How is it that the girl who got the top marks in high school ends up, at fifty, scrubbing floors and cleaning toilets for minimum wage, living in a room above Vera?s Hairstyling, in a god-forsaken town called Powassan?
Feminist theorist Dale Spender wrote, in Women of Ideas and What Men Have Done to Them, ?We need to know how women disappear....? Although Spender spoke of women who disappear from the historical record, all too many women seem to disappear from any sort of public life as soon as they leave high school: so many shine there, but once they graduate, they become invisible. What happens?
Marriage and kids is an inadequate answer because married-with-kids straight-A boys (of which, let?s acknowledge, there are fewer) are visible. Everywhere. Even the straight-B boys are out there. So what happens?
Tracing the life of one woman through three juxtaposed voices-the fresh, impassioned protagonist speaking through her journals from the age of fifteen; the sarcastic, now-fifty protagonist commenting about the events of her life, occasionally speaking to her younger self; and the dispassionate narrator-the novel will resonate most with older women, but it is younger women, and men, who most need to read it. Because this is what happens.
"An incisive reflection on how social forces constrain women?s lives. ... Great for fans of Sylvia Plath, Doris Lessing?s The Golden Notebook." Booklife/Publishers' Weekly
"I find the writing style very appealing ... An interesting mix of a memoir and a philosophical work, together with some amazing poetry. ... This is what happens ranks in my top five of books ever read." Mesca Elin, Psychochromatic Redemption
