The Anti-hero you need

I need to tell you quickly (because I should be writing) about a book I read yesterday – total inspiration, made me walk taller: The Blue Place by Nicola Griffith. Look I have nothing in common with the hero, Aud, other than we are women living in a world that can be really hard. I mean she’s tall, Norwegian, an ex-cop, rich, a master of martial arts. She has woodworking skills and an incredible girlfriend. She has killed, I haven’t! But like all of us she’s damaged, she’s loyal, she takes no shit or prisoners. And while I was reading that book I walked proud, believed in myself, felt less overwhelmed by life: that positive feeling has lasted into today.

Yes Aud steps outside the law, she does things that make her anti-hero not heroine, but to me that just makes her more real. There are quite a few reviews that rave about JJ, you  know that new Marvel series they think is empowering and feminist (umm not in my world) and how she’s the new anti-hero that women need to aspire to be. Well Aud would be a much better tv series female anti-hero than JJ! That show annoys me – as if women get superpowers to stand up against violence! We don’t get external superpower mojo when we are oppressed, when men manipulate and control and emotionally abuse. We have to find courage in our ordinary humanity, if we can we find other women, and then we get up and keep going. Hoping for superpowers or flopping hopelessly waiting for a superpower saviour won’t save abused women. I also feel like its a show that profits from rape culture & intimate partner abuse of women. End of sermon!!

Sadly the Aud series publishers are, well odd, so in Aus only books 1 and 3 are available electronically, which means that I’ll have to wait for book 2 to arrive in paperback from distant shores. And that well known web-publisher named for incredible women, well the product description for these books is “xx” hmmm, not very helpful! Luckily my electronic goggling skills found more details and I risked “purchase now”.

While I’m waiting for the delivery person you’d thing I should get back to my writing, but luckily Nicola Griffith has also written some interesting looking sci fi and historical fiction so procrasti-reading can continue. Have a look at the Blue Place, it really is worthwhile.

Author: Wendy's Out of Station

I write as a way of processing and reflecting on experience, and as a way of sharing that experience. When I travel I used to write email journals back to friends, family, anyone who’d read and risk immersing themselves in my reality for a while: writing for them was a way of writing for me. Borrowing from Graham Greene in a flip of Travels with my Aunt, I imagined writing letters to my nieces, as their travelling aunt. Crafting the sentences became a way of extruding the experience, giving it birth, drawing its meaning from my soul, nurturing it into something tangible with a life of its own. The aim of my blog is to open the world to my thought-children, to let them out of the safety of my friends and family and let them experience the world. And in the process I get the honour of taking a larger group with me when I’m wandering around India and beyond, or just reflecting on parallel truths, thinking thoughts that take me to new places new beginnings. Please journey with me View all posts by Wendy's Out of Station