7Women’s Review of Books

hen I first heard Ani DiFrancosing about her abortion at asmall auditorium in thePioneer Valley during thespring of 1992, I felt as if my

head would explode. A freshman atMount Holyoke, I had never had anabortion, but I’d had several close calls(who hadn’t?). The honesty with whichshe wrote about her experience in “LostWoman Song”—how she linked it to theanti-abortion politics that were (and stillare) so pervasive in parts of thiscountry—was brave and righteous. Myfriend Grace and I were hooked. Afterthat, we saw DiFranco wherever wecould, driving to Boston or New York tosee her perform in bigger, flashier venues.We were high on her lyrics—which wereas urgent, feminist, sexy, and independentas (we hoped) we were.

For many budding feminists in theearly 1990s, Difranco’s lyrics were morethan just songs. They were a roadmap forhow we wanted to live our lives—or, insome cases, affirmation for how we werealready living. Her music was powerful,addictive—watching her on stageproduced feelings of euphoria the likes ofwhich I haven’t experienced often in myforty-five years. Her small size—she stood five foottwo—belied her power as a singer and a performer.She belted out her songs; she attacked her acousticguitar, playing percussively and loud and used fakenails reinforced with electrical tape instead of aguitar pick. Her sound was exciting, but her lyricswere electrifying. DiFranco sang about topics noone else our age dared to speak about: abortion(“Lost Woman Song,” “Tiptoe,” “HelloBirmingham”), periods (“Blood in the Boardroom,”“My IQ”), sexual assault (Gratitude), atheism(What if No One’s Watching), and women whosettle (“The Slant,” “Fixing her Hair,” “Worthy,”etc.). And, like any self-respecting folksinger, shesang about heartache, love, and sex—sometimes allin the same song. Though on the surface DiFrancocame across as angry and provocative (especially toher male listeners), her songs were also poetic,reflective, and downright seductive. “Overlap,” abrooding song on Out of Range, starts,

I search your profile / For a translationI study the conversation / Like a map‘cuz I know there is strength in the differences

between us and I know there is comfort where we overlap

Because she was so prolific—producing, onaverage, one new album each year—we fans neverhad to grow tired of what DiFranco had to offer.First there was her eponymous album (I still havethe worn-out cassette version) then—in quicksuccession—Not So Soft (1991), Imperfectly (1992),Puddle Dive (1993), Like I Said (1993), Out of Range(1994), and Not a Pretty Girl (1995). We haven’t evengotten to Dilate—which may be my favorite of heralbums, full of righteous anger—or Little PlasticCastles.

DiFranco’s fans were legendary for their intenseidentification with her and her music. When I tookmy male cousin with me to see her perform at NewYork City’s Irving Plaza in the late 1990s, hemarveled at how her audience knew all the wordsto all her songs. “That doesn’t happen at a Liz Phairconcert,” he said. In her new memoir, No Walls andthe Recurring Dream, she expresses gratitude tothese very same ardent fans:

Even in deepest obscurity, I was blessed withlisteners who supported and affirmed myexistence in the way that I so craved, but also,right from the beginning, I was challenged bytheir high demands. The intensity in me,naturally found its likeness in the world.

Ani (pronounced “AH-nee”) DiFrancowas born Angela DiFranco in Buf-falo, New York, in 1970. Her father

was the first American-born son of an Italianfamily from Campobasso (near Naples),and her mother, who studied architecture,was Canadian. In the memoir DiFranco pro-vides an indelible image of a kid who em-braced being different from an early age.

I was the wildly expressive girl withthe rainbow socks pulled up over myoveralls and pigtails in my hair. Abright smiling clown. I was my wildlyexpressive mother’s understudy andI earned the label “weird” from theother kids.

DiFranco expressed her independencefrom a young age. At eight or so (shedoesn’t give an exact age), she read about ahorse camp in the back of the Sunday NewYork Times and negotiated with her parentsto pay half. (She earned the remaining halfby selling pressed-flower greeting cards,babysitting, and busking.) At age 15, shebecame an emancipated minor, renting aroom from a Lebanese woman in Buffalo,while gigging around town with MichaelMeldrum, her first musical mentor. (She

relied on her dad’s Social Security check to payrent, but later got a job waiting tables at a Greekdiner.) In high school, she told the principal that ifhe didn’t allow her to graduate in three years (stillsqueezing in all her needed credits), she’d quit andget a GED. He assented, as long as she promised tobe discreet. “It was a theme that was just starting toappear in my life: Okay, I will let you be theexception, just don’t tell anyone,” she writes. “Ididn’t know it at the time, but this theme was tocarry all the way through to my eventualrelationship with the music industry and itsgatekeepers.” She recorded her first demo tape in1990, the same year she founded Righteous BabeRecords, her label. She was not yet twenty years old.

She moved to New York and attended the NewSchool in Greenwich Village, studying poetry withpoet/musician Sekou Sundiata, a lasting influenceon her writing. She also took Feminism 101, whereshe read Zora Neale Hurston, Audre Lorde, bellhooks, Alice Walker, Adrienne Rich, NtozakeShange, and Carol Gilligan. “I knew it right away: Iam a part of the feminist continuum. I am enteringmyself,” writes DiFranco of that education. Thisclass was also where she re-discovered the poetryof Lucille Clifton, whose “lost baby poem,” abouthaving an illegal abortion, helped her put words to

Poster Girl with No PosterNo Walls and the Recurring Dream: A Memoir

By Ani DiFranco

New York, NY; Viking, 2019, 298 pp., $28.00, hardcover

Reviewed by Hannah Wallace

W

Ani DiFranco

8 Women’s Review of Books Vol. 36, No. 3, May/June 2019

her own abortion. Difranco’s Lost Woman Song isdedicated to Clifton and she’d often recite “lostbaby poem” on stage as an invocation beforesinging her own.

DiFranco’s memoir is as bold as her songwriting.In straightforward, vivid prose, we learn about herbrother’s mental illness, the circumstances surround-ing her two abortions, and details about past lovers.She opens one early paragraph with this revelation:“I’m not sure if this is typical but I, personally, hadseen a lot of penises by the time I was ten.” Menexposing themselves to young girls “seemed like thekind of thing that just happens, like thunder, to makeyou suddenly jump out of your skin.” She and herfriend Ingeri develop a sixth sense for flashers andlearned how to avoid them—an experience which isperfectly conveyed as both horrifying and utterlynormal.

On the question of musical influences, DiFrancoreveals that she’s always been “somewhat sincerelystumped.” “For one thing, who stops and examinesthemselves in the middle of a journey?,” she asks,quite wisely. But I enjoyed learning that the manshe refers to only as “First Boyfriend” exposed herto Santana, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, JoniMitchell, “and a host of other heroes of the hippiecosmos.” Joan Armatrading and British singer-songwriter John Martyn got deeply under her skin,especially Martyn’s record, Solid Air. “I believe hisguitar playing resides deep inside mine and hiscircular, jazz-inflected grooves wove their wayslowly into my DNA,” DiFranco writes. She alsomet and listened to Suzanne Vega (“somethingabout her presence provided me with subliminalproof of my own difference”) and absorbed JohnFahey and the Beatles. Later, she would discoverjazz (coincidentally around the same time shediscovered cannabis)—specifically TheloniousMonk, Miles Davis, and Betty Carter—and groovemusic and West African musicians like Baaba Maal,Mansour Seck, and Farka Touré. Even Prince, whoshe eventually meets while on tour withsaxophonist Maceo Parker, is an influence. (I’llnever forget DiFranco’s rapturous cover of WhenDoves Cry at a concert in Edmonton, Canada.)

Meanwhile, the memorable backstory to her firstabortion is a tender reminder of how easy it is to getpregnant—even when you’re educated andresponsible and trying so hard not to. She begins byrecounting her pre-sex preparations:

I must have been the only teenage virgin toever walk into the Buffalo Planned Parenthoodto properly plan for having her first run-inwith a penis because I was an instant celebrity.The nurse practitioner took me around thewhole office and introduced me to everyone.They all acted proud of me and it felt like I wasgiving them hope. Maybe some of theeducational efforts they had been putting forthwere having an effect on society. Maybe theworld was changing for young women.

DiFranco leaves with a prescription for the pill andgeneral approbation, but “in those days the pill waslike a hormonal sledgehammer” and she feels dizzyevery time she stands up. Predictably, she stopstaking it and, well— “Instantly I was pregnant,”she writes.

“Why, why would you stop taking it?” thenurse asked me as I cried in her office. “I don’tknow,” I whimpered, “I just made a mistake.”

In the end, severely depressed, she opts for anabortion—“This was a solvable problem, not theend of my life”—and returns to writing poems andsongs, playing her guitar, and becoming thesignificant musician we know her as today. Later inthe book, after a profound philosophicaldisquisition about when life starts, and theadmission that she’s happily carried two childrento term, DiFranco re-affirms a belief in the right toabortion. “Every situation is unique and everywoman is right when she decides what is right forherself,” she writes. “Reproductive freedom shouldbe understood as a civil right.”

Her fan base loved her bold declarationsabout abortion; her complexity was lesstolerated. As DiFranco described in her

early (somewhat meteoric) rise, she grappled withthe power of her iconography and what sherepresents to her mainly young and female fans.When she fell in love with and later married Goat(her male sound engineer), for example, a certainportion of her vocal dyke fans felt betrayed—andlet her know. Though she now concedes that themedia probably gave the conflict outsizedattention, DiFranco was hurt by the relentlessnessof the criticism. In the memoir, she sums it up:

There had really been no more backlashagainst my marriage than there had been toevery other thing I’d ever done but, after acertain number of repetitions, I doubted eventhe weight of my own experience.

Even though DiFranco writes that she finds itinsulting that someone might ask her who a song isabout, one of the great joys of reading her memoiris hearing echoes of her lyrics in the stories sheshares. “My parents were patriotic about payingtaxes and taught me all of what you get for it inAmerica,” she writes in the first chapter. “They notonly voted, but my mother volunteered her time tolocal candidates she believed in. I sat with herstuffing envelopes and licking stamps in circles oflaughing women and I went canvassing door to

door holding onto her hand” (a story I’d heard in“Paradigm,” from her album Knuckle Down). I’dalways wondered about a lyric from “Cradle andAll”—and now I know its origins: the Trico plantshe refers to in the song (which moved to Mexico) isa windshield wiper factory, based in Buffalo. Latershe talks about the end of her relationship withFirst Boyfriend, and how his resistance to breakingup included punching things. “There were holes inthe plasterboard right next to where my head hadbeen,” she writes, an image that devoted fans willremember from Out of Range. Sometimes, she eventells us who she wrote a song about. For instance,“If He Tries Anything” was about her Mexican roadtrip with Shawnee.

No Walls and the Recurring Dream is adelightfully picaresque memoir, but thereare some glaring omissions. For one thing,

though the book is chronological (for the most part),she’s not consistent about giving dates. Also,DiFranco only glancingly mentions her twochildren—Petah and Dante. (And we never learnwho their father is, or if he’s still her partner.) I didn’texpect them to be the centerpiece of this story, but Iwas curious—as I assume many of her fans are—tohear whether motherhood has changed her prioritiesand informed her songwriting and activism.

As a parent of a teenage girl, I was eager toknow how she navigates the twin issues of screentime and sugar: is she like her dad, who said, “Letthem eat a box of donuts! They will get sick andthrow up and they will learn!,” or like her morestructured mom? And how does an artist likeDiFranco encourage the kind of boredom that leadsto hours of creative exploration, the kind of solitudethat she herself knew well as a teen, but that fewchildren experience these days due to the siren songof social media, video games, and Netflix? I’mafraid we’ll never know, although there is one clueto her parental prerogatives. On page 167, afterdescribing the Mexican adventure with her friend-turned-lover Shawnee, she does give a word ofadvice to her daughter: “It’s all okay but thehitchhiking. That shit’s just too dangerous.”

GM

D Three

ith The Accidentals, Minrose Gwin hasgiven us homegrown magic realism, aUS version of that Latin Americangenre that brings the tangible intangibleto life. Each character lives in their own

unique world, yet their desires and acts shape oneanother in surprising ways. Against a backdrop ofmid-twentieth century, with its painful gender andrace relations, Cold War menace and fear of nuclearannihilation, each of the novel’s “accidentals”inhabit their space and time with ferociouscharacter.

Gwin begins with definitions, the armature forwhat is to come. As an adjective, the term accidentalmeans “happening by chance, undesignedly orunexpectedly, produced by accident, fortuitous, ...nonessential” (Oxford English Dictionary). As a noun,it is “a bird found outside its normal geographicrange, migration route, or season, a vagrant”(Merriam-Webster). A Field Guide to the Birds: GivingField Marks of All Species Found East of the Rockies listsaccidentals as “the rarest of the rarities.” Gwinshows us that every being is the rarest of rarities,how we are all accidentals when it comes to ourdesires, and the tensions that surface when desireplays itself out within the confines of limiting socialexpectation.

This is a novel about lies and about truths thatfail to make it into words, about betrayal and theneed for forgiveness that too often festers betweenhumans. It is a book about language: how wordssound and then, much later, how they get lost whendementia begins to claim them. Alzheimer’s andcancer, the two conditions that most dramaticallydefine our mortality, are treated more realistically—and more poetically—than in most books I haveread in which they figure. Memory and its loss arewrit large in these pages. And, because of this, TheAccidentals is also a novel about how a chancecomment or instantaneous decision may set in

motion a series of events that can end up changinglives, even history itself.

The Accidentals opens in Opelika, Louisiana, in1957, a small busybody town not far from NewOrleans, where acceptable women join theDaughters of the American Revolution, JuniorLeague, and Ladies’ Hospital Auxiliary. OliviaMcAlister, the fascinating mother of the book’scentral family spurns these organizations. “Idiots,every one of them!,” she says of the women whojoin. Characters are finely drawn and satisfyinglydeveloped: Olivia chooses illegal abortion ratherthan bear a third child she doesn’t want. Herhusband, Holly, whose misogyny is laced withtenderness, eventually claims a grandson as theson for whom he has always longed. June andGrace, their daughters, adore and support, thenresent and abandon one another at crucialmoments in their lives.

A secondary cast of characters includes a coupleof young gay male lovers, a female high schoolfriend who practices kissing with one of the sistersin order to prepare for that activity with boys, and apoor waitress and equally poor motel receptionistwhose humanity comes to the fore when required.Babies are also present: born out of wedlock (as thecircumstance was called at the time), disfigured,near dead but not quite, adopted out to who-knows-where. Among the many successes of this

novel is Gwin’s ability to make each of these peoplecome alive in important and believable ways—howshe is able to reflect the larger social issues in theeveryday lives of ordinary people.

In the opening paragraphs of The Accidentals,Olivia tell us: “Listen hard now, and you can tellwhat they’re saying. This morning, the cardinal.Sweetheart, sweetheart, sweetheart, sweet. Then, twohouses down, a mockingbird. Redemption,redemption.... Cheer, cheer, cheer. I’m all ears, littlewren.” Olivia loves sound just as her husbandHolly loves his cherry bounce moonshine andhypothetical son, as her daughters Grace and Junelove moving determinedly toward their own lives,and as all the novel’s other characters love the ideaof what we all want: personal fulfillment in thelives we have.

Animals populate this story: the variety ofbirds who sing at Olivia’s backyard feeders.The giraffes at the zoo who intertwine and

slap their long necks in what might be anger ordance. Dogs, including little Soviet Laika, themongrel puppy launched into orbit in November1957 aboard Sputnik 2. She became famous as thefirst dog in space, a legend of heroism although it isbelieved she died a painful death inside her crampedcapsule and had already expired for most of her2,570 trips around our planet.

Laika is one of several embodied metaphors thatrun through this story, standing in for freedomversus confinement, and creativity versusalignment with the status quo. In Gwin’s exquisiteprose, these themes come to life, insertingthemselves in the narrative in three—or more—dimensions. This novel’s prose reads like poetry; Iwas propelled by the beauty of the language andforce of what lies beneath it. The preponderanceand consistency of this gorgeous writing make ithard to quote a few isolated examples, but I offer

9Women’s Review of Books

In her final pages, she divulges that her childrenhave always been jealous of her music. “Both mykids looked instantly upon my guitar as the enemy,”she writes. “Goddess forbid Mommy should startplaying and get that faraway look in her eyes … If Iam in the same city with them, and they are awake,songwriting is forbidden. It would be like taking airout of their lungs.” Other than that hint, DiFrancodoesn’t reveal much of anything that happened inher life after 2001—including the nine albums she’sproduced since then. DiFranco writes,

You’ll have to forgive me. I only ever intendedthis book to be the “making of” story. Iprobably should’ve warned you at the onset.The remake is a story that is still writing itself,right now. A story so much in motion thatwords couldn’t even begin to nail it down. Butrest assured, the greatest happiness,fulfillment, and accomplishments of the girl inthis book are still ahead of her.

The inside dope of DiFranco’s life remains hersto reveal to her fans, or not. Her honesty, it’s clear,still shines brightest in her songs—which continueto evolve, as she does.

Hannah Wallace is a freelance journalist who writesprimarily about food, health, and sustainableagriculture. Whenever she gets the chance, she alsowrites about strong women—be they activists,artists, entrepreneurs, winemakers, or chefs.

This Morning, the Cardinal

W The Accidentals

By Minrose Gwin

New York, NY; Harper Collins, 2019,

416 pp., $16.99, paperback

Reviewed by Margaret Randall