Love's Work

I’m not really sure what I want to say about Love’s Work.  It’s not what I was expecting, being the autobiography of someone dying of cancer.  I’ve never been that close to anyone with cancer, but the book is surprisingly not depressing.  I don’t want to call it positive or uplifting because that sounds like some ridiculous cliché and it’s just not true.  I think what I was expecting from Gillian Rose’s book was more cancer.  I assumed the book would be about the act of dying itself and the thing that’s killing her, but it’s not.  It’s about her life, being female, being Jewish.  All sorts; which is kind of obvious in retrospect.

There is stuff about cancer in there, or more the consequences of it.  She writes, more wryly that I’d manage I’m sure, about her colonoscopy bag and the pain she experiences when she realises that this is now a permanent state of affairs.  But even talk of doctors is wrapped up in other things.  The most interesting part of it that she recounts is a conversation with her doctor who has moved into his specialist area precisely because it’s what his father didn’t do.   Rose uses this to philosophise about the nature of parent-child relationships and how parents can use the fact that their children want to be different from them to encourage them to do the right thing.

I think that the main problem I have with this book is that Rose isn’t mad keen on feminism.  I want her to be.  She’s of the age where she’d have been young during the second wave stuff.  It’s ridiculous that I judge her so harshly for it, but she goes on about not getting a great education at Oxford because she was in woman’s college and then refuses to believe that she has not been silenced by the patriarchy.  If she had, she argues, how would she be able to speak out against it at all?  It's especially frustrating as earlier in the book she writes about how much she used to enjoy Roy Rogers and was mortified by the idea that her gender may not allow her to be a cowboy, instead forcing her into the much loathed role of milkmaid.

I don’t know what else to say about the book, really.  It’s readable and it’s short.  I feel just horrid and as though I’m essentially reducing down Rose’s life into two adjectives, but there you go.  As I said before, it’s not as depressing as I thought it would be.  The second chapter starts with a trip to Auschwitz (this follows on from a friend dying of AIDS) and at that point my heart plummeted, I was sure the whole thing would be pure misery.  But it’s not.  Love’s Work is by no means an easy read, but it’s about love, in the end.  And love’s not all terrible.

I’m now on Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd.