He credits his mother Monica (herself the patron saint of mothers) with having been the force guiding him back to faith.
Readers of Augustine’s seminal book Confessions know that as a boy Augustine famously did the same thing, stealing a load of pears with his friends simply to enjoy the wrongdoing. In the novel, August tells us that his mother’s name was Monica, and that his family was excommunicated from the colony when he was a child, he thought at the time for a sinful act he committed: stealing pears. The terrific new novel Women Talking asks what justice looks like in the post-#MeToo age
That has ramifications for the movie, though an Augustinian thread still binds them together. In the film, August Epp and the conversations remain, but this reference is gone. Augustine, who is mirrored in the book’s narrator, August Epp, as well as in the women’s conversations about the flow of time, the nature of memory, the meaning of faith, and more that feel drawn out of Augustinian thought. The novel’s explicit backbone has to do with a figure from ancient Christian history: St.
Yet, reading the novel closely reveals some extra layers - layers that disappear in the movie. It’s a skillfully made, conversation-forward movie that unpacks various ways women have responded to violence and abuse over centuries and across the world: living with subjugation, fighting it, fleeing it, or trying to reform society from within. With a cast that includes Rooney Mara, Jessie Buckley, Claire Foy, Ben Whishaw, and Frances McDormand (in a tiny but thematically crucial role), she tells a story that’s about learning to unlearn oppression, about embracing freedom after violence. That it was initially released in 2018 - less than a year after the #MeToo hashtag became a movement and a byword - certainly adds to that reading.įor the film, writer and director Sarah Polley, who has written recently about her own experiences with destructive behavior by men, did what every good adaptation should do and found her version of the story inside of the original. The resulting novel has often been taken as a cry of desperate defiance, in a metaphorical sense for the struggles of women everywhere, whether or not they’re from an oppressively patriarchal religious community.
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