In “Wake, Siren,” Ovid’s women emerge as unique individuals, fully formed and very often full of anger.
Nina MacLaughlin’s new book, Wake, Siren: Ovid Resung, began as a series of writing exercises. Like countless authors before her—not to mention poets, playwrights, and visual artists—MacLaughlin turned to Ovid’s Metamorphoses for inspiration. Ovid’s stories are tales of transformation—but they are also, in many instances, narratives of assault. The female figures at the center of these stories are often distinguished primarily by how they are violated and robbed of agency by the gods, rather than who they really are. In MacLaughlin’s retellings, though, these nymphs and human women describe their own experiences in their own words. Sometimes MacLaughlin meets her characters where she finds them—Arachne at her warp-weighted loom, Callisto in an ancient forest. Sometimes she envisions them in the present day; Galatea, for instance, faints in the middle of a 7-Eleven because she’s on a cleansing fast. But whatever the setting, these figures emerge as unique individuals, fully formed and very often full of anger.
MacLaughlin is currently a books columnist at the Boston Globe, and her work has appeared in The Paris Review Daily and The Believer. Her first book, Hammer Head: The Making of a Carpenter, is a memoir about her decision to take her professional life in a decidedly unexpected direction. When I reached the author by phone, we took a moment to compare notes on the weather—she was enjoying a gray day in Massachusetts; I was feeling the first stirrings of Seasonal Affective Disorder in Michigan—before we started talking about pissed-off women of the Classical period and what they can tell us today.
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