We Were Witches

July 17, 2017
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.

Ariel Gore's novel ranges back and forth through time in a storyteller's web that is easy to follow and studded with reanimated scenes from her childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. However, all of what makes an engaging and insightful quilt of memories becomes nearly lost through Gore's narration. She whines, rushes, and sometimes reads with that abrasive near-chanting quality of young girls calling each other out. Gore is a contemporary cultural icon known for her fiction and nonfiction, and this novel offers evocative glimpses of how she became who she is. However, this audio format is not the way to meet that book. F.M.R.G. � AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine