If we’re each a character from Winnie the Pooh, then me, I’ve always been Eeyore, the donkey determined that life should be a downer. Grumpily munching his thistles, while Tigger bounces gleefully through life, and Pooh and even Piglet plod hopefully on towards the next pot of honey. Perhaps that’s why I wound up writing a book with ‘Celebrate’ in the title.
Over the course of several years when I’d suffered a series of losses, culminating in the death of my partner of forty years, I had been editing Secret Voices: A Year of Women’s Diaries. And reading the diaries of other women over a period of four centuries, I realised I was not alone. Not to make a scale of suffering, but you might say that some of those women had much more to complain about than I did. Thrown out into the street by a husband; suffering through war and sickness; or, far too many of them,facing the death of a child.
What I came slowly to realize was the shortage of cheerful voices. Yes, with more work I found enough happy souls, of course. I didn’t want to cast all the book’s readers into gloom. And yes, the diary is a particular form–one to which women will turn when they want to let the dark thoughts out.
But it wasn’t just diaries, I realised. It was letters–novels–newspaper columns–and ordinary conversations between female friends, too. It was almost as though every woman had been told by her mother, as I was by mine, the story of the Chinese field workers who used to call out ‘bad rice!’–bad harvest–when the crop had been particularly good, for fear lest the jealous gods should hear, and take their good luck away from them.
I began to look for positive quotes, written by women about women– not just celebrating women’s achievements, though that’s in there too, but women who were in the process of celebrating something in their lives, whether that was planting a strawberry patch or throwing a party; rediscovering your connections to a family member, or relishing a friendship that’s endured for decades. The result was a new anthology: Celebrating Women. Women writing on women: family, friends, feminism and fun.
