short stories – Empowering women through fiction and history.

Lessons From My Mother’s Life Release Day Blitz!

Lessons Front Cover Photo Credit:stokkete (Luciano de polo)/Depositphotos.com

Title: Lessons From My Mother’s Life

Author: Tam May

Genres: Historical Fiction/Women’s Fiction/Short Fiction

Release Date: March 29, 2020

It was the 1950s. The war was over and women could go back to being happy housewives. But did they really want to?

Women in the 1950s should have been contented to live a Leave it to Beaver life. They had it all: generous husbands with great jobs, comfortable suburban homes with nice yards, two cars, and communities with like-minded families. Their days were filled with raising well-behaved children, cleaning the house, baking cookies, and attending PTA meetings and church events.

They should have been fulfilled. Women’s magazines told them so. Advertisers told them so. Doctors and psychologists told them so. Some were. But some weren’t.

In the 1950s, women were sold a bill of goods about who they were and who they should be as women. Some bought it. But some didn’t.

These stories are about the women who didn’t. They didn’t buy that there wasn’t more to life than making a happy home. Except they didn’t know they weren’t buying until something forced them see the cracks in their seemingly perfect lives.

A teenage bride sees her future mirrored in Circe’s twisted face. A woman’s tragic life serves as a warning about the dangers of too much maternal devotion. And the lives of two women intersect during two birthday parties, changing both of them. These and other moving tales of strength, discovery, and hope are about our mothers and grandmothers and the lessons their lives have to teach us.

This book is the second edition of my 2017 short story collection, Gnarled Bones and Other Stories. This edition has been extensively revised, the stories changed and expanded, and the context moved from the present day to the 1950s and 1960s. This edition also includes a Preface and a bonus chapter from The Specter, the first book of my Gilded Age family drama, the Waxwood Series.

You can pick up your copy of the book at a special promotional price at the following online retailers:

Amazon US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B084Y7GDV9

Amazon UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B084Y7GDV9

B&N: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/lessons-from-my-mothers-life-tam-may/1136487332

Apple iBooks (iTunes): https://books.apple.com/us/book/lessons-from-my-mothers-life/id1499562199

Kobo: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/lessons-from-my-mother-s-life

Excerpt

She rose, slipping her hands from his and placing them in the pockets of her dress so he wouldn’t see them shaking. She looked out the window where the sea had disappeared for curvy mountains. “Isn’t it wonderful how you only have to travel on a railroad track to reach a new place, a new world, even?”

“It’s not enough,” he said in an almost brutal voice. “I’ve been on many train tracks to many new places and new worlds. It’s like the living body and the living soul. One without the other kills them both.”

She took a breath. “You mean your body can be in a different place, but if your soul is the same, you’ll always be back where you started?”

“Something like that.”

Her legs felt as fragile as matches as she left the drawing room and made her way down the aisle and into the observation car. She saw that Bea and Carla were both dozing in chairs near the center of the car. She crept past the resting heads and soft snoring people to where the observation section gathered like a cup at the edge of the car. There was one oblong little window that stared right ahead into the vast space of mountainous ranges and gray-blue skies. She watched as the train moved forward, leaving behind her dead soul.

About the Author

Tam May grew up in the United States and earned her B.A. and M.A in English. She worked as an English college instructor and EFL (English as a Foreign Language) teacher before she became a full-time writer. She started writing when she was 14, and writing became her voice. She writes fiction characters who examine their past in order to move into their future and are influenced by the time in which they live.

Her first book, a collection of contemporary short stories, was nominated for a 2017 Summer Indie Book Award. A revised and expanded second edition of this book is now published under a new title: Lessons From My Mother’s Life. She is currently working on a Gilded Age family saga. The first book, The Specter, came out in June of 2019, and the second book, False Fathers, is also now available. Book 3 (The Claustrophobic Heart) and Book 4 (Dandelion Children) will be out in 2020. She is also working on a historical mystery series featuring a turn-of-the-century New Woman sleuth. Both series take place in Northern California.

She lives in Texas but calls San Francisco and the Bay Area “home”. When she’s not writing, she’s reading classic literature and historical fiction, watching classic films, or cooking up awesome vegetarian dishes.

Social Media Links

Website: http://tammayauthor.com/

Blog: https://tammayauthor.com/category/thedreambookblog

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tammayauthor/

Facebook Readers Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/tamsdreamersRG/

Facebook Blog Page: https://www.facebook.com/thedreambookblog/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/tammayauthor

Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/tammayauthor/

Instragram: https://www.instagram.com/tammayauthor/

Goodreads Author Page: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/16111197.Tam_May

Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/Tam-May/e/B01N7BQZ9Y/

BookBub Author Page: https://www.bookbub.com/authors/tam-may

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The Feminine Mystique

Photo Credit: Betty Friedan as photographed in her home, 1978, photo taken by Lynn Gilbert and uploaded 6 August 2009: LynnGilbert5/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 4.0

Last year, most of my work focused on the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era. I’ve made no secret about the fact that the late 19^th/early 20^th centuries have always fascinated me.

But last year, I decided I wanted a redo of the first book I ever published and the book evolved into a historical short story collection that takes place during the post-WWII era. The stories and their resilient protagonists were inspired by the social and psychological history of women in the 1950s. The one that made me aware of the paradox of the “happy housewife” which is so prevalent a theme in the stories of Lessons From My Mother’s Life was Betty Friedan.

Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique introduced this paradox to the American public. The book explores Friedan’s experiences talking with women in the 1950s, especially housewives just like herself. She takes a very comprehensive look at the feminine mystique and the institutions that allowed this image to emerge.

The idea of the feminine mystique has been defined in many ways, but, for me, it’s the idea that a woman’s biological, psychological, social, and spiritual destiny boils down to two things: getting married and having children. There is little else outside these social constructs that a woman can, and should, want. In Friedan’s own words:

“[For] the feminine mystique, there is no other way for a woman to dream of creation or of the future. There is no way she can even dream about herself, except as her children’s mother, her husband’s wife.” (p. 59)

I think this is really the crux of the mystique: a woman’s identity, her fulfillment in life, her capabilities, and her intelligence are all tied to who she is in relation to the other people in her life. Her role in life is defined, then, as wife, mother, daughter, granddaughter, caretaker, lover, etc.

You’ve probably heard The Feminine Mystique led to the second-wave feminist movement in the late 1960s. But, as Gail Collins, in her preface to the 50^th edition of the book points out, that’s not, strictly speaking, true:

The Feminine Mystique did not create the women’s rights movement. Those commissions on the status of women were started by the Kennedy administration before it [the book] was published, and the Civil Rights Act was being debated in Congress while American housewives were still just starting to pass Friedan’s book around. (Friedan, location 128-132)

From a political perspective, this may very well be true. But I think from a psychological perspective, Friedan’s book did much to bring many “a-ha!” moments into the lives of the women (and men) who read it when it first came out in 1963.

Friedan’s book has been heavily criticized, just like any other seminal work on gender politics. For a start, her book is looking at a very narrow population of women: American, white, upper-middle class, and suburban. This was also an issue with the second-wave feminist movement which often addressed the needs of white middle-class women first. The issues relating to women of color, working-class or poor women, older women, lesbians, etc., were either put on the back burner or left out entirely (until women of color and lesbians spoke out and began to form their own groups). The third-wave feminist movement which began around the late 1980s and early 1990s (and still going on today), rectified this situation, as it strives to include all women’s issues and has earned the name “global feminism.”

The book was also criticized for offering one single solution: that women defy the feminine mystique by getting out of the house and having careers. The implication that being a housewife and mother was not enough for any woman rubbed a lot of housewives (and rightly so) the wrong way. There were also personal attacks made against Friedan, more of which you can read about here.

Lessons From My Mother’s Life contains fictional representations of the feminine mystique. The stories are set in the 1950s and early 1960s, before the second-wave feminist movement. In each story, the main character is fighting against the feminine mystique in one way or another. For example, in my story “Fumbling Toward Freedom,” Susan is a nineteen-year-old college student in love and about to marry an upright young man still in medical school. When she attends an exhibition of Circe sculptures by a local San Francisco artist, she finds in them a message about the consequences of letting love define who you are. The message both entices and frightens her.

To learn more about this book, which reached #1 on the Amazon charts, please visit this page.

Want to explore the nooks and crannies of history that aren’t in the history books? Like social and psychological history and not just historical events? Want in on exclusive sneak peeks, giveaways, and surveys? Then sign up for my newsletter! You’ll get a free short story when you do. Here’s the link!

Works Cited

Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique (50th Anniversary Edition). W. W. Norton & Company, 2013 (original publication date: 196). Kindle digital file.

Cover Reveal for Lessons From My Mother’s Life

Photo Credit: stokkete (Luciano de polo)/Depositphotos.com

I’m so excited to be revealing the cover for the second edition of my first book, Gnarled Bones and Other Stories, now titled Lessons From My Mother’s Life!

Why the title change? Because in revising and expanding this new edition, I threw out some of the stories that didn’t fit into the collection with its new theme, namely, the feminine mystique and other ideas related to the 1950s housewife. One of those stories was “Gnarled Bones,” the title story of the first edition. I took this story out, so, obviously, I had to find another title.

I hit upon Lessons From My Mother’s Life from my reading of Betty Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystique. In the book, Friedan talks about the lessons previous generations of women had to teach women of the 1950s, pointing out how the mothers of the 1950s American suburban housewife did not have the burden of the feminine mystique on their shoulders and were, in fact, fighting for their rights as women and getting out into the workforce to show their worth in roles other than wife and mother. Since many of the stories in the second edition take place in the 1950s, this era represents the mothers and grandmothers of more modern generations and their lives do, indeed, have much to teach us. I also talk a little bit in the Foreword of the book about how these themes and stories relate more closely to my life and my mother’s life. So the title seemed fitting.

The preorder for this book will be up very soon. In the meantime, you can read more about the book here.