All women are magic. Literally all of us. It’s in our nature. It’s best you learn that now.

‍

This should be required reading for adolescent girls.