We Were Witches
A Novel
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- £10.99
Publisher Description
This inspirational “magic-infused narrative . . . is a moving account of a young writer and mother striving to claim her own agency and find her voice” (Publishers Weekly).
Buying into the dream that education is the road out of poverty, a teen mom takes a chance on bettering herself and talks her way into college. But once she’s there, phallocratic narratives permeate every subject.
Wryly riffing on feminist literary tropes, We Were Witches documents the survival of a demonized single lesbian mother as she’s beset by custody disputes, homophobia, and America’s ever-present obsession with shaming unconventional women into passive citizenship.
But even as the narrator struggles to graduate, a question uncomfortably lingers: If you’re dealing with precarious parenthood, queer identity, and debt, what is the true narrative shape of your experience?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Gore (The End of Eve) calls this deeply autobiographical work a "new genre: the memoirist's novel," with the intention of "transmuting shame into power." Bodily shame (and violence) is indeed front and center here: an early scene includes a harrowing description of the teenaged Ariel in childbirth, undergoing an invasive mediolateral episiotomy that leaves both physical and emotional scars. As Ariel despite the objections of her family, her neighbors, and the larger 1990s single mother shaming culture grows determined to mother her daughter and get a college education, she rewrites fairy tales (like "Rapunzel") and encounters new models of feminine strength, particularly through the supernatural. The "witches" of the title, however, are her powerful literary foremothers, the ones to whom Ariel returns most consistently: Audre Lorde, Tillie Olsen, Adrienne Rich, Ntozake Shange, and others. Gore's magic-infused narrative, with its pleasantly rambling structure that intentionally inverts Freytag's phallic narrative pyramid, is a moving account of a young writer and mother striving to claim her own agency and find her own voice.
