Twitter: Women Were DragonsĮvent: Book launch, 7 p.m. Trisha Collopy is a Star Tribune copy editor. Written on the heels of that bruising Supreme Court battle, and before the current "Don't Say Gay" laws and push to ban books, "When Women Were Dragons" reminds us how difficult it is to put the knowledge of freedom back into the bottle and the cost to a society that tries. The novel shifts from the suffocating conformity of the 1950s to a world where gender identity, and the family structures built around it, turn out to be more fluid than anyone could have imagined. The stakes feel more genuine as Alex navigates her first relationship and also grapples with letting Beatrice, whom she has parented for years, find her own path. If much of the novel feels like a full-throated howl, an indictment of a system of gender apartheid, an alchemy occurs in the final chapters.īarnhill relaxes into her characters, and it's here that "When Women Were Dragons" really sings. The silence and conformity, what one character calls a "mass forgetting," are as suffocating as a world that uplifts men while constraining women to secondary roles. The odder things become, the more Alex is forced to pretend she doesn't see what she sees. Her mother begins obsessively weaving knots, and her parents cut off Alex's friendship with a neighbor girl, who also disappears. Beatrice is adopted as Alex's "sister," and any mention of her aunt or dragons is forbidden.
Then Aunt Marla disappears during a "mass dragoning" of nearly 650,000 women, leaving a baby behind. She had a way of occupying a room that felt dangerous," Alex reflects. I found her thrilling, but terrifying too. Sometimes she laughed louder than any man I knew. She's a mechanic who works in a body shop - a large woman who takes up space and stares down men who cross her. These isolated eruptions are hushed up, suppressed by the local news media and by police and fire crews that respond to the "incidents." Scientists who seek answers to the phenomenon are called in for questioning and blackballed from their universities.Īunt Marla is a breath of fresh air in this stifling environment. Meanwhile, alarming events are happening in her community, as women spontaneously "dragon," erupting in a conflagration that sometimes levels buildings. Or why her father disappears into his work, sometimes not returning home at night. No one will tell her why her mother disappears for months, and her unmarried Aunt Marla moves in to take care of the family.
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