Burning of the Marriage Hat by Margaret Benshoof-Holler
I just read a whole book today – pulled it out of my box of signed books from the 2007 Book Expo. Burning of the Marriage Hat is an odd sort of book. It’s a novel, but doesn’t feel like one. It feels more like a memoir, and I suppose that’s what the author intended.
The main character in the book is Wyoming, and the mind set of the upper plains and small-town America on the dry and windblown northern plains. Okay, the narrator is actually a woman named Katherine, one of four daughters of an abusive marriage, and the family scapegoat. The story is her journey trying to find out the truth about the women in her family, and simultaneously trying to figure out her own life, and her relationship with Cynthia, the daughter she was forced to give up for adoption when, in 1966, she was an unmarried pregnant teenager. She is driving over much of the book to the fictional town of Brown Rock, and worries about the cowboy in the pickup truck who seems to be following her. But the feel of the terrain is ever-present.
Wyoming was the earliest state to give voting rights to women, in an effort to draw more women to move there, but Katherine believes not only did it not work then, but that many of the men of Wyoming today don’t understand women and how to relate to them. It certainly holds true for her own father, and from all reports to her grandfather, who is rumored to have killed her grandmother Naomi when her father was a child.
Bothered by visits from Naomi’s ghost, Katherine travels to the town in Wyoming where Naomi lived and died. The more she learns of her grandparents and their relationships, the abuse and attitudes of the people, the more she wonders how her own choices in life are a result of her family’s difficult and tragic history.
Unlike most novels, there is no neat, tidy ending, just an ending. And in the back is a list of other works on women’s rights, domestic violence and other relevant topics. That’s the only time the book feels like a “Women’s Issues” book – otherwise, it feels like a memoir of a life still unfolding. There’s not a lot of closure, or a big dramatic climax, just a steady unfolding of events and discoveries.
Doesn’t make me want to move to Wyoming, though.