Re: CoL49 group reading ch6 - then there’s this

[Mark Kohut]

The Crying of Lot 49 is one of the earliest feminist masterpieces of the
second half of the 20th Century...re; this para

On Sun, Aug 4, 2024 at 5:09 PM Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
wrote:

> They say it’s different every time you read a great story. I came into this
> reading thinking that Oedipa had slept with at least one other person
> besides Metzger, but it doesn’t seem she did.
>
> I also never noticed this paragraph before:
>
> “Waves of nausea, lasting five to ten minutes, would strike her at random,
> cause her deep misery, then vanish as if they had never been. There were
> headaches, nightmares, menstrual pains. One day she drove into L.A., picked
> a doctor at random from the phone book, went to her, told her she thought
> she was pregnant. They arranged for tests. Oedipa gave her name as Grace
> Bortz and didn’t show up for her next appointment.”
>
>
>
>
>  She picked a female doctor, that’s interesting, & in the early ‘60s
> would’ve been slim pickin’s.
> https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7784804/
>
>
> Waves of nausea could be morning sickness though not just in the morning,
> but menstrual pains? That’s interesting and ambiguous.
>
> Good Housekeeping says they can occur in the absence of a period:
> https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/health/a41340417/cramps-but-no-period/
>
>
>
> Giving her name as Grace Bortz - that’s also interesting. Almost as if a
> paucity of identity-affirming relationships in her own name has driven her
> to try to take on Grace Bortz’s.
>
> One good reason for not showing up for a next appointment would be the
> arrival of her period.
> But that’s not specified explicitly.
>
> - when she gets drunk and drives, probably that shows she knows she’s not
> pregnant?
> --
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>