Tille Olsen’s Tell Me a Riddle, Requa I, and other stories

Our September 9, 2024 Book Group discussed Tillie Olsen’s Tell Me A Riddle, a collection of four short stories first published in a slim book in 1927. All four stories were featured in Best American Short Stories, in the year each was first published in a literary magazine. The title story was awarded the O. Henry Award in 1961 for best American short story. The group had read Tillie Olsen’s short story “I Stand Here Ironing,” before, and were excited that a member suggested this collection as a chance to read more of her work.

Let me digress a bit here to describe how the book list selection process has evolved. I chose the selections initially, drawing on stories assembled in my Book of Old Ladies that had been favorites in my courses at Mills College. We maintained the theme, focusing on “women of a certain age” as the main characters. 

Eventually the entire group participated  in proposing books, pitching them and then taking a vote. We considered broadening the theme, and read several books by men, opening the genre to include essay collections by Ursula LeGuin and Ann Patchett, and then returned to our initial theme of old women but maintained the inclusion of essays and memoirs. 

We now limit recommendations to two per member and then vote, trying to select one from each pairing. Sometimes several members agree on a single book, and reduce the list prior to a final vote. Then I create the order of books, taking into consideration length and topic. We read or listen to the longest books over the lengthy break between series. 

We have also changed our discussion format. Initially I assembled a list of open-ended questions and led discussion. Later, various members took turns creating the questions and leading the discussions. Now we each show up with an observation or a question, usually sharing a few sentences from the text that either delighted or confused us.

Back to Tell Me a Riddle. In advance of the discussion, I wrote a bit about my responses to the stories, and my connections to and responses to Tillie Olsen. Tille Olsen’s writing introduced me to many writers of what we began to call Working Class Literature;  the Feminist Press began to publish some of the then out of print works she brought to light. When I was a student in UC Berkeley’s graduate program.  I invited her to a graduate course on California Women Writers, where her work was not included.  Later, I  invited her to read aloud “I Stand Here Ironing” at Mills. Olsen reminded me a little of my mother, also an Olsen, also a working class woman, a maid, raised to be a wife and mother, writing poetry on the backs of envelopes and grocery receipts. In Silences, Olsen accounts for the years between her literary outputs: “She did not write for a very simple reason: A day has 24 hours. For 20 years she had no time, no energy and none of the money that would have bought both.” Both Tillie Olsen’s life and my mother’s contrasted starkly with university culture, and after meeting Tillie Olsen I wanted my Mills students, especially those first generation students like me, to be encouraged to write their untold stories. 

In our group, everyone had much to offer about their own connections to Olsen’s work. A librarian in the group considered the implications of  the subject headings under which the collection is listed  in library’s catalogs. Another member who was familiar with the names Jack and Tillie Olsen from her family’s connections with the Longshoremen Union  told us about the housing cooperative Tillie Olsen and her husband helped establish in the Western Addition. Our discussion included close analysis of the prose and general discussions of class and race, of mothers and daughters, of the “sorting” that occurs among children as they move into middle school. We all learned something beyond our own initial reading, and it was one of the richest discussions we have had.

Several people read the most recently published version from the University of Nebraska  Press that includes not only the 4 stories but also a longer piece of writing, Requa, perhaps her most experimental work, some of her political articles, and several wonderful critical essays by family members, daughters Laurie Olsen and Julie Olsen Edwards and a stellar introduction by her granddaughter, Dr. Rebekah Edwards, a long time visiting professor at Mills as well as an alum and a dear friend of my daughter, Kirsten. I highly recommend reading Tillie Olsen’s work, and if you can, reading this edition.

Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse

Our second August discussion focused on a book I recommended because it is my favorite novel by Virginia Woolf: To the Lighthouse (1927). 

While it is less than half the length of The Stone Diaries, it is a lyric and non linear novel, an early example of a stream of consciousness narrative. After completing  Carol Shield’s fictional account of the multiple decades of Daisy Goodwill’s life, we read Virginia Woolf’s fictional account of the Ramsays based closely on her parents, particularly Julia Stephens, in which the life is squeezed into an account of a single day, a death recorded in parentheses, and a rendering of the ways in which Mrs. Ramsay’s legacy lingers in Lily’s mind. Both novels confront the reader with those not so simple questions:  What is the meaning of a life? And what does it mean to “know” another person?

To the Lighthouse is a book in three parts, in three movements. All of it is laid at the Summer home of an English family named Ramsay in the Hebrides, the first portion occupying an afternoon and evening, the second portion constituting an interlude of ten years during which the house remains unoccupied, the third portion occupying a morning at the end of these ten years. The Ramsays are a middle-aged couple, when the book opens, with eight children, who have with them at their Summer place about half a dozen friends including the young unmarried artist Lily Briscoe. Woolf uses the figures of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay as the archetypal marriage, and the eccentric unmarried artist, Lily Briscoe, to engage ideas about gender relations, marriage, war, home, meaning, truth. Woolf uses stream of consciousness—a style of writing meant to mimic the way thoughts flow through people’s minds.

Most of the books we choose are plot driven, moving through time in a linear fashion, chapter by chapter, often with one point of view, or sometimes a sequence of chapters is narrated by separate characters. In contrast, Woolf’s stream of consciousness moves inside and outside characters’ heads, forward and backward in time, and the vivid prose and imagery is similar to that of poetry. 

I began receiving emails from members who were struggling to finish the novel. I shared notes from my teaching days, introducing stream of consciousness and some critical reflections on  the novel, hoping to convince everyone to love one of my favorite books. While I did not convert everyone to Woolf, the discussion was animated, and we all appreciated hearing each person’s remarks. 

Coming away from the novel, we were left with its essential question:  What is the meaning of life? Mrs. Ramsay repeatedly asks the question in Part I, and in Part III, trying to finish her painting of Mrs. Ramsay, Lily echoes it:  

What is the meaning of life? ‘That was all–a  simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark;…Mrs. Ramsay saying, “Life stand still here”….In the midst of chaos there was hope; this eternal passing and flowing.

As Lily ponders the impossibility of ever really knowing another person, she thinks of the habit we all have of making up scenes about others based on bits and pieces  “what we call knowing people,” and realizes there are no guides to answer the question about life’s meaning, but rather that “so much depends upon distance: whether people are near us or far from us….” 

As Lily continues and eventually completes her painting, her vision of Mrs. Ramsay, she thinks:  “One wanted fifty pairs of eyes to see with…Fifty pairs of eyes were not enough to get round that one woman with” and as Lily finishes her canvas with a single brush stroke, Woolf ends the novel with Lily’s words “I have had my vision.”

Click For Book List 2020-2024

 Like many authors who published books in 2020 and as a professor for over 42 years, I’m particularly looking forward to sharing my work and connecting with readers in person next Saturday (you can RSVP here). The video above is from one of the first in-person readings I gave in November 2023 since The Book of Old Ladies was published.