On reflection, it probably wasn't my best gift idea.
I had been swallowed alive by a new book — enraptured by its writing and intelligence, enraged by its subject matter, disturbed by the echoes in my life and astonished at what Anna Funder had unearthed about the modern literary hero, George Orwell and his wife Eileen. So, naturally I bought a copy of this book, Wifedom, and rushed it to a dear friend.
I thought it was a nice thing to do, until a few days later when my friend's terse text hit my inbox: "Wifedom making me very cranky!" I could actually hear her shouting.
I knew exactly why. The book had made me pretty cranky, too.
I read Funder's meticulous excavation of the patriarchal truths kept buried by 20th century literary criticism and biography while I was on holiday overseas. It was a long anticipated trip, and a trip solely planned and organised by me.
As is the case in many marriages, it's the wife who is the travel agent, and I had spent months researching and booking hotels, worrying about plane times and connections, calibrating itineraries and schedules so that a series of train bookings lined up like Rockettes to get us to far-flung destinations.
I was very proud of myself. The trip was fabulous, if a bit exhausting for me.
Resentment came in waves
But as I read Funder's book while on all those planes and trains, and as it revealed the untold story and astonishingly unknown achievements of Eileen, the wife of George Orwell, I could feel my resentment coming in waves.
I watched as the man and boy I loved, contentedly wake each morning, brush the sleep from their eyes and ask with delight what the plans were for the day. Their trip was laid out like a magic carpet for them, and no one noticed that my hands were red-raw from weaving it.
Funder's book excoriates a fundamental truth unchanged from both before and after Orwell's time: that what women do in a marriage, in a family, creates more time for the other members of that family than they would ever have if they had to manage their lives without her.
The wife is an enabler, and a bearer of the mental and even physical load in ways that make her work both crucial and unvalued, all while it is also completely invisible. It's a story as old as time and as powerfully present, to greater and lesser degrees, in all our relationships. And it's driving many of us crazy.
It's a truth my friend and I could not avoid confronting as we white-knuckled Funder's brilliant book. Anna Funder, the celebrated Australian author of Stasiland, acknowledged that she, like us, believes her relationship to be one of equals so "to draw attention to the gendered load feels like driving a wedge between us …the distribution of labour is hard to make equal because so much of it is hard to see, wrapped up in the definition of what it is to be me".
'Is this you, too?'
We bitched to each other resentfully about this reality, and I quizzed my friends: is this you, too? We wondered if Wifedom was the book breaking up marriages around the country.
Funder's demolition of the patriarchal structure that keeps many of us trapped in this place is something to behold, but her main quest in this book is to bring to light Eileen O'Shaughnessy: a brilliant writer erased by history, criticism and biography, and she wants to reveal her quite incredible contribution to the work Orwell produces. I don't want to spoil all that Funder uncovers — but there's a reason almost every critic notes that Animal Farm is unlike anything Orwell wrote, before or after.
And 15 years before Orwell published his book, Eileen had written a poem about a dystopian future called 1984. Just saying.
Loading...Funder makes clear that she does not want to cancel Orwell, a writer she adores — but she doesn't have to: the history she uncovers condemns a great deal around this man, most particularly his awful neglect of the woman who types, edits, counsels on and advocates for all his books; who kept his houses, got him out of war-torn Spain and tolerated unspeakable infidelities.
The seething anger is hard to contain
It's hard to contain the seething anger you feel reading Funder's biography, and I'm pretty sure that AI has now evolved to empath-level algorithms because that's the only explanation for my social media feeds changing to an endless roll of "mental burden" posts as I read the book.
The worn-out faces and narrowed eyes of the tired women in the videos made subtitles redundant: I knew exactly what was pissing them off just by the way they looked at me.
It's an old, exhausting conversation, one my colleague Annabel Crabb nailed years ago in her terrific book The Wife Drought, and yet nothing seems to change. It doesn't make any sense: this book is published to international acclaim, the Barbie movie and its clever takedown of patriarchy is a world-wide smash and yet Tiktok is full of exhausted mothers being told by their husbands "but just tell me what you want me to do!"
I know one thing: the next time I want to surprise a friend with a gift I think I'll just send her a fruit basket.
This weekend one child, one tiger and Libbi Gorr's one big mistake. You can read them all in one go.
Have a safe and happy weekend and it's AusMusic Month — so you better believe Weekend Reads will be antipodean all November-long. Get out that frayed Silverchair T-shirt, STAT. Next week, this lot is going to be inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame. They could have got there on this riff alone.
I know Kate Winslet would agree.
Nice and loud, now.
Go well.