There wasn't much to be said for the place, really, but it had a roof over it and a door which locked from the inside, which was all I cared about just then. I didn't even bother to take in the details -- they were pretty sordid, but I didn't notice them so they didn't depress me; perhaps because I was already at rock-bottom.
Call it a slump. A reading slump? A blogging slump? A blogging about reading slump? It feels the former. For a few months I've been 'auditioning' books, or rather skimming (i.e. reading about four chapters or hitting the 40% mark on my Kindle), trying to find a book to latch onto, that ~calls~ to me. I'm usually not this picky, not this indecisive, or take this long to read anything, but this year began...confused. Freak snowstorms, insurrections, vaccination drama, personal illnesses...my body and mind just can't settle this year as I cautiously emerge from a quarantined cave....thus I'm distracted, slumping along, looking for lit stimulation.
To get back in the groove of reading (and blogging about said reading), I decided to keep it simple. Back to a 'simpler' time, a decade ago, back when I first joined GoodReads (!) and browse the earliest additions to my e-bookshelves. Lynne Reid-Banks' The L-Shaped Room was one of the first books I added to my to-reads list when I joined. Reasons? I had just seen the 1962 film, starring Leslie Caron and Brock Peters, and wanted to read the source material. Simple. At the time, I know I was intrigued that British author Lynne Reid-Banks wrote it considering she wrote The Indian in the Cupboard series, which I read eons ago in elementary school. It always interests me when authors genre hopscotch throughout their careers, and this was quite the hop.
The L-Shaped Room has very little in common with the Cupboard series (well, except for its focus on main characters in confined domains...). Published prior to sixties getting its swing on, The L-Shaped Room was a runaway hit, the starting point for author Reid-Banks' writing career, and a memorable addition to the "kitchen sink" realism genre. "Sink" tales tackled the 'taboo' topics concerning the working class poor, and an emerging counter-culture of young British angst at the close of the 1950s (this a much more gracious generational cultural acknowledgment than the usual lambasts us Millennials get...). For its time The L-Shaped Room was quite a groundbreaking narrative as it challenged conventional ideals of womanhood, sexuality, and childbirth, broadening the conversations when most spoke of them in hushed tones. Further diverging was its "kitchen sink" voice. Here we're not aware of the thoughts of the usual angst-riddled guy, but rather a young angsty girl --- an unmarried-pregnant-after-her-first-sexual-encounter angsty girl --- a voice that crackles on the pages with all the frustration, fear, regret, and uncertainty in its timbre.
While today we barely bat an eye over a teenaged/unmarried young girl being pregnant (this unless there was some nefarious, criminal reason why she is with child...) as we have celebrities procreating without bling on the ring finger, and have reality TV shows revolving around the daily drama of teenage mothers, the stigma of rearing a child solo as a woman was often a source of stringent shame and judgement in the mid-20th Century. It was something that you just did not flaunt. To shield such 'shame', a lot of single mothers pretended to be married or widowed. Our heroine Jane plays a similar act, and it's how she ends up in the l-shaped room, as it's the one place that can swallow her secret wholly.
