The Mighty Queens of Freeville

"Yes, I thought we should have some inspiring mothers! Amy Dickinson is the person who took over for an American columnist named Anne Landers, who wrote a hugely popular advice column for the Chicago Tribune. Now the column is called ‘Ask Amy’. Amy was a dauntless daughter too, but her conflict came when she got married to her college boyfriend and had a child and moved to London, where the marriage disintegrated — he just walked out one day. The memoir is about what it was like to suddenly become a single parent. Amy and her daughter lived in Washington DC, but the rest of her family was in this one little town in upstate New York called Freeville, and she eventually buys a house there as well. Her Freeville family is made up predominantly of women — her mother, her aunt, her sisters. The women were the strong part of the family, they were the people she could always rely upon and who helped her to raise her daughter. They help her to survive the broken marriage so she could go on with her life, eventually winning a nation-wide competition to succeed Ann Landers. It’s an engaging, uplifting story, very well-written. “None of the women in these memoirs are victims, they all meet their problems head on.” Still, to this day, all the women in Amy’s family meet in a diner once a week in their small town to have breakfast and discuss their lives. I think that’s terrific, that’s a side of family that’s wonderful. In this book Amy’s father had also walked away from the marriage, so her mother had been a single parent too. In Ivana’s case, she never knew who her father was, and in Wendy’s case her father died while she was still a child and she was left with her stepmother. So all of the worlds depicted in these memoirs are very feminine! In Catherine de’ Medici’s case, many of the older men who were her political opponents were killed in the First War of Religion. They left behind sons, but the boys were all young. Even at the time of the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre Catherine was still basically presiding over a court of college-age kids. It took until they were in their early thirties for this second generation to grow up enough to actually become a political force, a viable political opposition. Until then Catherine benefitted from having a bunch of young people around her. All those hormones — they were easy to divert and control, especially with sex. She got rid of the one father figure, Admiral Coligny, who opposed her. That’s what the Massacre was partly about. So I don’t think of the court of France as having a lot of serious male figures. The women were more powerful at that time."