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V©hI > $l\ 3 Y\o€
%$, who visits Athens this week.
No one writes female characters like
surrealist-humorist-novelist
Womb, approximately thirty-one yean old.
Never been pregnant. Last seen at area shop
ping mall near Reynold’s Shoes ..
This is the story: somehow, Rita, same
age as womb, loses said organ in the shop
ping mall. When she appears on a syndicat
ed talk show, introducing her plight to mil
lions 61 viewers in an effort to retrieve the
uterus, a pane! of gynecologists theorize that
she has lost it from lack of use.
Laurie Foos’ first novel, Ex Utero (1996,
Harcburt Brace & Co.) slyly lays bare soci
etal notions concerning sexuality and moth
erhood by detailing this surreal story. Foos,
who has been cal'ed a young genius — as
well as the “unholy love-child of Kafka and
Erica Jong” — may very well be the savior of
modern feminist fiction, though she profess
es in a recent conversation with Flagpole
that she doesn’t really know what the term
“feminism” is supposed to mean. Despite
this, her writing — clear, beautiful, simple,
strong — brings to light many of the big
identity issues the modern woman faces.
This Friday, Foos, an adjunct instructor of
English composition at Bentley College in
Massachusetts, will bring her cunning sense
of humor to Athens from her native New
England, lecturing on “The Cult of Fertility”
on the UGA campus and later giving a book
reading at Book Peddlers.
In tier most recent novel. Portrait of the
Walrus by a Young Artist (1997, Harcourt
Brace & Co.), Foos continues to create
sweetly deranged characters thrust into situ
ations that seem strangely familiar despite
their otherworldliness. Again, Foos chal
lenges not only societal notions of sexuality,
but ah‘.he streamlined
conventional novel, pre
senting an unnerving and
delicate balance between
reality and fantasy. It’s an
appropriate landscape
for the protagonist, 18-
year-old Frances Fisk a
young woman teetering
or; the brink of artistic
vision and madness.
Foos ably uses overt
sexual images as her
weapon in the face of tra
dition; she explains the
root of her characters’
traumas is rooted in a
pop culture reality, one
of her favorite targets.
"There still exists that
double standard where it’s OK for a man to
express his sexuality but not for a woman,”
she muses. “And 1 do think fundamentally we
are sexual beings.”
But are we necessarily mothers? Foos
recalls writing Ex Utero at age 27 as a
“counter-attack” to the pressure she felt
from others to have children when she mar
ried. She is still childless.
“1 kind of thought the book would quell
some of that but it really hasn’t,” she says. ‘ I
think in a lot of ways we are expected to
reproduce, procreate. Despite ail of the
changes we have gone through, [it’s still]
taboo to say you don’t want children.”
The battle between motherhood and sex
uality, and whether the two can coexist — a
dichotomy Foos thinks “women still ques
tion" — is played out in Ex Utero with a dose
of vivid, often unsettling imagery, like the
ever-present bowl of Cheerios (Foos finds
Cheerios to be endowed with that perfect
opening, representing that passage through
which all life comes).
Foos is keen to dis
cuss the empathy that
naturally exists among
women, if only by default
of anatomy. U I think there
is a common ground that
women have, that we
just have a different
physiology than men,”
Foos says, remembering
when she found herself
at an age where most of
her friends began having
children. “It would be
birth stories that we told
at the dinner table, and
that kind of thing,” she
says. “There was an
immediate bond of ‘That
happened to me too,’
and just the changes in our bodies we go
through at different periods of our lives, it
becomes a bond that you don’t understand
unless you’re a woman."
Foos takes such bonding to the extreme
in Ex Utero, in which other childless women
oddly begin to manifest physical responses
to Rita’s plight. One woman’s vagina seals
shut — simply “closes up shop.” An 80-year
old woman collapses in a frenzy of hot flash
es. Another woman spontaneously erupts
into a nevei -ending menstrual flood, which
trails behind her like “an insect.”
Laurie Foos Photograph by Kevin Vickers
Foos continues to explore women’s iden
tity in Portrait of the Walrus, in which Frances
is tormented by artistic inclinations inherit
ed by her late father. When she succumbs to
the artistic fever that took her father, she
finds herself pursued by a menacing horde
of... walruses.
.“I tried to play with the whole idea of a
conventional coming-of-age novel," Foes
says. “You sort of have this preconceived
notion — most people, probably myself
included — that you need to know where
you are from the beginning. And it’s very dis
torting. 1 wanted the book to reflect the dis
tortion that happens in her life. That things
remain, to a certain point, wacky, but not
surreal. When she begins to break down logi
cally, that line becomes blurred.”
Besides detailing the journey to woman
hood, Foos had another objective in mind
when telling Frances’ story: dispelling the
“almost romantic myth" she says, that mad
ness is a necessary for true genius.
“One of the larger questions for me has
been: how do you exist as an artist and still
be a part of the ‘normal’ world?" Foos says.
“You sort of feel different in some way, and 1
do think you have kind of an aesthetic inside
of y^u that is just a part of you.”
Foos’ next book, Twinship, is due out next
fall. “It’s about boundaries and lines that
have been blurred in a mother-daughter rela
tionship," she explains.
The plot? “It’s about a woman who basi
cally gives birth to herself.”
Mary Jessica Hammes
WHO: Laurie Foos (reading)
WHEN: Friday, Sopt. 25
WHERE: Book Peddlers
HOW MUCH: FREE!
"\
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PULLING THREADS: bring foos' strange vision to life
£*tita has become famous since
mysteriously losing her womb in a
shopping mall. The Fruitless Wombs
collective, a support group formed foi
such situations, come to call on Rita.
They have wombs, and she doesn't.
When Rita's husband, who has felt
the sting of loss almost as much as
his spouse, senses the wombs sur
rounding him, it is too much to bear.
So George jerks off in the corner
while Rita and her guests eat plain,
non-fat yogurt.
Reading the scene in Laurie Foos'
book. Ex Utero, is effective. Watching
the scene actually played before your
eyes by the local performance group
Pulling Threads is more than effec
tive; its fascinating, skillful, and a
little unnerving.
Pulling Threads has remained
faithful to Foos' vision, which means
that Saturday night's show, including
numerous artfully enacted sex scenes,
may not be one for the kiddies. The
fact that all of Pulling Threads' per
formers are women may initially dis
tract the viewer; however. Kimberlee
Saumgarner, Michelle Stiles, Susie
Polnaszek and Laura Green easily shift
roles and genders several times
throughout the show.
Pulling Threads
began last year
under the direction
of Kimberlee and
Philip Baumgarner
(who directs this
performance of Ex
Utero), as a person
al need for creative
expression. The group expanded;
members changed. Last June, they
performed an improvisational piece
on the life of Frida Kahlo at the
Globe.
A specia! moment to look for in Ex
Utero: Polnaszek, as Leonard,
attempting to drill open his girlfriend
(Baumgarner)'s vagina after it has
mysteriously sealed itself shut ©
WHAT: Pulling Threads performance collective, performing Ex Utero,
with a "talk back" scheduled immediately after the show.
WHEN: Saturday, Sept. 26 at 8 p.m.
WHERE: Spalding Theater in Seney-Stovall Chapel, 201 N. Milledge Ave.
HOW MUCH: $8. For info, call 549*9167
*05*
*
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