Month: March 2020

Catch and Kill Review

Huge trigger warning concerning this book, as it deals with Harvey Weinstein’s sexual assaults, and the widespread misogyny and sexual assaults found in the entertainment and news media industry.

This book gets 4.5 freaky surveillance cameras out of 5. This photo technically only has 4 cameras in it, but the implication being that they are everywhere, I’m going to say there is half a camera hiding in this photo somewhere.
[This photo is stylized with bisexual lighting (that means pink, purple and blue woo I’m cool I know things) and just shows 4 cameras on a variety of walls, watching your every move.]

This crazy COVID19 pandemic means that most of Ontario, Canada is shut down right now. If you can stay at home, please do. Perks of staying at home: lots of time to blog and lots of time to read which in turn leads to more blogging. So I’m going to be grateful for this pandemic-imposed isolation and let my creative and critical juices flow. I have no time-frame for posting now, but hopefully can crank out another post before going back to work!

  • Why did I pick this book up?

I picked this book up because a lot of people I know have been buzzing about this book. After months of hearing about this book, and being steeped in the reality of the events from the book unfolding in almost real-time in our newsfeeds, I decided, enough was enough. The Harvey Weinstein trial was just beginning, and even though I already believed him to be guilty based on a myriad of factors I won’t even begin to unpack here, I wanted to see the proof for myself. I expected Ronan Farrow’s Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators to be a fact-filled book that laid out Farrow’s investigative research into Weinstein and the accusations around him. I definitely did not expect Catch and Kill to be this and a thrilling and sometimes scary spy novel! There were many times reading this book that I kept thinking “no one could make this shit up, because no one would think this is realistic.” And that is what is wild about this book! Because it is real! He has so much proof!

  • Would I recommend why/why not?

It’s a resounding hell yeah I would recommend this book! Farrow’s writing is riveting, insightful, and the pace of the book is wound tight, keeping you on edge. Even when he has to go into some context, explain the makeup of some organization, detail some executive’s past, it all serves to show the insidious ways in which these predators infiltrate communities and prey on vulnerable people. And they all help each other in some way. Covertly or overtly, all these predators know on some level what the other predators are doing, and they know that they all have each others’ backs. They all value the same thing in life, and that is power and how that power makes them feel.

I would not recommend this book if you are an incel I guess, because this will not jive with your overall worldview, but also why are you reading my blog then? *Casts a banishing spell*

Ok, that’s better. Anyways, even though non-fiction can sometimes be dry and boring, that is definitely not the case! Even knowing in an overall sense ‘what happens next’ in the book did not take away from how exciting and suspenseful it was. If you only know the Weinstein sexual assault aspect of this case, and not the surveillance and overall societal/industry cover-up of these and other similar crimes, then you don’t know half the story! I thought I knew a lot, and turns out I was only seeing the tip of the iceberg!

  • Quick Synopsis  **SPOILER ALERT FROM HERE ON, DO I EVEN HAVE TO SAY IT?!**:

The book covers so much ground that I can’t even begin to hope to summarize it fully and properly. But basically we get a bit of Farrow’s backstory, how he is working for NBC and wants to be a tv journalist. He is doing a series of stories on Hollywood, and gets a lead on sexual assaults in the business. In the meantime, we also see the parallel investigation into the investigation into these sexual assaults that is being done by some scary, vaguely Russian men. This is all stuff that Farrow has obviously uncovered after his initial investigations, and seeing how Farrow goes from slightly paranoid to full on believing he is being followed, to actually having proof that he was being followed on a scale much crazier than he could have imagined, make this book feel like a spy novel. That’s basically what it is at its core, with sexual assault as the underpinning motive, and the fact that this is not a novel, it’s real life. Which makes it crazier than spy novel out there.

Essentially, Farrow’s leads grow from one, to two, to four, and exponentially from there, and all the victims have something, or rather someone, in common: Harvey Weinstein. While reporting, Farrow also comes up against a lot of resistance, and in some cases outright hostility and manipulation, from most of his superiors. People who are supposed to have journalistic integrity.

Eventually, Farrow’s investigation comes to have the significance and potential danger of a bomb, and he is fired from NBC. He takes his reporting to the New Yorker, and also discovers Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s own investigation into Weinstein. Along the way, we discover that basically 90% of Hollywood has heard or witnessed some crazy gross behaviour from this man, but no one really ever does anything. Except for the amazing and courageous women who come forward to denounce his actions.

The great thing about reading this book when I did was that I happened to read this just as the trial was unfolding, and got to see the tangible results of these journalists’ work. More on that below.

On a typical weekday, the parking lot behind the book in this photo would be totally full. We are on lockdown. Stay healthy people!
[There are only a few cars in the parking lot. The book cover has a drawing of a hand zipping a mouth shut. The title is spread across the black cover in huge, intimidating white font.]
  • Overall brain gushings :

This book proves that not only is Ronan Farrow a brave and excellent researcher and interviewer, he is a great writer.

One of the most terrifying aspects of this book was the ways in which so many people who seemed to be allies, or seemed to believe victims, proved to be abusers and their various actors. I’d like to give Lisa Bloom a special garbage human shout-out for being the fucking most despicable example of someone who purported to be a victim advocate using their own privilege to undermine and benefit from victims’ abuse. Fuck that lady. Also all the NBC executives who tried – and failed I’d like to point out snarkily – to make it impossible for Farrow to do his job.

The second scariest thing about Catch and Kill was to see the ways in which the dystopian surveillance state apparatus we imagine in worlds like 1984 and Neuromancer are actually being deployed by wealthy and influential individuals. Spy agencies and PR agencies work in tandem to protect the powerful, and to help abusers find and suppress victims. Jesus it is scary. I could go on for a million years about this book, but basically, read it because it is interesting and covers way more than what any media surrounding the trials has covered. Also, if you know me in real life, we can talk about this for as long as you like.

  • What does it mean?

It means Harvey Weinstein is fucking guilty. In a beautiful fashion, I finished reading Catch and Kill, vindicated in my opinion of his guilt, reeling at the sheer volume of proof against him, knowing that no argument would lessen his guilt in my mind. Farrow brought receipts! Stacks of em! And then, just a few days later, a jury of his peers found him guilty! For once! Then, to further emphasize the real concrete impact this book has had, Weinstein was sentenced to 23 years in prison.

Catch and Kill means that maybe, for some men who have been abusing their power for so long, thinking that they would get away with their behaviour forever, because they had been getting away with it forever, well… Time’s up, baby.

  • Favourite passages :

O. M. G. I almost died the first time Matt Lauer made an appearance in this book. Firstly because it is one of the first examples we have of how far-reaching and insidious this behaviour is, but secondly, because of how it ends:

As I reached the door, he said wryly, ‘Don’t let us down. I’ll be watching.’

‘You want this closed?’ I asked.

‘I’ve got it,’ he said. He pushed a button on his desk. The door swung shut.

Farrow, pg 23.

This is some spy communication that Farrow gets access to when one of the Russian spies decides to become a double agent and give him a bunch of files; I could not make this up if I tried. Also, this passage is where we see the beginning of Lisa Bloom’s fucking shady game, making me say “I don’t buy your shitty apology, bitch”.

It observed that I was ‘a fan’ of Lisa Bloom, appearing to assess her level of access to me. And it described my attempts to get in touch with Judd, Sciorra, and Arquette. The email analyzed the likelihood that each of them would talk. It flagged any public statements the women had made about sexual violence as a warning sign.

pg 85.

Here we see just how little we all really know about Weinstein. I’m telling you, this guy is the new Cosby, but without the drugs to incapacitate women. Instead, Weinstein used professional power and credibility to silence and manipulate these women. I ain’t even going to get started on anything his lawyer said during his trial, because that lady is the shittiest of all the shitty ladies.

She took out an iPhone and navigated to a sentence she’d jotted down in her Notes app a few years earlier. It was something Weinstein whispered – to himself, as far as she could tell – after one of his many shouting sprees. It so unnerved her that she pulled our her phone and tapped it into a memo, word for word: ‘There are things I’ve done that nobody knows.’

pg 110.

Here is a passage that really drove home that we as a society are missing out on the most important aspect of this whole situation; the victims’ emotional pain and trauma.

The renderings of these stories that were ultimately published in The New Yorker were precise and legalistic. They made no attempt at communicating the true, bleak ugliness of listening to a recollection of violent rape like Sciorra’s. Her voice caught. The memory erupted in ragged sobs. You heard Annabella Sciora struggle to tell her story once, and it stayed inside you forever.

pg 303.
  • If you liked this (or my review), consider reading :

I haven’t read it yet, but I’m sure She Said by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey is also incredibly excellent and informative on this topic, as they are the two female journalists who broke the story for the NYT mentioned by Farrow many times in this book.

If you want to read another big-deal non-fiction book about women facing sexual harassment in the workplace, then Anita Hills 1997 Speaking Truth to Power is a good read.

If instead, you are looking for fiction that deals with the topic of sexual assault and the twisted ways in which our loyalties can be pulled, then I would recommend Zoe Whittall’s The Best Kind of People. Although not set in Canada explicitly, it does feel like it could be happening in the suburbs of Toronto, and Whittall is Canadian! Always managing to squeeze in a shoutout for my compatriots! Another great recommendation in terms of books that deal with sexual assault (what a weird category to be commenting on, seriously) also happens to be my favourite book, which is the controversial Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. I could and am usually expected to defend this choice, but if you can’t understand the subtleties of the book and the fact that me saying I think it is one of the best books every does not mean I am endorsing paedophilia or even agree that Lolita is a love story, then what even is the point of wasting my time. But seriously, you should real it because it is good and uncomfortable in a way that courageous art should be.

Stay tuned for my next review, Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng. This book was part of Reese Witherspoon’s book club, and she raved that it ‘made her cry’. Will it make me cry? I can be a big crybaby, so read on to find out!

The Testaments Review

This book gets 2 brown sack dresses that the Aunts wear in Gilead out of 5. I thought this stack of sacks of coffee was a pretty accurate visual representation of what they look like without subjecting me to copyright infringement.
[As the caption suggests, this is a picture of a pile of brown coffee sacks. They look worn and would make itchy dresses.]
  • Why did I pick this book up?

You guys, I picked this book up because The Handmaid’s Tale has been having a moment for like three years now. I read the OG book when I was a young teen and loved it, am a somewhat fan of the show, and kept seeing posters for this damn book everywhere!

My partner also very thoughtfully gifted me this book for Christmas, so I was just so excited and ready to dive into this book. I am typically a fan of Atwood’s work: I don’t love it all, and to be frank I have a tendency to like her older work. But, since this was a sequel to her old work, and something I loved, I was super excited.

  • Would I recommend why/why not?

Although I didn’t enjoy this book a ton, I would recommend it as like an entertaining read that isn’t going to require a lot of work. It’s a good book if you’re on a train or something like that.

I would recommend this book to you if you are a fan of the show the Handmaid’s Tale, but not a big fan of the book. I personally liked the ambiguity of the original book – I liked that we didn’t know if June actually escaped or not, if she had been betrayed or not. I also liked the ambiguity of whether the Colonies actually existed, or were merely a piece of propaganda to control people in Gilead.

Now, the show totally obliterated this ambiguity, and honestly that is probably my biggest issue with the show (that and its tendency to get a little torture-pornish). So, since The Testaments takes the events of the show to be true and what happens in this universe, the ambiguity of The Handmaid’s Tale (the novel) is not to be found. So again, this could be either a selling point to you, or a detriment.

Part of my dislike of this book also lies with the fact that there are so many Atwood books that I have enjoyed more, as demonstrated in my Alias Grace review, and the knowledge and expectation that I could have enjoyed this book so much more definitely hurt its overall score, and made my criticisms a tad more vitriolic than they would have been with a different author. I had expectations Margaret!

  • Quick Synopsis  **SPOILER ALERT FROM HERE ON, DO I EVEN HAVE TO SAY IT?!**:

Now, this story is told from the point of view of three women; we quickly discover one of them is the famed Aunt Lydia, and the other two are some sort of peripheral girls (who eventually become aunts), only identified by their “witness testimony” number. Now, this led me to believe that maybe these women had conspired against Gilead and been caught, and that they were being persecuted and held up as an example to the women of Gilead of what not to do. However, it quickly becomes clear that instead, these women make it OUT of Gilead, and these testimonies are their record of what happened in Gilead. This was interesting, but quickly lowered the stakes for me, as I knew these women had to be successful for their testimonies to be collected and preserved.

Anonymous woman 1 (known as Agnes) is revealed to be the ‘daughter’ of a high-ranking Commander and his wife. We quickly discover that she is not their biological daughter, and that her biological mother is hunted by Gilead. It is pretty easy to connect the dots and realize that Agnes is June’s first daughter, the one she was separated from before the events of The Handmaid’s Tale.

Anonymous woman 2 (known as Daisy) is a young girl living in Canada. Her parents run a secondhand clothing store. She doesn’t have a lot in common with them. It becomes really easy to deduce that she is the escaped Baby Nicole, or June’s second baby that is spirited out of Gilead by June and Serena Joy in the TV show. I felt like Atwood was putting clues about Daisy’s lineage way too much, because I figured it out as soon as we saw we had a character in Canada, and after Baby Nicole got mentioned a few times just felt like, “ok I get it, just actually give me the reveal because I’ve figured it out”.

This is one of those weird books where a lot of stuff happens, but also not a lot happens? It’s very plot driven, as opposed to character driven, and apart from Lydia, the characters are mostly responding to events around them, or having things done to them, rather than being active participants. This means I’m going to gloss over a lot of stuff.

But basically, Baby Nicole/Daisy’s fake parents get killed in a bomb, obviously placed by Gilead. This is when Daisy learns that she is actually Baby Nicole, and that Mayday (the resistance group, remember them?) has an operative in Gilead sending them a ton of insider information and documents. Aparently, their way of transmitting information is compromised or something, because the source demand that Baby Nicole be delivered to Gilead, given a ton of documents on a microdot implanted in her arm, and then extracted. We easily realize that this mystery source is Aunt Lydia! Surprise, this whole time Aunt Lydia has just been trying to get powerful to dismantle Gilead from within!

Baby Nicole makes in into Gilead as a ‘Pearl Girl’ who are like Gilead’s missionaries and Aunts in training. There she meets Agnes (who if you are not keeping track, is her half sister, DUN DUN DUN!) who is training to be an Aunt. As soon as this happens, Lydia reveals herself to Agnes and Nicole as conspiring against Gilead, and explains Nicole’s identity to Agnes. Then she tells them that they must escape with these documents and hopefully bring about the downfall of Gilead.

Then there is a bit of a thrilling ish escape (where we basically get to see what is only hinted at in The Handmaid’s Tale – escaping Gilead and the routes that mimic the Underground Railroad) and then Agnes and Nicole make it to Canada, where they see June, their mom. Then the book ends, and we get an epilogue that mimics the epilogue of The Handmaid’s Tale; it is an academic conference on the topic of Gilead, this one held a year after the one we read about in the first book. There is the usual commentary that society has not changed much, the idea that fascism and regimes can be dismantled from within, and the notion that we must learn from history. The end. Praise be, under his eye, it is over. Blessed be the fruit that is moving on to a better dystopian series.

Because I have been swamped at work, instead of a cool thematic background to the book you just get me holding it in my cubicle because the time has come to update this damn blog.
[This is a picture of The Testaments: the cover is mostly black, with a graphic of a woman in a white wimple and green cloak. Over this woman is the silhouette of a woman with arms upraised, perhaps in rebellion?]
  • Overall brain gushings :

Here are my overall thoughts about why this book pales in comparison to the OG tale, starting with my least favourite thing; like the show, this book kills all the ambiguity I loved in The Handmaid’s Tale. I loved not knowing if June lived past the first text, I loved not knowing if the colonies were real or propaganda, and I especially loved not knowing Aunt Lydia and other nefarious characters’ motivations or true allegiances! I was seriously bummed at the way in which this book killed Aunt Lydia’s complexity. Sometimes, people are evil. Sometimes, people want power. Sometimes, people will betray the very communities they belong to to achieve their means. And sometimes, those people are women. I also thought that Aunt Lydia’s idea of dismantling Gilead from within was sort of dumb, and obscured the reality that even Lydia wasn’t willing to admit to herself: she did everything out of the selfish need for survival. Then, she probably felt guilty and decided she needed to change her ways. To me, this is more interesting, and less naive. So why the hell did Atwood make the character choices she did?

Also, while The Handmaid’s Tale is a story about bearing witness to survival, about what people will go through to survive, and the ones who decide survival is not enough, The Testaments is a just an action tale about resisting an oppressive regime. There isn’t even much ideological depth or exploration, and instead of a poignant narrative about humanity and the desire to live, we get a somewhat exciting escape narrative. Which is fine if that is what you came for. That is not what I came to the narrative world of Gilead for.

  • What does it mean?

Ok. Well, obviously this book means that being a theocratic dystopia is bad. There’s a lot of interesting stuff about the ties that bind people: are we bound by experience, by gender, by familial ties, by belief?

This book also means that even in the face of desperation, of what seems like a totally dystopian reality, there is room for hope. Dictatorships and horrible regimes have been overthrown, and can be again. So to those of us who have been incredibly depressed by the cheeto known as Trump, it’s not over until the results of the 2020 election! And if he wins, I guess we have to pray that a high-ranking woman will pull an Aunt Lydia and try and burn it all to the ground?

And not to state the ridiculously evident, but the book wants us to realize the dangers of viewing women as property, drawing comparisons between the infringements on women’s reproductive rights and the all-too-scary-because-it-could-be-the-future Republic of Gilead.

  • Favourite passages :

Oddly enough for a Atwood book, I had very few passages flagged as interesting or impactful; again, see my rating for this book.

I was at the age at which parents suddenly transform from people who know everything into people who know nothing.

Atwood, pg 44.

To my parents, I apologize for being like Baby Nicole as a teenager and thinking you knew nothing.

Every woman wanted a baby, said Aunt Estee. Every woman who wasn’t an Aunt or a Martha, said Aunt Vidala, what earthly use were you if you didn’t have a baby?

pg 81.

The Testaments obviously follows a lot of interesting themes that The Handmaid’s Tale is interested in, and this is probably the clearest indication we have of Gilead’s core beliefs about women and how they subjugate them.

“No one wants to die,” said Becka. “But some people don’t want to live in any of the ways that are allowed.”

pg 294.

I found this passage really moving and interesting with regard to the different reactions that people will have in the face of crisis and oppression. Will we live? Will we join the bad guys to try and dismantle it from within? Is just living enough? What is more brave? What has a better chance of affecting real change?

  • If you liked this (or my review), consider reading :

I mean, if you haven’t read it yet, go read The Handmaid’s Tale! All the things I dislike about The Testaments lies largely in how great Handmaid is and it never needed a sequel! I hate sequel and remake culture, argh, make it stop!

If you want an excellent read about the sexual subjugation of women, and the lessons we can take from history, read Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden. Another great feminist-dystopia that I’m pretty sure I’ve recommended before is Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower.

I haven’t read this book yet, but it is going on my to-read list right now; Naomi Alderman’s, The Power, which is apparently about a world where women can harm people just by touching them, and the ways in which women begin to enjoy this dangerous new-found dominance.

Stay tuned for my next review, Ronan Farrow’s explosive Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators. A little bit of a trigger warning as this is Farrow’s account of his various investigations into sexual assaults in media and politics.