Fiction
What It Feels Like for a Girl
by Eia Uus
The female body stands at the core of Eia Uus’s newest novel. It is a book that speaks to women and may irritate many men, as the author states frank, unvarnished truths about what life is like for a woman in our masculine world. At the same time, Uus does not clearly demarcate gender roles. The story is set in motion by a party at which the narrator Lilian, still reeling from losing her job, meets a woman close to half her age – Mona. Inexplicably, Mona stirs up erotic feelings in Lilian which gradually swell into nearly oppressive maternal instincts – or, perhaps, a selfish desire to sculpt a socially-acceptable companion for herself. Uus’s novel would be a modern Lolita or Pygmalion, were its mission not divergent and its social spectrum less expansive. Worked into the story are attractive and enterprising women’s attempts to break through the glass ceiling in the traditionally male-dominated world of PR and politics. It is a world that ingrains in women from a very young age the notion that they are inadequate. Accounts of sexual harassment inflicted upon the protagonist as a girl tend to recur, but there can never be too many of those stories – who has ever heard of a woman who knows no other woman who has suffered from harassment? That being said, the author’s storytelling style is in no way piteous or depressing – on the contrary, Uus’s book is written in a light, engaging manner; you could even say with zest. It is intimate, erotically charged, and at the same time grittily honest and acute. What It Feels Like for a Girl isn’t an enervated individual’s personal drama, but rather a concentrated portrait of a woman striving to understand the reactions which the female body provokes. It tells the untold stories of so many women – stories that have been buried beneath the feelings of guilt and shame that society forces upon them. Uus’s novel has sparked heated debates on a variety of topics in Estonia and contains ample material for many more.
