I picked up megan hunter's the harpy one morning expecting to read a few pages and read, well, the whole thing. its a shorter book, written in mostly small, digestible chapters. the inciting incident is the protagonist Lucy getting learning her husband Jake was having an extramarital affair.
lucy and jake come to an agreement that she can hurt him three times to "make them even". as she continues to hurt him and think about how she will hurt him in the future, she goes through an awakening, of who she had been before children, before marriage, who her mother was, who her grandmother was, a generational anger.
its familiar, if not a similar situation to anger or unhinging after losing oneself and a blow on top of it. One poignant scene was at an annual christmas party lucy put on in an attempt at normalcy. instead the guests all know about the affair and gossip during the party devastating yet not hard to imagine. her husband retires from the party and she is left to face the hoard alone. she ruminates on this, raising her anger. Lucy observes she is the one suffering for the affair. she is the one that should seemingly be embarrassed, like she did something wrong, while her husband was able to go unscathed. why, she asks herself, isn't he the one under the microscope, under trial for his actions? it reminds me of the conversation we've (the collective) been having about women being the responsible, the done do, and how language needs to change: a woman wasn't raped, a man raped a woman; lucy wasn't cheated on, jake cheated on lucy. I don't know if I'm quite making my point here, which, I think is place blame where blame lies — with the men that do wrong. it is not the fault of the victim, woman is not inherently bad.
the role of the harpy from mythology is not explicit, but implied throughout the story as I'm sure this review makes fairly obvious.
the harpy is an ethereal story grounded in real things but somehow seeming ungrounded. a transformation, unescapable, not totally of free will but not unwanted. it happens before you know it. I suppose its a reckoning of sorts, but for lucy it's more of a freedom. for so long, women have been forced to live for their families, their husband and children and put them first. subject to abuses physical, mental and emotional.
I recommend this book. read if you like: stories that are real and fantastical, strong women, transformation, reclaiming mythology, revenge kids that (I imagined) are cute.
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