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She was the first guest whose session sold out. She had the royal touch, mothers lining up to get copies of her book signed for their baby daughters, in a modern version of the laying on of the hands.  She was the only guest to have an interviewer summoned from across the seas (Edinburgh Book Festival Director Nick Barley) (not sure why, actually). She had the raiment - that leather jacket!\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EBut here was the thing. She didn’t want to be Queen. She was not here to represent or embody anything. She was here to share some stories about her life, from the many in her book\u0026nbsp;\u003Ci\u003E\u003Ca href=\"http:\/\/discover.elgar.govt.nz\/iii\/encore\/record\/C__Rb3083694\"\u003EMy life on the road\u003C\/a\u003E\u003C\/i\u003E. But no nostalgia!  ”There’s something about being part of a movement and being on the road that forces you to live in the present -- which is where we should live.” \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003ENick Barley led her through the salient points in the book. They talked about her parents, her father who treated her as an adult even when she was little “and I’m very grateful to him”, and her mother, who had been a pioneering journalist but had given up her career in those days when no one thought you could have it all, not before having been diagnosed with “anxiety neuroses”. Steinem's stories of them were, for me and I think for many readers, the most touching in the book. They split up when she was only 11.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EShe never again felt she really had a home. As soon as she was out of school she took off for India. She told herself she was attracted for the theosophy aspect (her mother was a theosophist), “but really… I was escaping”. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EIn the Indian villages she discovered \"talking circles\". People would come out of their houses in the evening and sit together around a kerosene lamp to talk about the terrible experiences they shared, trying to sort out the truth and break the cycle.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EWe got the first taste of her wicked sense of humour. She recalled that many years later the women's movement developed their own form of talking circles -- consciousness raising groups.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\"I’m sure a lot of women here remember those, now we call them book clubs.”\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EBack in the US, her time in India having helped her skive the suburban ideal she had firsthand reasons to distrust, Steinem began working in journalism. And here of course we came to her notorious turn as a Playboy bunny, somewhat misleadingly described in the Festival programme blurb as “She was famously a Playboy bunny, but one who wrote a magazine article entitled “A Bunny’s Tale”, revealing the exploitative working conditions bunnies endured”.  She was a journalist, and Show magazine assigned her to write a story about the Playboy Clubs, with the idea she would go undercover as a bunny for a couple of weeks. She wasn't enthusiastic about it, but it was “the kind of assignment I would get”-- which tells you something about the times.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EShe had thought that it might at least be somewhat glamorous, but she was being set straight on that before even being fitted for her bunny suit. At the job interview she told the woman she was a secretary, and the reply came back: “Honey, if you can type you don’t want to work here”.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe article, which you can and should \u003Ca href=\"http:\/\/dlib.nyu.edu\/undercover\/sites\/dlib.nyu.edu.undercover\/files\/documents\/uploads\/editors\/Show-A%20Bunny%27s%20Tale-Part%20One-May%201963.pdf\"\u003Eread online in the New York University Digital Library\u003C\/a\u003E, made her famous but, she tells us, \"It was a bad career move\". Being an ex-bunny became the thing she was most known for, despite it being her least favoured characterisation. \"At my advanced age people still introduce me as an ex-bunny. People say \"What does she know? She was a bunny\".\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EBut there was some satisfaction. The gynaecological exam for aspiring bunnies which she blew the whistle on was discontinued soon after her article came out. And in her 1983 book \u003Ca href=\"http:\/\/discover.elgar.govt.nz\/iii\/encore\/record\/C__Rb1536357\"\u003E\u003Ci\u003EOutrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions\u003C\/i\u003E\u003C\/a\u003E, she pointed out \"My exposé of working in a Playboy Club has outlived all the Playboy Clubs, both here and abroad.\"\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003ENick Barley asks a question about Ms magazine which I miss because I’m so stupefied by having heard him call it “Miss Magazine” and asking myself if this could be just an accent thing (I'm still not sure), and then asks her about the historic 1977 conference in Houston on women’s issues, 20,000 women in attendance, their delegates busy drawing up an action plan to submit to the US Congress (the conference was actually sponsored by the US Government).\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EIt’s depressing of course to think how few of their planks have been achieved, and how many of those achieved are nonetheless still threatened (however, as I write this, the US Supreme Court has just blown away attempts by the state of Texas to deny women the reproductive rights the US government has ruled are theirs), but Gloria Steinem hadn’t written a book, and come here to talk to us, just to be our institutional memory, or Cassandra, or whatever.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EShe talked about the women at the conference, about the Native American women she had gotten to know there, how she had learned so many fascinating things about early Native American history from them. Because, and this is pure Gloria, “We don’t study history from when it started, we study it from when monarchy, patriotism and patriarchy and the other bullshit started”.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EAbout patriarchy, Gloria... Gloria had no hesitation. “It’s about controlling reproduction -- that’s what it’s all about”.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe perfect lead-in for Nick Barley to call our attention to the dedication in \u003Ci\u003EMy life on the road\u003C\/i\u003E.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E“Such a great dedication. Tell us about it.”\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E“Shall I read it? I don’t want to say everyone’s read my book!” (a good Steinem laugh) and she does.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u0026nbsp;\u003Ci\u003EThis book is dedicated to:\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/i\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Ci\u003EDr. John Sharpe of London, who in 1957, a decade before physicians in England could legally perform an abortion for any reason other than the health of the woman, took the considerable risk of referring for an abortion a twenty-two-year-old American on her way to India.\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/i\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Ci\u003EKnowing only that she had broken an engagement at home to seek an unknown fate, he said, “You must promise me two things. First you will not tell anyone my name. Second, you will do what you want to do with your life\".\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/i\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Ci\u003EDear Dr. Sharpe, I believe you, who knew the law was unjust, would not mind if I say this so long after your death: I’ve done the best I could with my life. This book is for you.\u003C\/i\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\"You will do what you want to do with your life,\" muses Barley. \"Do you sometimes feel as if you’ve sacrificed your life on behalf of others?” \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E“I don’t feel like that at all!” and another good laugh.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EGloria Steinem wasn't going in for any of that \"I sacrificed myself for you\" blackmail. She wasn't going in for recognition, or packaging, or ownership. (She doesn't even own a car, I learned from reading the book.)\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\"Women say to me with some alarm, 'My daughter doesn't know who you are!' But does she know who she is? \u003Ci\u003EBecause that's the whole point\u003C\/i\u003E.\"\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EShe pumped for all of us filling the ASB theatre to use the occasion as an opportunity to spread the word about what we are doing and thinking. “Use the mike!” she said when Q\u0026amp;A time came around. And some people did, websites were promoted, organisations cited. But a lot of people had questions, and none were turned away.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EQ \"Where do you want us to be in fifty years?\"\u003Cbr \/\u003EA “I want it to be wherever you want it to be. I'm not here to tell you where to go -- you know things I don’t know. “\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EQ Should we should talk to people who are “against feminism”?\u003Cbr \/\u003EA Well of course. “If I am fucking up I don’t want someone to hate me, I want them to tell me!”\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EA woman wanted to talk about the rights of sex workers. Steinem was honest; she has a problem with legalising “sex work”, though she does not want to criminalise it. “What happened to mutuality?” Is it about cooperation or submission? She doesn't see it as just another exploitative job, as is the risk if we term it \"sex work\". In her life, she says, she's only known one woman whose choice to sell her body was truly free of coercion.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EAdvice to a 14 year old feminist, who wanted to know where to start in her school where \"nobody even knows what feminism is\": Find an instance of injustice (how do the budgets for boys and girls sports teams compare) and organise people to challenge it.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\"Change that one unfairness and that will be feminism”.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EI saw a hopeful, funny person, the humour more pithy than came across in her book...\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\"Who are your anti-abortionists?\" No hands went up.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\"Maybe they don’t read books!\"\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E... and the hope more matter-of-course.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EI’m not sure it was clear to me from the book how enjoyable a member of your, um, book group she would be, but the evening left no doubt about it.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u0026nbsp;She sent us out telling us to talk to other people after exiting. I took it as a sort of beau geste, but as it happened, my daughter and I, standing in the signing line with her copy of \u003Ci\u003EA life on the road \u003C\/i\u003E(the Christmas present I didn't choose for her, thinking, \u003Ci\u003EWhat will that long ago stuff mean to her?,\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/i\u003Eonly to see her choose it on her own), found ourselves next to funny smart Michele A’Court, author of \u003Ci\u003E\u003Ca href=\"http:\/\/discover.elgar.govt.nz\/iii\/encore\/record\/C__Rb2984492\"\u003EStuff I forgot to tell my daughter\u003C\/a\u003E\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/i\u003Eand it all happened just as it should.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EWhen we arrived in front of Ms Steinem, I heard my daughter say that she didn't care about having her name in the book, she preferred a message, \"whatever you would like to say to me\".\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cdiv class=\"separator\" style=\"clear: both; text-align: center;\"\u003E\u003Ca href=\"https:\/\/3.bp.blogspot.com\/-__FNFws34Dg\/V3z-ylvRu5I\/AAAAAAAABTA\/hnVAjHRMN6AJNAhPPv3kcfGbAudAFcABwCLcB\/s1600\/Gloria%2Bdedication.jpg\" imageanchor=\"1\" style=\"margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;\"\u003E\u003Cimg border=\"0\" height=\"353\" src=\"https:\/\/3.bp.blogspot.com\/-__FNFws34Dg\/V3z-ylvRu5I\/AAAAAAAABTA\/hnVAjHRMN6AJNAhPPv3kcfGbAudAFcABwCLcB\/s640\/Gloria%2Bdedication.jpg\" width=\"640\" \/\u003E\u003C\/a\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Ci\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003C\/i\u003E\u003Ci\u003E--Karen \u003C\/i\u003E"},"link":[{"rel":"replies","type":"application/atom+xml","href":"http:\/\/albooksinthecity.blogspot.com\/feeds\/5560925212703362805\/comments\/default","title":"Post Comments"},{"rel":"replies","type":"text/html","href":"http:\/\/albooksinthecity.blogspot.com\/2016\/07\/gloria-steinem-not-queen-of-auckland.html#comment-form","title":"3 Comments"},{"rel":"edit","type":"application/atom+xml","href":"http:\/\/www.blogger.com\/feeds\/2501884760724421053\/posts\/default\/5560925212703362805"},{"rel":"self","type":"application/atom+xml","href":"http:\/\/www.blogger.com\/feeds\/2501884760724421053\/posts\/default\/5560925212703362805"},{"rel":"alternate","type":"text/html","href":"http:\/\/albooksinthecity.blogspot.com\/2016\/07\/gloria-steinem-not-queen-of-auckland.html","title":"Gloria Steinem: not the Queen of the Auckland Writers Festival"}],"author":[{"name":{"$t":"Karen Craig"},"uri":{"$t":"http:\/\/www.blogger.com\/profile\/18310967522076681423"},"email":{"$t":"noreply@blogger.com"},"gd$image":{"rel":"http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#thumbnail","width":"23","height":"32","src":"http:\/\/4.bp.blogspot.com\/-WaLn2rFYxqE\/UNvHlimMvBI\/AAAAAAAAABY\/ceYnAw1lZEk\/s220\/The%2BLibrarian.jpg"}}],"media$thumbnail":{"xmlns$media":"http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/","url":"https:\/\/3.bp.blogspot.com\/-5A9_I549Ca4\/V3tRVHjmjCI\/AAAAAAAABSw\/qquI_kDeRscBMPmMDOccR3SG9UXu1plgQCLcB\/s72-c\/Gloria%2BSteinem%2BAWF.JPG","height":"72","width":"72"},"thr$total":{"$t":"3"}},{"id":{"$t":"tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2501884760724421053.post-4408591173270074387"},"published":{"$t":"2016-05-15T21:30:00.000+12:00"},"updated":{"$t":"2016-05-20T00:57:08.003+12:00"},"category":[{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"#aklwritersfest"},{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"aklwritersfest"},{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"Anne O'Brien"},{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"Auckland Writer's Festival"},{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"AWF"},{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"AWF2016"},{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"Karen"}],"title":{"type":"text","$t":"Auckland Writers Festival Gala Night \"True Stories Told Live\""},"content":{"type":"html","$t":"\u003Cdiv class=\"separator\" style=\"clear: both; text-align: center;\"\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\u003Cdiv style=\"margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;\"\u003E\u003Cimg height=\"292\" src=\"https:\/\/thewandrinstar.files.wordpress.com\/2014\/12\/amarcord-fellini-6.jpg?w=560\u0026amp;h=411\" width=\"400\" \/\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EOur first dispatch from the Auckland Writers Festival Ocean Liner! Yes, because every year when I head over from the library to the Aotea Centre where the Gala Night is about to take place, when I see it loom up before me in the dark, all levels ablaze with light and teeming with people, wine glasses in their hands, I'm always reminded of the magical scene in Fellini's \u003Ci\u003EAmarcord \u003C\/i\u003Eof the fabled ocean liner \u003Ci\u003ERex\u003C\/i\u003E\u0026nbsp;passing like a dream in the night, on its way to fabulous places.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EFestival Director Anne O'Brien welcomed us all to this 16th Auckland Writers Festival  with her usual élan. If last year she had given us a pang with her reading of an excerpt from Oliver Sacks’s essay “My Own Life”, written shortly after his diagnosis of terminal cancer, this year she enticed us with an excerpt from Neil Gaiman’s \u003Ci\u003EFragile things\u003C\/i\u003E.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E“Stories, like people and butterflies and songbirds' eggs and human hearts and dreams, are also fragile things, made up of nothing stronger or more lasting than twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks. Or they are words on the air, composed of sounds and ideas --abstract, invisible, gone once they've been spoken -- and what could be more frail than that? But some stories, small, simple ones about setting out on adventures or people doing wonders, tales of miracles and monsters, have outlasted all the people who told them, and some of them have outlasted the lands in which they were created.”\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe theme for the small stories, eight of them, told to us by eight Festival writers in the True Stories Told Live format which is by now the signature of the Gala night, was Altered States. I’m sure everyone in the audience had their own favourites; I had four.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EPetina Gappah (“rising Zimbabwean star”) had Spirit with a capital S and her jaunty lines included “As a Marxist-Leninist my drug of choice was vodka”, and her finale: “If one dream dies, I’m going to dream another dream and I’m going to dream it bigger!”. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EPoet Tusiata Avia came out of the wings looking for all the world like a Minoan priestess with her mysterious archaic smile and regal countenance, and took her shoes off and spoke to us, in line with Minoan priestesses, about altered states originating from her epilepsy-- auras, and a thing called “Jamais vu”, \u003Ci\u003Enever seen\u003C\/i\u003E,  the opposite of the better known “Deja vu”, \u003Ci\u003Ealready seen:\u003C\/i\u003E “I don’t recognise where I am or who I am with”, and about the tumour next to her pineal gland, known as our “inner eye”. Her closing, testifying to the role of the unknown, had a hint of the oracular. “I don’t know what the ending is” she said, and exited.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EI am very fond of New York Jewish humour and enjoyed both Vivian Gornick (“New York woman of letters”) and her story about Daniel and the effect he had on her F.I., or \"Feeling Intelligence\", which was to stop it from working, making it impossible for her to process the discrepancies between what he told her (My parents live abroad) and what she observed him doing (visiting them in Kansas City).\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EAnd finally, Jeanette Winterson. “My mother was a flamboyant depressive”, she began, who read the Bible to her every day. “Books were banned, except for the Bible. I asked her why and she said, 'The trouble with a book is that you don’t know what’s in it until it’s too late'\". She found the books Jeanette was hiding under her mattress (apparently you can hide 72 books under a standard mattress) and took them outside and poured kerosene over them and burned them.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EWatching the bonfire, Jeanette realised two things: “One, only the things inside us are ours -- I can memorise them! And then I thought, I CAN WRITE MY OWN!”\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E“It’s about the place we make in our imaginations, because the imagination is where everything begins.”\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003ECould there have been a better send-off for a festival of writers and readers?\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cdiv class=\"separator\" style=\"clear: both;\"\u003E\u003Ca href=\"https:\/\/images-blogger-opensocial.googleusercontent.com\/gadgets\/proxy?url=http%3A%2F%2Fawf.gcdn.nz%2Fimages%2Flogo.png\u0026amp;container=blogger\u0026amp;gadget=a\u0026amp;rewriteMime=image%2F*\" imageanchor=\"1\" style=\"margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;\"\u003E\u003Cimg alt=\"Auckland Writers Festival\" border=\"0\" src=\"http:\/\/awf.gcdn.nz\/images\/logo.png\" height=\"200\" width=\"200\" \/\u003E\u003C\/a\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E"},"link":[{"rel":"replies","type":"application/atom+xml","href":"http:\/\/albooksinthecity.blogspot.com\/feeds\/4408591173270074387\/comments\/default","title":"Post Comments"},{"rel":"replies","type":"text/html","href":"http:\/\/albooksinthecity.blogspot.com\/2016\/05\/auckland-writers-festival-gala-night.html#comment-form","title":"0 Comments"},{"rel":"edit","type":"application/atom+xml","href":"http:\/\/www.blogger.com\/feeds\/2501884760724421053\/posts\/default\/4408591173270074387"},{"rel":"self","type":"application/atom+xml","href":"http:\/\/www.blogger.com\/feeds\/2501884760724421053\/posts\/default\/4408591173270074387"},{"rel":"alternate","type":"text/html","href":"http:\/\/albooksinthecity.blogspot.com\/2016\/05\/auckland-writers-festival-gala-night.html","title":"Auckland Writers Festival Gala Night \"True Stories Told Live\""}],"author":[{"name":{"$t":"Karen Craig"},"uri":{"$t":"http:\/\/www.blogger.com\/profile\/18310967522076681423"},"email":{"$t":"noreply@blogger.com"},"gd$image":{"rel":"http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#thumbnail","width":"23","height":"32","src":"http:\/\/4.bp.blogspot.com\/-WaLn2rFYxqE\/UNvHlimMvBI\/AAAAAAAAABY\/ceYnAw1lZEk\/s220\/The%2BLibrarian.jpg"}}],"thr$total":{"$t":"0"}}]}});