: Ainslie Hogarth
: Normal Women
: Atlantic Books
: 9781805460053
: 1
: CHF 6.20
:
: Erzählende Literatur
: English
: 320
: Wasserzeichen
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
New mother Dani has a lot going on. She's just moved back to her hometown, where her father was once known as the Garbage King; she's fed up of not being a manicure-sporting, perfectly coiffed Normal Woman; and most of all, she's worried that her seemingly healthy husband, Clark, will drop dead, leaving her and her new baby Lotte destitute. And then Dani discovers The Temple. Ostensibly a yoga center, The Temple and its guardian, Renata, are committed to helping people reach their full potential. And if that sometimes requires sex work, so be it. Finally, Dani has found something she could be good at, even great at - meaningful work that will protect her and Lotte from poverty, and provide true economic independence from Clark. But just as she's preparing to embrace this opportunity, Renata disappears, leaving Dani to step into another role entirely - detective. Darkly comic, sharply witty and fiercely smart, Normal Women asks how our societies truly value female labour - and what independence really means.

Ainslie Hogarth is the author of four novels, including Motherthing, a New York Times Best Book of 2022. She lives in Canada with her husband, kids, and little dog.

2


THEY’D BEEN LIVING in the city when they found out Dani was pregnant. A condo: one bedroom, plus a pitiful, windowless den, and a whole closet taken up by a washing machine and a dryer. They looked at a few houses in their neighborhood and beyond, almost all of them near dangerously run-down, hastily disguised with fresh paint and pot lights and still well out of their price range. They decided to revisit the matter of their inadequate housingafter the baby was born. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad having an infant in a seven-hundred-square-foot sock drawer, sixty feet in the air.

“We’ll make it work!” Clark declared, with suspicious optimism. Almost as though he’d already known about the promotion he announced six months later. The real estate development company he worked for was opening a new office. In Metcalf, of all places. Dani’s hometown. An area positivelybooming thanks to the grand reopening of the Silver Waste Management Corporation (now known as the Silver Waste ManagementCampus, or SWMC around town), where innovative approaches to managing garbage had attracted a haughty crowd of environmental consultancies, AI think tanks, and tech start-ups, which, all together, began to resemble what people like Clark called ahub.

Naturally, the coffee shops appeared first. With a hermit crab’s entitlement, they began occupying the criminally small cubbyholes that developers like Clark carved from crumbling strips of brick storefront. They sold cortados in short brown cups and hot new literary fiction and austere notebooks and expensive espresso machines that would collect dust on the counters of hectic businessmen, checking their teeth for sesame seeds in the chrome dash before zipping out the door to grab a cortado before work.

And then there were the taco joints with takeout windows and vegan carnitas, where you could buy a jar of homemade salsa for $10, queso for $12.

And that pizza place with the graffiti walls and COWABUNGA signature pie to appeal to the nostalgic millennials, the former Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fans spending a fortune on real estate and nacho dips.

It was Dani’s father who’d started the original Silver Waste Management Corporation. Daniel “DJ” Silver, the Garbage King of Metcalf, even back then a sizeable kingdom of waste-processing innovation. At one time he employed almost the entire town, made more money than any single man could know what to do with or spend in his life. He sponsored Little League teams and bought de