The Woman Who Made Me Feel Strange

So your estranged parent is dying and someone decided to tell you against your estranged parent’s wishes. Should you go visit, or not? Should you go to the funeral, or not? And what would you end up discovering about that parent you never knew, whose face you don’t even remember, whose life you have heard nothing about in recent years? What would you do and realise in the years after their eventual death? How would you grieve? Would you even grieve? Those were the questions lesbian fiction author, Anna Ferrara had after getting a text message from a stranger on an otherwise regular weekday morning, informing her of the impending death of the mother who disappeared from her life when she was 5. What followed was a complicated 800+ days of discovering the secrets of a woman she knew nothing about, the uncovering of past hurts and buried emotions she didn’t even remember she had, which she documented in a series of journal entries that eventually provided the content for this book. Written for adult children of absent, toxic or negligent parents and professionals seeking a real-world case study of the subject, this book is a real and honest record of the stages of grief, coping and self-discovery an adult child will go through when their estranged parent remains self-centred and unloving up till the very end.

Long before there was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, there were two other stories some preferred not to tell… “I have three profitable businesses and more money than anybody else in the land, some people even say I’m the fairest in the land, and yet you who obviously enjoys everything I buy for you are ashamed of being seen with me because I am a woman?!” One year after leaving the North behind, Queen Katherine and Princess Eirwen find themselves struggling with new desires they never had to deal with before. It doesn’t help that Eirwen’s new cinder dust covered apprentice brings to Eirwen something Katherine can never give, while someone Katherine once knew has taken to calling them “beasts”. When desire brings out the worst in them and those around them, Katherine and Eirwen have to seek creative ways to get to that happily ever after they once thought possible, before it slips out of their reach once again, this time maybe forever and always.

In 1975, Helen Mendel married a widower and aircraft engineer, moved into his suburb in Los Angeles, 375 miles away from Area 51, and got herself merrily settled into a life of domestic bliss with nothing but her husband's pleasure on her mind. Ethel Ashlock, wife of her husband's colleague, a depressed alcoholic addicted to Valium with unfulfilled dreams of becoming a pilot, hates her on sight. She thinks Helen's just another boring, brain-washed housewife and doesn’t make any effort to hide how much she detests her. She doesn't realise Helen is not as commonplace as she appears; that she has synaesthesia—the ability to see sounds, hear images and taste feelings—and a past she's not telling anyone, not even her husband, about. Things change when Helen, having tolerated enough of Ethel's persistent hostility, lifts her veil of pretence. Ethel soon finds herself blackmailed, frightened, and also... irresistibly intrigued by her new neighbour. She becomes obsessed with getting Helen to like her and soon discovers they have more in common than she previously thought. Neither of them believe their husbands are truly aircraft engineers, for one, and neither of them believe Helen’s husband’s former wife, Violet, actually killed herself in the year before… Together, the two women work to uncover the truth about Violet’s sudden death, until they discover the truth, not out there, but closer than either of them ever thought possible… About the series: Those Strange Women is a series of six books about the lives of six ‘unusual’ women over nine decades. Amidst changing attitudes towards women and homosexuality, the women grow, adapt and find their own ways of existing in a world in which they don’t quite belong. A few of them learn to love but most learn to hate; a few of them fail to thrive but most survive and develop a taste for revenge.

In day-to-day-life, people often act as if they know exactly what they mean by boys and girls, mamas and papas, masculine and feminine, butch and femme, stud and fluff. But what happens to gender in same-sex relationships? Can different women be differently gendered? If you accept that gender is as much about race and class and nation as it is about sexuality, what happens to commonly accepted "truths" about gender and identity? Render Me, Gender Me challenges comfortable assumptions about gender by weaving Kath Weston's own thought-provoking commentary together with the voices of lesbians from a variety of race and class backgrounds. Nuns, strippers, teachers, carpenters, small business owners, and women in the military all find a place in this spirited account. At the heart of the book are interviews Weston draws upon to give a new twist to contemporary discussions of gender. Among the topics discussed are gender as a multicultural subject, power play in lesbian relationships, lusting after "fluidity", writing gender into lesbian history, the tomboy mystique, the latent tendency to imagine gender as a sliding scale, the impact of job markets and race relations on the way women gender themselves, the guessing games people play when they pin one another down with respect to gender, why "who's the man?" is the wrong question to ask about lesbian couples, and why gender is not about "imitation" or "roles".

For Vlada, a cruise ship singer raised to be Christian, her same-sex, God-fearing, Bible-quoting singing partner, Dasha had always been someone she could only ever peep at in quiet moments, whenever nobody was around, or looking... ... until a stranger claiming to know how to get her the love of her dreams changes everything. Suddenly, Dasha is head over heels in love with Vlada, open to homosexualism, ever ready to throw religion into the wind in order to be with her. Everything is lovely and wonderful, for a while, until the consequences Vlada had not been warned about rear their terrifying heads... and make her question the rationality of giving up everything for a love disapproved by God, church and family. In this story with multiple endings and many surprises, the fate of our protagonists will depend on the choices you make on their behalf. How will you behave when life pushes you beyond the boundaries of what you know to be possible, or true? Would you put your trust in faith or love when that happens? Would you be able to survive?

This novel is told in the first person, which gives immediacy to the story and the events recounted. It begins by telling of an odd character called Sybil, who is the narrator's friend. Sybil believes herself to be 'delicate' and different but becomes displeased when the narrator becomes friendly with Tony. She begins to talk about the narrator in an unpleasant way.