3/31/2007

Reading Marie Antoinette, The Journey, by Antonia Fraser. Next in the line up is Abundance, A Novel of Marie Antoinette, by Sena Jeter Naslund.

Her interest in Marie Antoinette began with the movie and, when she found this amazing wig on the street, her Halloween costume. She found a prom dress at Clothes Contact on Valencia, where you buy the clothes by the pound--her dress weighed about five pounds! ...without all the petticoats.

Since reading this book, something she's learned that she didn't know before--Marie Antoinette was married when she was fourteen and it took her seven years to conceive. Her husband, who was just a few years older than her, was shy about sex and had low-self esteem. It took the humiliation of his family, when his cousin produced an offspring first, for him to get his wife, Marie Antoinette, pregnant. Their marriage was for the alliance of France and Austria and this needed to be physically manifested with children. The role of women in that age was as a vessel for giving birth. "You need to take your wife and do this to her..." his family had to explain.

The last thing she read--Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf.

Her favorite book--Geek Love, by Katherine Dunn, for its character development and storytelling style which is vivid and captivating. It's about a family of circus freaks. They're outcasts and, maybe one of the reasons she likes the book so much is that she's kind of an outcast herself.