From Our Own

ABR is fortunate to have on its editorial staff many prominent writers and critics. From Our Own is a regular feature devoted to reviews and discussions of their books.

Ours is a society where nuanced discussions of true female sexuality are dangerously hard to come by. I choose the adverb "dangerously" with keen intent—an intent freshly affirmed by Mazza's brave novel. Its interwoven narrative lines challenge several broadly accepted ubiquitous social messages and showcase the ways that stereotypes of heterosexual roles (men are the predators, women the prey; men are the initiators, women the receivers)—stereotypes that are invariably linked to traditional power structures and men having more agency and financial opportunity than women—cause confusion, passivity, and harm.

In the book, narrator Hester Smith uses a collage of epistolary journal entries, exposé journalism research, and confessional memoir to write a biography of desire-fueled trauma. Smith acknowledges in the beginning of the book that names have been changed for privacy: her own pen name is a hybrid of Hester Prynne and, she states, citing The Crucible (1953) as the influence, "Abigail Smith." Of course the Abigail in The Crucible is Abigail Williams; this odd ambiguity asks readers to employ the central questions that surround the novel in terms of responsibility and getting the facts (or remembering the facts) incorrectly.

The first question: is it ignorance? As an education major assigned to high school teacher Daniel Wood, Smith unwittingly meets the distressed teenager Heather Bushnell that Wood is having sex with. But she doesn't see or suspect it; she's too busy trying to get Wood's attention herself. Likewise, Wood takes Bushnell to Las Vegas over spring break, allegedly for a class trip that Bushnell's mother and stepfather don't question. In her lust for Wood, the narrator admits she never thought about how her potential actions might affect his wife—she ignores it. And there is even ignorance in what she can't ignore. The narrator eventually realizes underage girls from Mexico are being forced to work as prostitutes in her own backyard—literally. She can see the girls and the johns from the plant nursery where she works. And yet, Smith points out, people seek out details about these girls to try to stifle their own sense of helplessness; knowing is enough to allow them to then "go take dinner out of the oven, or turn on the end of a ballgame." However, "what they don't want to read" is Smith's story—"the late adolescent anguish of a late-virgin always in the process of deciding, too late, to act." Smith halfheartedly tries to rescue two of the enslaved girls, but her ignorance of the situation jeopardizes the girls' safety.

The second question: is it an overt concealment—is the narrator "protecting" Abigail, who was an underage accuser (and a false one, motivated by sexual desire), the same way the newspaper "protects" "alleged victims of sexual crimes" by not printing their names, thus inviting a comparison not just between Smith and Abigail Williams but Heather Bushnell and Abigail? Or is it more the reverse, a comparison of Abigail to Bushnell—for if, as the police officer commenting on the case against Wood states, minors under age eighteen "cannot give consent," then seventeen-year-old Abigail Williams was indeed the victim of John Proctor. Yet, as Smith indicates for Bushnell's tale of victimization, this "doesn't ring as the whole story": due to Abigail's lies of witchcraft, Proctor and many others are sentenced to death. Did this all happen because of sexual desire, both John and Abigail's—because he had sex with her, but then she was pushed away?

And the third question: is it a subconscious repression? Rather than a character from The Crucible, the narrator's surname instead seems to speak of the Smith-Corona typewriter she uses in her research-assistant duties to her college professor Andrew Pryor. Although she freely admits wishing Wood had more assertively goaded...