The Women of Marilyn French by Marilyn French

Author:Marilyn French [French, Marilyn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-5040-3890-4
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2013-08-27T00:49:00+00:00

Graduation party for Franny a huge success, and she’s gone off with Jillian to wait table at a resort in Maine, anyone who can get those two gigglers to work has my respect. She’s still a giggler, a baby, despite school in New York. I’m glad.

And Billy and Livvy, a beautiful wedding, her parents are not ostentatious, I was worried they might be. Such sweet kids, they both glowed. And went to Capri first, on the way to Somalia, for five days of luxury before the deprivation that awaits them, the heartbreak. But they won’t be heartbroken because they will feel they are doing something, that they are not helpless.

The show a great success again, again despite the critics. They scream: why does this woman photograph only women? When for the ten years I was with World I photographed only men and no one complained about that. But they’re lying about what upsets them, it isn’t that I photograph women, it’s the kind of women I shoot: Chinese women sweeping the street, women working in a corset factory in Queens, women carrying fardels in Greece, working in the fields in India, cleaning public lavatories in Penn Station. They like shows featuring women if Richard Avedon does them: images of the impossible, women who transcend body: stark black poles with a white blur of a face, frozen whipped cream caught in space, big black blurs for eyes, women who don’t exist, for even the models don’t look like that in life, they are made of flesh and blood and muscle and bone and when they move their blouses pull out of their skirts, and when they laugh their mascara runs, and they can’t walk in those heels without falling.

Whereas my women are a little gross, not gross enough to be grotesque (that would be all right), just enough to seem real. And they probably wouldn’t have minded so much if I’d concentrated only on women in Turkey or Greece or India—it’s the American women they are offended by.

Still—someone must like them, my pictures, because they’re selling.

AN UNDATED ENTRY: Mother pours a glass of water and sips at it for a half hour. Then she puts it in the refrigerator. I ask her why she does this. “Why waste it?” she asks, surprised at my question.

Franny opens a can of soda, takes a few swigs, and leaves it on the kitchen counter. If I don’t pour it out, it will remain there for days, along with all the others she will have opened in that time. I tell her she should visit Billy and Livvy in Somalia. She doesn’t understand.

How can a woman with such a mother have such a daughter?

It is November 1981. Anastasia is packing. She is going to the Middle East on an assignment for UNICEF. She is excited. She imagines sailing down the Nile, riding over bumpy sandy roads to dusty little villages in Morocco, in Egypt, in Algeria. She would like to see Isfahan, she has always

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