Daily Rituals: Women at Work

by Mason Currey Narrated by January LaVoy, Michael Crouch

Overview

More of Mason Currey's irresistible Daily Rituals, this time exploring the daily obstacles and rituals of women who are artists--painters, composers, sculptors, scientists, filmmakers, and performers. We see how these brilliant minds get to work, the choices they have to make: rebuffing convention, stealing (or secreting away) time from the pull of husbands, wives, children, obligations, in order to create their creations.

From those who are the masters of their craft (Eudora Welty, Lynn Fontanne, Penelope Fitzgerald, Marie Curie) to those who were recognized in a burst of acclaim (Lorraine Hansberry, Zadie Smith) . . . from Clara Schumann and Shirley Jackson, carving out small amounts of time from family life, to Isadora Duncan and Agnes Martin, rejecting the demands of domesticity, Currey shows us the large and small (and abiding) choices these women made--and continue to make--for their art: Isak Dinesen, "I promised the Devil my soul, and in return he promised me that everything I was going to experience would be turned into tales," Dinesen subsisting on oysters and Champagne but also amphetamines, which gave her the overdrive she required . . . And the rituals (daily and otherwise) that guide these artists: Isabel Allende starting a new book only on January 8th . . . Hilary Mantel taking a shower to combat writers' block ("I am the cleanest person I know") . . . Tallulah Bankhead coping with her three phobias (hating to go to bed, hating to get up, and hating to be alone), which, could she "mute them," would make her life "as slick as a sonnet, but as dull as ditch water" . . . Lillian Hellman chain-smoking three packs of cigarettes and drinking twenty cups of coffee a day--and, after milking the cow and cleaning the barn, writing out of "elation, depression, hope" ("That is the exact order. Hope sets in toward nightfall. That's when you tell yourself that you're going to be better the next time, so help you God.") . . . Diane Arbus, doing what "gnaws at" her . . . Colette, locked in her writing room by her first husband, Henry Gauthier-Villars (nom de plume: Willy) and not being "let out" until completing her daily quota (she wrote five pages a day and threw away the fifth). Colette later said, "A prison is one of the best workshops" . . . Jessye Norman disdaining routines or rituals of any kind, seeing them as "a crutch" . . . and Octavia Butler writing every day no matter what ("screw inspiration").
**** Germaine de Staël . . . Elizabeth Barrett Browning . . . George Eliot . . . Edith Wharton . . . Virginia Woolf . . . Edna Ferber . . . Doris Lessing . . . Pina Bausch . . . Frida Kahlo . . . Marguerite Duras . . . Helen Frankenthaler . . . Patti Smith, and 131 more--on their daily routines, superstitions, fears, eating (and drinking) habits, and other finely (and not so finely) calibrated rituals that help summon up willpower and self-discipline, keeping themselves afloat with optimism and fight, as they create (and avoid creating) their creations.

Editorial Reviews

MARCH 2019 - AudioFile

Narrator January LaVoy uses her ample vocal talents to deliver powerful stories of mostly well-known female artists and performers, specifically, how these women managed their day-to-day lives while keeping their creative sides alive and thriving. These often emotional stories and brief biographies are strengthened by LaVoy’s careful narration. Her pacing captures the humor in some of the anecdotes, and she moves just as smoothly through the tragic sections. Overall, LaVoy sounds like a good friend telling stories about people she knows personally. This inspirational collection is a great pick-me-up for listeners who feel that their daily tasks interfere with leading a creative life. V.B. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

Publishers Weekly

01/28/2019

In Currey’s previous Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, only 27 of the 161 profiles were of women; as a corrective in this fascinating sequel, Currey explains, he offers 143 vibrant depictions of the routines of creative women, living and dead, drawn from letters and diaries. Photographer Margaret Bourke-White was a morning person (“The world is all fresh and new then”); actress Tallulah Bankhead prayed on opening nights (“Dear God, don’t let me make a fool of myself”); artist Alice Neel was a “lifelong shoplifter”; Margaret Mitchell depended on Johnnie Walker, Frida Kahlo on Demerol. Currey quotes women on their men, from the helpful (George Eliot’s and Elizabeth Bishop’s Georges) to the hindering (choreographer Agnes de Mille’s unfaithful husband); on their women (Rosa Bonheur’s and Romaine Brooks’s Natalies); and their children (Ruth Asawa, six; Anne Bradstreet, eight; writers Eudora Welty and Virginia Woolf, none). He includes writers (Harriet Jacobs), sculptors (Harriet Hosmer, Niki de Saint Phalle), filmmakers (Jane Campion, Agnes Varda), composers (Charlotte Bray, Julia Wolfe), journalists (Eleanor Roosevelt, Dorothy Thompson), and video artists (Joan Jonas). He covers women who succeeded young (writer Françoise Sagan, 18) and old (artist Alma Thomas, 80). Currey’s encyclopedic tour respectfully and entertainingly addresses Colette’s question about George Sand: “How the devil did she manage?” Agent: Meg Thompson, Thompson Literary Agency. (Mar.)

From the Publisher

"This outstanding compendium of women artists at work is an admirably succinct portrait of some distinctly uncommon lives. It is also consistently entertaining and full of insights."

—Meryle Secrest

MARCH 2019 - AudioFile

Narrator January LaVoy uses her ample vocal talents to deliver powerful stories of mostly well-known female artists and performers, specifically, how these women managed their day-to-day lives while keeping their creative sides alive and thriving. These often emotional stories and brief biographies are strengthened by LaVoy’s careful narration. Her pacing captures the humor in some of the anecdotes, and she moves just as smoothly through the tragic sections. Overall, LaVoy sounds like a good friend telling stories about people she knows personally. This inspirational collection is a great pick-me-up for listeners who feel that their daily tasks interfere with leading a creative life. V.B. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171793074
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	03/05/2019
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Nearly every weekday morning for a year and a half, I got up at 5:30, brushed my teeth, made a cup of coffee, and sat down to write about how some of the greatest minds of the past four hundred years approached this exact same task— that is, how they made the time each day to do their best work, how they organized their schedules in order to be creative and productive. By writing about the admittedly mundane details of my subjects’ daily lives— when they slept and ate and worked and worried— I hoped to provide a novel angle on their personalities and careers, to sketch entertaining, small- bore portraits of the artist as a creature of habit. “Tell me what you eat, and I shall tell you what you are,” the French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin once wrote. I say, tell me what time you eat, and whether you take a nap afterward.
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Daily Rituals, Women at Work"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Mason Currey.
Excerpted by permission of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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