girl woman other essay

“Girl, Woman, Other” Illuminates the Everyday Lives of Black British Women

Bernardine Evaristo’s Booker-winning novel is challenging the overall whiteness of the British canon

Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other depicts the complexities of identity through the interconnected stories of twelve Black British women, painting a portrait of the state of contemporary Britain that also examines the legacy of Britain’s colonial history in Africa and the Caribbean. Though Black women are not a monolith, there is something about the shared experience of a certain collection of people who identify together in gender-related experiences and the results of coming from places where colonialism—from the standpoint of the colonized and the colonizer—played an importance on how your skin color dictates how others treat you. For an African American woman who has read many British writers, reading Girl, Woman, Other was the first time I felt any affinity to such authors and their works. 

It was not surprising to me that this book won the 2019 Booker Prize. Although what was surprising is that Bernardine Evaristo is the first Black woman to receive the literary honor. Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University London, Evaristo has written eight books that cross multiple genres and styles. Evident in Girl, Woman, Othe r is Evaristo’s willingness to play with style, voice, and lyricism. I spoke with Evaristo with an “American Black woman interviews British Black woman” kind of vibe. We spoke about Girl, Woman, Other with the context of understanding it from and for a Black American reader, the similarities and differences between American and British Blackness and Black womanhood, specifically, and the depiction of such in literature.

Tyrese L Coleman: I loved this book so much and found it hard to put down. When I told a white woman I met that I would be interviewing you, she said to me that she was surprised you won the Booker Prize but when I read Girl, Woman, Other , I knew exactly why you won the Booker Prize. I also read where a BBC anchor referred to you as “another author ” when discussing the shared award with Margaret Atwood. Both incidents made me wonder whether or not you have noticed a racial and/or gender divide in the book’s criticism and, specifically, the reaction to you winning the award. If so, why do you think that is?

Bernardine Evaristo : I’m glad you enjoyed the novel so much. I’ve had very little feedback from individual American readers, mainly because the novel came out much later there. You don’t say whether the woman mentioned had read the novel or not—which makes a difference. People have opinions on the Booker Prize shortlists and winners without actually having read all the books. Or they’ve read one and decided that book is their favorite, without knowing anything about the competition. I’ve had incredibly positive responses from all kinds of readers to Girl, Woman, Other and since winning the Booker, the novel has gone out into the world to land in the laps of readers who wouldn’t usually read my work, even if they came across it. In the U.K. the main reading market is older and female, but since winning the prize my events have also been packed with men, often elderly men, some of whom have already read the book and loved it. I find this incredibly reassuring in the sense that they are responding to the humanity in my work and that they have encountered my twelve primarily Black British women and found them interesting and perhaps, even, relatable. We are all human beings, after all, with shared emotional drivers.

TLC: As an American who is slightly an anglophile (meaning, I watch a significant amount of British television and movies and am specifically obsessed with The Crown ), Girl, Woman, Other felt familiar to me. Not because of what I think I know about what it means to be English, but rather what I know about what it means to be a Black woman. I was drawn to those moments of knowing that feel unique to Black womanhood, such as Carole’s constant respectability performance as she is surrounded by white people daily, especially white men, and her struggle to outperform just to remain equal. 

I find myself and I see other Black women always saying, “we aren’t a monolith,” but we do have shared and relatable experiences. What were you hoping to say about the shared experience of Black women?

BE : As Black women in the U.K. and U.S., we will share certain experiences in that we are living in societies where we are racialized and where women are also discriminated against. My novel explores many women, one of whom is non-binary, from multiple perspectives, and this includes experiences of queer and straight sexuality, different classes, occupations, family set-ups, and cultural backgrounds, migration histories, rural and metropolitan women, and women of every generation through to a nonagenarian, and so on. My aim was to create as many stories as I could about Black British women and in so doing to counteract our invisibility in literature to present my characters as complex, flawed, and very real beings. All of these areas lattice across the text, so that while the novel is specific to individual narratives, there are so many points of connection for the reader, especially for Black women readers, and women of color more generally. 

TLC: What are some similarities and differences between American and British Blackness and Black womanhood as they are depicted in literature, specifically?

BE: I don’t claim to be an expert on this and I’d hate to generalize, but I can talk more widely about the differences between the U.K. Black experience and its American counterpart. The recorded history of Black Britain goes back to the Roman occupation of two thousand years ago (something I wrote about in my 2001 novel, The Emperor’s Babe and picks up in a big way from the 16th century, but we don’t have Black ancestry here with unbroken lineage beyond the 12th century.

I can count the number of Black British women novelists publishing today on two hands.

Most people of color in the U.K. arrived post-WWII so our lived history is very recent compared to America’s history of four hundred plus years of African Americans. We are also a small minority in terms of race in this country. There are about 2 million people of African descent here, as opposed to some 40 million in the U.S. This is reflected in our literature, with little of it and most of which was very male-dominated until the 90s, with Black women putting in rare appearances, most notably in the works of Nigerian novelist, Buchi Emecheta, who migrated to the U.K. in the 60s.

It’s really only in the past 20 years that we’ve seen more Black female presence in U.K. literature, but certainly not enough of it. I can count the number of Black British women novelists publishing today on two hands. The same can’t be said for the U.S. In the 90s young Black British women writers were writing similarly young protagonists in coming-of-age novels. Most of those writers disappeared. Since then we’ve had a few writers writing Black female protagonists who are still mainly young, also urban and contemporary. African American women’s fiction and literature—which so inspired my younger self—far outperforms our own production here in the U.K. in terms of the quantity of this work. One of my aims with Girl, Woman, Other was to break through these limitations. I think any wider comparison with the U.S. will require something of an academic thesis.

TLC: In your interview with the New York Times , you talk about writing about the African diaspora. Girl, Woman, Other , are stories about womxn whose parents or grandparents immigrated or worked in England in the 19th and 20th centuries. Dominique was the only character where it was mentioned that her ancestry could be traced back to slavery and Hattie’s lineage included slave traders, but otherwise, that part of the diaspora is not explored very much. 

Coming from an American perspective where so much of our literature involves slavery, even when it is about other aspects of the diaspora, I am curious about your decision not to touch heavily upon the impact of slavery for Black British people—slavery in England and the slave trade outside of it involving the English. 

BE: I’m not sure why my novel should draw more on the slave trade when it’s not a novel looking that deeply into British history. And if there’s one aspect of Black British history that continues to be mined in all media, it’s the transatlantic slave trade, to the extent that it alone is synonymous with our history, even though, as I said earlier, our history goes much deeper. My novel is about British women living in the 20th and 21st centuries, and it delves to some extent into their ancestry but it’s touch on slavery is light, as it should be. Britain was a major player in the transatlantic slave trade but there weren’t that many slaves living in the U.K., rather they were in the West Indies. Some of the women in my novel have Caribbean origins and some have direct African origins. Many, many writers continue to explore the slave trade and indeed my own 2008 novel, Blonde Roots , is all about slavery—a satirical inversion of this slave trade where Africans enslave Europeans. It’s very much an indictment of Britain’s involvement in the slave trade. My focus with Girl, Woman, Other was to explore so many more areas of our lives that go under the radar.  

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Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo review – joy as well as struggle

The interconnected stories of a group of black British women raise timeless questions about feminism and race

B lack women’s stories have long been misread as something they are not. It is hard to write fiction without being asked: is this story about you? And does this singular tale represent the collective black female experience? Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other turns a subtle side-eye to both questions, and makes answering them an impossible task.

Her eighth novel follows 12 characters, most of them black British women, moving through the world in different decades and learning how to be. Each character has a chapter; within the chapters their lives overlap, but their experiences, backgrounds and choices could not be more different. There’s Amma, a lesbian socialist playwright, and non-binary Morgan, who uses the internet to navigate their gender identity – but also Shirley, a teacher who feels alien in Amma’s community, and Winsome, a bride who has arrived from Barbados to an unhappy marriage. Many of the characters are close – friends, relatives or lovers – while others simply visit the same theatre on the same night, or argue with each other on Twitter.

Living within a patriarchal society presents challenges that unite many of us. Amma is concerned with what it means to be politically pure, or to “sell out”, while another character, Carole, chases mainstream success in the world of banking. Other questions raised in the novel feel urgent yet timeless: how can a woman incorporate a relationship with a man into her feminist life? Should we show anger towards those who “get it wrong” – even if from a position of ignorance? Whose guidance should I follow? That dispensed by my mother, my university, my partner, my peers, my feminist heroes? Which bonds will last?

Feminists have always grappled with certain problems, such as commercialisation: “the media’s obsession with beautiful women is nothing new, look at Gloria, Germaine and Angela in their youth”. Evaristo weaves these struggles into dialogue without reducing her speakers into mouthpieces for a popular debate. Some of her conversations feel naive (who is the “most” privileged, and is there a sliding scale anyway?), but they are nonetheless conversations that many of us have had. Others are contentious – one character creates a trans-exclusionary festival – but they’re tackled sensitively. We are also shown where political discourse can fail us, such as through emotional manipulation in a lesbian relationship: “only a black woman can ever truly love a black woman”.

Evaristo, whose previous books explore heritage, the African diaspora and modern life, wrote these intergenerational stories over a six-year period. There are echoes here of her 2009 verse novel, Lara , with the prose at times feeling more like poetry, stripped of capitalisation and punctuation: “while dancing / for herself / out of it / out of her head / out of her body / feeling it / freeing it / nobody watching”. The pace is tightly controlled, and women’s bodies and the way they’re presented arise again and again as motifs, with details including a sequinned hijab, bare feet, an apron and a string of pearls all imbued with significance.

Each storyline brings the reader round to a position of empathy. The characters are flawed and complex, for example Bummi, the immigrant parent who would rather her child did anything but bring home a white partner; and later, an affair that perhaps represents the worst way one woman can betray another. When each section ends, we leave with a new perspective.

There is no overarching story, but to be racialised as black brings with it some level of connectedness. As a result, there is something unconditional about the relationships here – the protagonists support each other, and are often forgiving and gentle. From finding family through DNA testing, to wanting to mentor other women of colour, to the possibilities offered by safe spaces – by the novel’s close, Evaristo has illustrated the drive for togetherness.

Girl, Woman, Other is about struggle, but it is also about love, joy and imagination. The book culminates with her protagonists – black women of different generations, faiths, classes, politics and heritages, and a few men too – thrown together at a party for a soap opera-style grand finale. Evaristo’s world is not idealised, but there is something uniquely beautiful about it. The core group holding the party together are a non-traditional family – Amma and Roland are queer parents, while Yazz, their formidable, defiant daughter with the unruly afro, bobs about the room. For many readers, it’s not a familiar world – this is a Britain less often depicted in fiction. But that certainly doesn’t mean it’s not a world that is possible, and worth celebrating.

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First published May 2, 2019

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this is about being together

Amma then spent decades on the fringe, a renegade lobbing hand grenades at the establishment that excluded her until the mainstream began to absorb what was once radical and she found herself hopeful of joining it"

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The ‘multicultural zoo’ in Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other (2019)

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• Post published: 17th June 2021
• Post category: Class / Co-education / England / Gender / Pupils / Reviews / Teachers
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This blog was originally written by former SESC Research Associate and continuing SESC collaborator Dr Laura Carter , for the LARCA Gender and Sexuality Studies research group blog at the Université de Paris, where she now works .

Bernardine Evaristo’s 2019 ‘fusion fiction’ [1] novel Girl, Woman, Other introduces several familiar narratives about postwar education in Britain: the ‘golden age’ of the grammar school, the myth of education as a route to social mobility, and the ‘failure’ of the comprehensive school. In each of these cases, Evaristo repositions the narrative by revealing them through the eyes of (mostly) girls and women of colour. In this blog post, I’ll explore the place of the secondary school in Girl, Woman, Other. I’ll also suggest a few things that historians might learn from Evaristo’s fictional, intersectional, and intergenerational perspective on the postwar secondary school.

            Just like in most stories of everyday life set in twentieth-century Britain, school days feature prominently in Girl, Woman, Other . We first catch glimpses of the New Cross girls’ grammar school where Amma and Shirley are the only two black pupils in the 1970s. They forge a lasting connection through this shared experience of schooling, despite the vast personal and political differences that will develop between them. One semi-fictional London secondary school in particular, ‘Peckham School for Boys and Girls’ [2] , is our mooring point as we follow the lives of the interconnected suite of characters in the novel. This Peckham school is the ‘multicultural zoo’ of my title, a racial slur used by teacher Penelope to signify its shift from white working-class uplift to postcolonial, multi-racial education.

            The school is a co-ed comp, where Shirley, first introduced to readers as an ambitious young black teacher, begins her career in the 1980s and where she encounters racist Women’s Libber Penelope, who is already mourning the loss of her 1970s dream for the comprehensive school. It’s also the site of Carole and LaTisha’s troubled school days of the early 2000s, by which point the school is on the brink of failure, plagued by knife violence, drugs, and teen pregnancy. This view across the decades is particularly powerful in driving a key message of Girl, Woman, Other : for this particular set of characters, secondary school is a site of almost universal disappointment.

            This disappointment comes in various forms. Carole finds the strength within herself to move past her horrifying experience of rape and turns to Shirley (by this point known, at best, as the ‘School Dragon’) as a mentor. Carole uses the school exam system to attain upward social mobility first via the University of Oxford and then the City of London. But there is no warm and fuzzy place in her heart for her old school, indeed Carole’s awkward encounter with Shirley at book’s end suggests how plainly functional institutions (and their staff) are in Carole’s self-narrative. As a highly intelligent and highly successful black woman operating in all-white spaces, Carole’s inner drive and well-honed survival tactics lift her out of poverty and trauma, at great personal cost with respect to her Nigerian heritage. This is quite different to the celebrated narrative of the white working class, upwardly-mobile grammar school boy, who returns home to pay his social and cultural capital forward.

            We meet Carole’s one-time friend, LaTisha, also climbing the ladder of social mobility (in her words ‘on the move’), working her way up the management hierarchy in a local supermarket. At their comp, LaTisha was part of what 1970s sociologists would have called the ‘counter-school’ subculture. LaTisha makes some very poor choices, but she is also highly intelligent, evidenced by her precocious, but logical retorts to each ‘senseless’ school rule she encounters. The school fails her too, by presenting her black girl future as a fait accompli . The school has no resources, no energy, no willpower to accommodate LaTisha’s complex social and emotional needs, and she’s unwilling to assimilate to the ‘good girl’ codes like Carole does.

            As we learn from both Penelope and Shirley’s narratives, the social justice mission of the comprehensive school is a faded memory by the 2000s in this corner of South London, and the long-standing racialisation of social problems located in the comprehensive school is a burden that girls like LaTisha must bear at the beginning of the new millennium. Earlier echoes of this shift appear in snippets of LaTisha’s father’s story, a first-generation immigrant pupil from the Caribbean who found himself thrown in the ‘Sin Bin’ for speaking patois (presumably in the 1970s).

            Shirley and Penelope, the two teachers, are also deeply disappointed by the secondary school they work at. For Shirley it’s the educational reforms of the Thatcher governments that curtail her pedagogical freedoms in favour of box ticking and league tables, whilst Penelope sees multiculturalism as a monster that swallowed second-wave feminism whole within the school gates. This shared disappointment leads to a cautious pact between the two women (they are ‘work friends’ according to Penelope), suggesting how age might work to reconcile white and black feminisms. But their alliance isn’t forged in a shared, positive commitment to intersectionality. Instead, the bleak landscape of the late-century, failed comprehensive school in which they both toil as older, disillusioned teachers bridges their cultural divide.

            Racial justice becomes less important to Shirley as she grows older and faces fewer daily micro-aggressions in the staffroom and classroom. At mid-life, she finds personal satisfaction more in the material and emotional spoils of family life, settling for occasional, individual success stories like Carole’s, rather than the structural, political changes she yearned for as a newly-minted teacher. Shirley is essentially a conservative character; she embraces her embourgeoisement and nurtures a little germ of nostalgia for the Butler Act of 1944.

            The intergenerational framing of Girl, Woman, Other brings the racialised and gendered aspects of English comprehensive education between the 1960s and 2010s into sharper focus in ways that are quite helpful to historians to think with. For example, Evaristo strongly foregrounds sexual harassment and sexual violence towards girls by both peers and teachers, an issue that historians might find difficult to reconcile with a still rather fixed narrative of postwar British history in which ‘comprehensivization’ is aligned with progress. Secondly, Penelope’s racist caricature of the school as a ‘multicultural zoo’ signals the rich, discursive history of multiculturalism in British education that remains to be excavated.

            Finally, the black and mixed-race characters found in this book are excellent, if sometimes composite, avatars for thinking about how individuals might have negotiated the mixed ability, co-educational, and multi-racial spaces of the postwar comprehensive school. To succeed, Carole must assimilate and credentialize, LaTisha must fulfil her ‘teen mom’ destiny, and Shirley and Penelope must relinquish their respective social justice missions. This combination of pragmatism, alienation, and a hint of possibility are useful starting points for mapping the social and emotional landscape of the British comprehensive school since the 1960s.

[1] Bernardine Evaristo, ‘Words of Colour’ Waterstones Library Bristol Takeover, 10 March 2020 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mu8Yo6i6VdU].

[2] Possibly modelled on Warwick Park School in Peckham, an 11-16 mixed comprehensive which closed in 2003 and became an academy.

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Girl, Woman, Other

There is something very of this moment about Bernardine Evaristo’s Booker-prize-winning Girl, Woman, Other. It makes so many other books seem old-fashioned and out of touch. One wonders how Literature with a capital L so long got away with the narrowness of its representation. The book makes it seem strange that the richness and variety of experience embodied in and by the stories it chooses to tell hasn’t always been recognised as obviously valuable.

The stories told are of twelve people – as the dust jacket puts it – ‘mostly women, mostly black’ for whom Britain has, in one way or another, been a home. They vary hugely and span intergenerational connections and political divides to include the cantankerous 93-year-old Hattie who has spent her entire life on her farmstead near the Scottish border and voted for Brexit, to her great-grandchild Morgan née Megan, a Twitter influencer, whose gender identity Hattie can’t grasp, beyond it’s being somehow “non-binding”.

The book is exceptional in its capacity to extend almost equal empathy to the complex lives of all these characters. Certainly, some are more gripping than others, and what speaks to each reader will probably be related to how much of their own world and values they see represented there. With the enormous variety in characters, it’s clear that there will be political disagreements amongst them. Evaristo is able to confront these conversations not only with sensitivity, but also with a sense of humour – be it when a transsexual woman mansplains the difficulties of living in the patriarchy to someone who’s lived their whole life up to that point as a woman; or when a white working class country bumpkin quotes Roxanne Gay to argue against discrimination hierarchies at the ultra-hip London-raised Yazz, who considers herself the wokest millennial alive.

At the centre of the larger narrative that serves to connect the different life stories to each other is a play put on by Amma, (once-)radical-feminist lesbian thespian. The after-party brings together many of the cast-members readers have got to know throughout the course of the book, so that when we encounter them here, they are nuanced, textured characters. Amma’s story especially questions the compatibility of becoming successful in the ‘establishment’ and staying true to one’s ‘radical’ principles. These conversation are held up for scrutiny, yet while the book pokes fun at the individuals who people this artsy London theatre scene, its critical gaze isn’t quite as critical as it might be of the essential elitism of what is very much a scene .

Formally, Evaristo remains an innovator. She foregoes capitalisation and full stops in Girl, Woman, Other , for a free-flowing effect of run-on sentences. The verse-like quality of her writing gives it a gentle rhythm of its own, while the free indirect style that enters the different chapters lets each of the characters have a measure of their own say in the telling of their stories.

Evaristo’s storytelling is perhaps at its most compelling when she is unstitching the histories of colonialism and migration that brought these woman and their ancestors to Britain. It also addresses the shifting sands and the changing priorities of a migrant like Bummi, from Nigeria, who spent many years working as a cleaner, and her daughter Carole, born and raised in England, now a successful banker in the city. Enormously diverse as the experiences represented evidently are – and the characters are by no means flawless and are shown also to wrong each other – the pull of the book is towards togetherness, and its implicit argument is that more connects than divides us. Not only is it entirely worth reading, it might leave you feeling a touch optimistic.

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Girl, Woman, Other

37 pages • 1 hour read

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Chapter 1, section 1 summary: “amma”.

The book begins in the perspective of Amma Bonsu , a middle-aged theater director who is on her way to London’s National Theatre for a rehearsal of her most recent play, The Last Amazon of Dahomey , a work of historical fiction about warrior lesbian Amazons. The entire run of the show sold out before one review was filed. As she walks, Amma reflects on her life and career trajectory. After she “spent decades on the fringe,” Amma is now receiving recognition for her work (2). As a young person, she was a budding queer feminist living in a King’s Cross squat with other young people interested in alternative lifestyles. While living in the squat, she slept with a myriad of women and was reticent to settle down.

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Sudden Resignations. A Leaked Letter. What’s Happening Inside Miss USA?

Noelia Voigt’s announcement this week that she was stepping down as Miss USA set off a string of departures and prompted larger questions about the inner workings of the organization.

By Madison Malone Kircher

When the reigning Miss USA, Noelia Voigt, announced this week she would be resigning from her position, she cited her mental health and wrote about her gratitude for the opportunity.

“As individuals, we grow through experiencing different things in life that lead us to learning more about ourselves,” she wrote on Instagram on Monday.

But an internal resignation letter by Ms. Voigt to Miss USA leadership and the Miss Universe Organization, obtained on Friday by The New York Times, presented a much darker picture.

In the eight-page letter, Ms. Voigt, who represented the state of Utah and was crowned in September, described “a toxic work environment within the Miss USA Organization that, at best, is poor management and, at worst, is bullying and harassment.” She also complained in her letter that the organization had delayed making good on her prize winnings.

The Miss USA Organization did not respond to request for comment.

Ms. Voigt’s departure has spurred at least two other resignations. UmaSofia Srivastava, Miss Teen USA, announced she was stepping down from her role on Wednesday. Arianna Lemus, who represented Colorado at Miss USA in 2023, said on Friday she was resigning in solidarity after seeing Ms. Voigt’s post.

“That was a call to help,” Ms. Lemus, 27, said in an interview.

The sudden departures have touched off wider speculation in the pageant world that crowned winners are legally barred from speaking freely about their experiences with the Miss USA Organization. Many of Ms. Voigt’s past competitors, including Ms. Lemus, shared a statement demanding that she be released from any nondisclosure agreements.

In her resignation letter, Ms. Voigt said she experienced an incident of sexual harassment when, during a Christmas parade last year in Sarasota, Fla., a driver made inappropriate comments toward her.

She said in her letter that the organization failed to support her when she reported the incident.

Ms. Voigt went on to write that serving as Miss USA took a toll on her health, adding that she now struggled with anxiety and took medication to manage her symptoms.

She said she had begun experiencing “heart palpitations, full body shakes, loss of appetite, unintentional weight loss, loss of sleep, loss of hair and more.”

Some people believed Ms. Voigt’s Instagram post announcing her resignation contained a secret message. The first letter of each of the first 11 sentences of the statement spell the phrase “I AM SILENCED,” which some have interpreted as a signal that Ms. Voigt is unable to speak openly about her experience.

Just a few days after Ms. Voigt’s announcement, Ms. Srivastava, who was crowned Miss Teen USA in 2023, also resigned from her post .

“After careful consideration, I have decided to resign as I find that my personal values no longer fully align with the direction of the organization,” Ms. Srivastava, who represented the state of New Jersey at the Miss Teen USA pageant in September, wrote on Instagram.

Her post included a quote from the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche: “There are no beautiful surfaces without a terrible depth.”

“I know all of us who love the program want to rush out and do something,” Laylah Rose, the president and chief executive of the Miss USA Organization, wrote in an email to The Times earlier this week, regarding Ms. Voigt’s and Ms. Srivastava’s resignations. “My goal is to provide truly helpful steps we can take together.”

“Our all-encompassing goal at Miss USA is to celebrate and empower women,” Ms. Rose added, saying she was taking “these allegations seriously.”

Through a representative, both Ms. Srivastava and Ms. Voigt declined to comment, citing a nondisclosure agreement. (A copy of the 2023 Miss USA contract obtained by The New York Times appears to bar signees from disclosing any information about Miss USA while employed by the organization.)

After Ms. Voigt’s announcement, several of her fellow Miss USA 2023 competitors posted a statement on Instagram demanding that the Miss USA Organization release Ms. Voigt from any such agreement.

Juliana Morehouse, who competed at Miss USA representing Maine and lives in South Carolina, said in an interview with The Times that the letter originated in a group chat of 2023 participants who were “shocked and saddened” to hear of Ms. Voigt’s resignation. On a Zoom call, they hashed out the message they wanted to share in support of Ms. Voigt.

(Ms. Morehouse did not provide an exact figure but said the number of women who wrote and shared the letter comprised a majority of the 51 competitors at Miss USA in 2023.)

Claudia Michelle Engelhardt, who stepped down from her role as social media director for Miss USA this month, said she felt the Miss USA participants were unfairly pressured into signing their contracts.

“It was pretty much, ‘You have to sign this or you’re not going to compete,’” Ms. Engelhardt, 24, said. “You just worked your butt off to get here. You won your state. What, are you not going to go because you don’t want to sign a contract? They are basically holding you hostage, for lack of a better term, to sign this contract.”

Ms. Morehouse said she was given “a little over 24 hours” to review the contract.

“I don’t think any of us sought legal representation to review it with us,” she said in an interview with The Times. “We had never heard of such an ironclad NDA being implemented in previous years, because this was the first year of the new leadership.” (Ms. Rose became president of the organization last year.)

She emphasized that while her personal experience with Miss USA was a positive one, she hoped speaking out would ensure that was the case for all participants in the future.

Ms. Lemus, the former Miss Colorado USA, said she saw some irony in how Miss USA appeared to be operating.

“This is an organization that preaches women’s empowerment,” she said.

Madison Malone Kircher is a Times reporter covering internet culture. More about Madison Malone Kircher

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2024 NCAA Softball Tournament: Women's Bracket, Scores, Schedule, TV, Results

Jack ankony | 16 hours ago.

The 2024 NCAA softball tournament bracket was revealed Sunday, setting the stage for the 64-team tournament that will run through the Women's College World Series in the first week of June.

Regionals take place from May 17-19 and follow a double-elimination format. The 16 regional winners advance to super regionals, where two teams will play a best-of-three series from either May 23-25 or May 24-26.

Eight teams will then advance to the 2024 Women's College World Series in Oklahoma City beginning on May 30. The WCWS is a double-elimination tournament, and the final two teams will play a best-of-three series for the national championship.

Indiana earned an NCAA Tournament bid for the second consecutive season under coach Shonda Stanton. The Hoosiers went 40-18 overall and finished eighth in the Big Ten with a 12-11 in regular season record, then made it all the way to the Big Ten Tournament title game.

Heading into the NCAA Tournament, Aly VanBrandt leads Indiana with a .370 batting average, and Avery Parker has hit a team-high 13 home runs. Taylor Minnick leads the Hoosiers with 53 RBI and 108 total bases, and Indiana has seven players with at least 10 stolen bases. Brianna Copeland (184.1 innings, 2.81 ERA) and Sophie Kleiman (121.1 innings, 2.54 ERA) have pitched the majority of innings for Indiana this season.

Here's the full schedule, all times Eastern.

Austin Regional in Austin, Texas

Friday, May 17

• Game 1: No. 1 overall seed Texas vs. Siena at 4 p.m. on Longhorn Network
• Game 2: Northwestern vs. Saint Francis (Pa.) at  6:30 p.m. on ESPN-plus

Saturday, May 18

• Game 3: Winner of Game 1 vs. Winner of Game 2 at 1 p.m.
• Game 4: Loser of Game 1 vs. Loser of Game 2 at 3:30 p.m.
• Game 5: Loser of Game 3 vs. Winner of Game 4 at 6 p.m.

Sunday, May 19

• Game 6, TBD
• Game 7 (if necessary), TBD

Norman Regional in Norman, Okla.

• Oregon vs. Boston University at 5:30 p.m. on ESPN-plus
• No. 2 overall seed Oklahoma vs. Cleveland State at 8 p.m. on ESPNU
• Game 3: Winner of Game 1 vs. Winner of Game 2 at 3 p.m.
• Game 4: Loser of Game 1 vs. Loser of Game 2 at 5:30 p.m.
• Game 5: Loser of Game 3 vs. Winner of Game 4 at 8 p.m.
• Game 7 (if necessary), TBD

Knoxville Regional in Knoxville, Tenn.

• Virginia vs. Miami (Ohio) at Noon on ESPN-plus
• No. 3 overall seed Tennessee vs. Dayton at 2:30 p.m. on ESPN-plus

Gainesville Regional in Gainesville, Fla.

• No. 4 overall seed Florida vs. Florida Gulf Coast at Noon on SEC Network
• South Alabama vs. Florida Atlantic at 2:30 p.m. on ESPN-plus

Stillwater Regional in Stillwater, Okla.

• Kentucky vs. Michigan at 3 p.m. on ESPN2
• No. 5 overall seed Oklahoma State vs. Northern Colorado at 5:30 p.m. on ESPN-plus

Los Angeles Regional in Los Angeles, Calif.

• Virginia Tech vs. San Diego State at 6 p.m. on ESPNU
• No. 6 overall seed UCLA vs. Grand Canyon at 8:30 p.m. on ESPN-plus
• Game 3: Winner of Game 1 vs. Winner of Game 2 at 5 p.m.
• Game 4: Loser of Game 1 vs. Loser of Game 2 at 7:30 p.m.
• Game 5: Loser of Game 3 vs. Winner of Game 4 at 10 p.m.

Columbia Regional in Columbia, Mo.

• Washington vs. Indiana at 3 p.m. on ESPN-plus
• No. 7 seed Missouri vs. Omaha at 5:30 p.m. on ESPN-plus

Stanford Regional in Stanford, Calif.

• Mississippi State vs. Cal State Fullerton at 7:30 p.m. on ESPN-plus
• No. 8 seed Stanford vs. Saint Mary's at 10 p.m. on ESPN2

Baton Rouge Regional in Baton Rouge, La.

• California vs. Southern Illinois at 3 p.m. on ESPN-plus
• No. 9 overall seed LSU vs. Jackson State at 6 p.m. on SEC Network

Durham Regional in Durham, N.C.

• South Carolina vs. Utah at Noon on ESPN-plus
• No. 10 overall seed Duke vs. Morgan State at 2:30 p.m. on ESPN-plus
• Game 3: Winner of Game 1 vs. Winner of Game 2 at 11 a.m.
• Game 4: Loser of Game 1 vs. Loser of Game 2 at 1:30 p.m.
• Game 5: Loser of Game 3 vs. Winner of Game 4 at 4 p.m.

Athens Regional in Athens, Ga.

• Charlotte vs. Liberty at 3 p.m. on ESPN-plus
• No. 11 overall seed Georgia vs. UNC-Wilmington at 5:30 p.m. on ESPN-plus

Fayetteville Regional in Fayetteville, Ark.

• Arizona vs. Villanova at 6 p.m. on ESPN-plus
• No. 12 overall seed Arkansas vs. Southeast Missouri State at 8:30 p.m. on ESPN-plus

Lafayette Regional in Lafayette, La.

• No. 13 overall seed Louisiana vs. Princeton at 5:30 p.m. on ESPN-plus
• Baylor vs. Ole Miss at 8 p.m. on ESPN2

Tuscaloosa Regional in Tuscaloosa, Ala.

• Clemson vs. Southeastern Louisiana at 2 p.m. on ACC Network
• No. 14 overall seed Alabama vs. USC Upstate at 4:30 p.m. on ESPN-plus
• Game 5: Loser of Game 3 vs. Winner of Game 4 at 8 p.m.

Tallahassee Regional in Tallahassee, Fla.

• Auburn vs. UCF at 2 p.m. on ESPNU
• No. 15 overall seed Florida State vs. Chattanooga at 4:30 p.m. on ACC Network

College Station Regional in College Station, Texas

• Texas State vs. Penn State at 4 p.m. on ESPNU
• No. 16 overall seed Texas A&M vs. Albany at 6:30 p.m. on ESPN-plus

Super Regionals

• Dates: May 23-25 or May 24-26
• Locations: TBD; Times: TBD; TV: TBD

2024 Women's College World Series

Location: Devon Park in Oklahoma City, Okla.

Thursday, May 30

• Game 1: Teams TBD at Noon on ESPN
• Game 2: Teams TBD at 2:30 p.m. on ESPN
• Game 3: Teams TBD at 7 p.m. on ESPN2
• Game 4: Teams TBD at 9:30 p.m. on ESPN2

Friday, May 31

• Game 5: Teams TBD at 7 p.m. on ESPN2
• Game 6: Teams TBD at 9:30 p.m. on ESPN2

Saturday, June 1

• Game 7: Teams TBD at 3 p.m. on ABC
• Game 8: Teams TBD at 7 p.m. on ESPN

Sunday, June 2

• Game 9: Teams TBD at 3 p.m. on ABC
• Game 10: Teams TBD at 7 p.m. on ESPNU

Monday, June 3

• Game 11: Teams TBD at Noon on ESPN
• Game 12 (if necessary): Teams TBD at 2:30 p.m. on ESPN
• Game 13: Teams TBD at 7 p.m. on ESPN2
• Game 14 (if necessary): Teams TBD at 9:30 p.m. on ESPN2

Wednesday, June 5

• WCWS Final Game 1: Teams TBD at 8 p.m. on ESPN

Thursday, June 6

• WCWS Final Game 2: Teams TBD at 8 p.m. on ESPN

Friday, June 7

• WCWS Final Game 3 (if necessary): Teams TBD at 8 p.m. on ESPN

JACK ANKONY

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• What to Watch

The best comedy movies of 2024 so far

From undead boyfriends to a lot of beavers

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Share All sharing options for: The best comedy movies of 2024 so far

It’s been a bit of a slow time of year for comedy movies, but 2024 has enough laugh-out loud gems to round out a list. And there’s a wide variety of sub-genres to pick from: musical reboots, existential animated kids’ movies, campy horror flicks, and even a DC parody.

So behold: the best comedy movies of 2024 so far. This list will continue to be updated throughout the year, and will be sorted in reverse chronological order, so the newest movies always show up first.

Where to watch: In theaters May 17

Director Pamela Adlon ( Better Things ) gets nitty and gritty about the epic highs and lows of pregnancy in Babes , but the best part is the central relationship between two best friends. Eden (Ilana Glazer), a single yoga teacher, and Dawn (Michelle Buteau), a married dentist with two kids, have been besties for decades — and even though their life priorities are a bit different now, they make time for each other.

Eden finds herself pregnant after a one-night stand, and decides to go through with having the baby. It’s a new stage of their relationship, especially as Dawn struggles with balancing her job, her family, and her friendship with Eden, all while Eden embarks on this scary journey of single motherhood. It’s wickedly funny, but also says a lot about the strain adulthood puts on friendships. — Petrana Radulovic

The People’s Joker

Where to watch: Limited theaters

Director-star Vera Drew initially planned The People’s Joker as a found footage movie , pulling together clips from Joker’s past, present, and future to create a new Jokerfied experience. While the found footage element didn’t happen, the end result ( after a brief delay over rights issues ) is a breath of fresh, satirical air in our IP-saturated landscape, part of a new wave of trans-authored cinema that is shaking up what mainstream audiences can experience in trans film.

The People’s Joker cleverly uses the DC canon as grounding for the setting, an avenue to explore gender expression, and for comedy, subverting expectations of these well-known characters. But my favorite part of the movie is how Vera utilizes many different styles of animation from many different creators to create a mixed media effect. It’s unlike anything else you’ll see this year. — Pete Volk

Wicked Little Letters

Where to watch: In theaters, or for digital rental/purchase on Amazon , Apple TV

The true story of the Littlehampton poison pen letter scandal of 1923 is a fairly depressing one, another in a long line of reminders that justice systems depend on people’s judgment, and people are notoriously prone to prejudice, stereotypes, and other forms of confirmation bias that get in the way of the truth. But Thea Sharrock’s lively (and heavily fictionalized) British comedy about the scandal addresses those points with a light perspective that offers a little uplift and a lot of good humor. International treasure Olivia Colman ( The Favourite ) stars as Edith Swan, a pious working-class spinster who starts getting obscene anonymous letters; Jessie Buckley is her neighbor, Rose Gooding, a foul-mouthed libertine accused of writing them, in an era where calling someone a “foxy ass whore” in print was enough to warrant a prison sentence at hard labor.

The absolute shock and disbelief Edith and Rose’s entire community feels over seeing words like “asshole” in print is part of the humor here, but a lot more of it comes from Jonny Sweet’s bouncy, winking script, which keeps the action zippy and highlights the ironies of an entire community full of hypocrites delighting in their self-righteous offense at the letters. (Any metaphor for today’s online communications is strictly intended.) Colman and Buckley’s performances add a terrific edge to it all, but this is an ensemble piece at heart, and Anjana Vasan as a lady detective trying to wade through institutional sexism rounds out the cast for a lively, sparky story that isn’t particularly believable as history, but sure lands well as funny, engaging metaphor. — Tasha Robinson

Drive-Away Dolls

Where to watch: Digital rental/purchase on Amazon / Apple TV

Don’t get fooled by only seeing one Coen name in the credits; Drive-Away Dolls (or its original title, which still appears in the credits: Drive-Away Dykes ) has the same hilarious crime-caper spirit that marks all of the Coen brothers’ best early works.

The ’90s-set movie follows two lesbian friends (Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan) on an East Coast road trip with two clueless gangsters hot on their trail. Equal parts excellent friends-on-the-road movie and crime comedy, Drive-Away Dolls is an early contender for the most fun movie of 2024, and one that will likely be hard to beat. — Austen Goslin

Lisa Frankenstein

Where to watch: Peacock or for digital rental/purchase on Amazon / Apple TV

Sometimes, you just want to see Kathryn Newton wear increasingly elaborate ’80s goth outfits as she and an undead Victorian musician go around killing people who’ve wronged her.

Lisa Frankenstein is a loving homage-slash-parody of old schlocky horror comedies, and even though some of the connective tissue is missing from scene to scene, it’s a shockingly good time. — PR

Orion and the Dark

Where to watch: Netflix

On its surface, Orion and the Dark seems like a standard fairy-tale-like children’s story about a scared boy meeting the personification of Darkness, who helps him get over his fears. But it takes a twisty turn when it’s revealed this story is being told by a grown-up version of that little boy to his daughter.

It’s not just a cute framing device, but one that warps the story and makes it way weirder than when it starts out (in the best way). — PR

Hundreds of Beavers

Where to watch: Fandor, free with a library card on Hoopla, or digital rental/purchase on Amazon and Apple TV

“What if Looney Tunes, but for adults, and filtered through video games and silent slapstick comedy?” That’s the genius combination that makes Hundreds of Beavers one of the most special movies of the year, a pure expression of cinematic comedy that will have you laughing in stitches. The low-budget indie follows Jean Kayak (Ryland Brickson Cole Twes), a trapper trying to survive in the harsh winter of the Great Lakes region. He’s surrounded by hundreds of beavers (which are presented as people in mascot beaver costumes) who view him as a threat, and he must solve a series of problems and puzzles to survive and thrive in the harsh environment.

Ludicrously silly and packed to the brim with jaw-dropping gags and special effects on its limited budgets, Hundreds of Beavers is the funniest movie I’ve seen in years. It’s the perfect antidote for what has ailed mainstream American comedy for years, by actually bringing back jokes instead of just the tone of comedy. I can not recommend it highly enough. — PV

Where to watch: Paramount Plus

Fans of the Broadway musical Mean Girls , based on the 2004 movie Mean Girls , have understandably bridled against some of the changes in this screen adaptation, from the many songs cut from the Broadway version to the casting of protagonist Cady Heron . But while it’s an imperfect translation of the stage experience, it still stands on its own as a lively, creatively staged movie that puts plenty of verve into its catchy, inviting musical numbers.

The performances aren’t out to replace the 2004 version of the movie: They’re new interpretations, delivered with big musical energy. This is a tremendously fun movie, designed to send people home singing. — TR

Self Reliance

Where to watch: Hulu

Jake Johnson’s directorial debut follows a man who’s so at sea after a breakup that he agrees to star in an underground reality competition where he tries to survive for a month with assassins trying to kill him. But Self Reliance isn’t the kind of manic thriller that premise suggests; Johnson told Polygon it’s much more of a mashup of two of his favorite movies : Wes Anderson’s Bottle Rocket and the Adrian Lyne thriller Jacob’s Ladder . That’s an odd combination of improbably dissimilar projects, but they coalesce into an offbeat indie comedy about human connection, and the mortifying ordeal of trying to be known by people who aren’t all that interested in the knowing.

Produced by The Lonely Island and featuring Andy Samberg playing himself in a pretty hilarious cameo, Self Reliance has some of the same dry humor and secret sentiment as the group’s movie Palm Springs , but with even smaller stakes and even less predictable storytelling. It’s goofy stuff, but it’s an enjoyably light story that’s designed to keep the audience guessing. And it’s just about impossible to watch without wondering: Would I do any better under these circumstances? — TR

The best movies of 2024 so far

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NEWS... BUT NOT AS YOU KNOW IT

Woman jailed after encouraging teens to attack black girl outside school

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A woman who encouraged pupils to attack a girl has been jailed.

A video of the fight was filmed at outside the Thomas Knyvett College in Ashford, Surrey, on February 6 last year, and posted on social media .

A 15-year-old black girl had her hair pulled and suffered bruises and cuts when she was kicked and dragged to the ground.

Winnie Connors, 40, was recorded shouting words of encouragement to the attacker saying ‘punch the face off her, kick her face, grab her face.’

The video played to Guildford Crown Court showed large clumps of the girl’s hair wrenched out as her head was also stamped on.

Prosecutor Charles Langley said she suffered a bruised eye, a grazed knee and her hair was ripped from her scalp. 

The fight was only broken up when teachers arrived.

Mr Langley said: ‘This was a group attack and it was a prolonged and persistent assault.

‘There was clearly an element of planning in the assault with Ms Connors arriving for what appeared to be a pre-planned fight.’

Mr Langley added the girl went through counselling after the assault, was left stressed, and unable to eat.

The girl has since made a full recovery.

Mr Langley read out a victim impact statement from her that said: ‘I was very embarrassed because it was videoed by someone from the school.

‘The biggest struggle for me was the video and it being all over social media… it was very embarrassing.

‘It was horrible for my family to see me being injured in that way.’

Helen Dawson, defence counsel for Connors, said her client was sorry and deeply regretted what happened.

She said: ‘She acknowledges that what happened was entirely unpleasant.’

The court heard Connors disputed that the incident was pre-planned.

Miss Recorder Lisa Goddard told Connors her behaviour was abhorrent.

She said: ‘It is clear to me that a fight was on the cards and you attended on February 6 of last year.

‘You started to encourage others to inflict violence on the victim. The words you used were abhorrent… you didn’t stop or come to your senses.

‘She (the victim) suffered bruising, fractures and some of her hair was pulled out. She was clearly shaken by what happened to her.

‘This was to some extent, on your part, a pre-planned attack.’

The response of staff to the assault led to protests outside the school at the time and criticism from MPs.

Connors was jailed for 20 months for intentionally encouraging or assisting an offence.

She was also handed a five-year restraining order.

Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at [email protected] .

For more stories like this, check our news page .

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Book Reviews

'women and children first' is a tale about how actions and choices affect others.

Kristen Martin

Toward the beginning of Alina Grabowski's kaleidoscopic debut Women and Children First , 16-year-old Jane Ryder rides her bike through the rain-slicked streets of Nashquitten, a fictional town on the Massachusetts coast, south of Boston. It's a Saturday morning in May, and the smell of "seaweed and crab shells" hangs in the air — Jane's street has flooded due to a cracked seawall that the town won't repair "because it's on the side of the beach where people actually live, as opposed to the side where people 'summer.'"

As Jane bikes past the "Murder Merge" onto the town's single highway, where a thicket of white flags memorialize the teenagers who died in car wrecks, she thinks about the kids she's seen taking selfies there, "writing long captions about childhood and angels and the fragility of life...holding each other close...because they wondered what it would be like if they died, if they would be called funny or nice or smart or handsome or hot." Jane knows that in a town like Nashquitten, where a half a dozen high school students have died in the past five years, where opioids are easy to cop and people regularly disappear, no one is remembered for long.

What Jane doesn't know is that the night before, as the rain blew into town, her classmate Lucy Anderson died under mysterious circumstances at a house party, and that this tragedy will upend her community and form a testament to its interconnectedness.

The puzzle of Lucy's death propels Women and Children First , but Grabowski's novel is not a thriller or a whodunit. The novel unfolds in ten chapters, split down the middle between "Pre" and "Post" Lucy's death, each narrated in the first person by a different Nashquitten girl or woman linked in some way to the tragedy, from classmate Jane to college counselor Layla to best friend Sophia to mother Brynn. The narrators form a Greek chorus telling this tale of a fractured, grieving community, their constellation of perspectives gradually offering shards of how Lucy died and who she was. Through her pitch-perfect summoning of this intergenerational female cast, Grabowski explores the fickleness of truth, the fallibility of memory, how difficult it is to really see those closest to us, and how easy it is to betray one another.

Grabowski's choice to set Women and Children First in the fictional Nashquitten is a smart one. In this parochial community, everyone's lives overlap, creating perfect conditions for a novel that depends on a web of interwoven perspectives. Grabowski clearly drew on her own upbringing in Scituate, Mass. — another insular South Shore town battered by coastal erosion and flooding — in shaping her setting, though Nashquitten is more worn down at the heels. It's a heavily Catholic fishing town dominated by a withering middle class; those who remain are stuck there because of thwarted ambitions.

Through the shards of the narrators' stories and memories, we learn that Lucy had dreams of escape. Those who knew Lucy thought of her as an artist who painted on massive canvases with water from tide pools and turned her bedroom wall into a mural with "a swirl of ocean colors." Through Layla, we learn that Lucy had ambitions of going to school in New York; later, Sophia tells us that Lucy imagined the city as a place where "you can be whoever you want," unlike Nashquitten, where "anything you do becomes this stain that sticks to you forever." Lucy's stain was her epilepsy — she'd had a seizure on the floor of a school bus earlier that year, and one of her classmates filmed it and soundtracked the video "to an EDM song whose beat matched the shaking of her body."

The night Lucy died, she was at a party with the classmate she believed made the video, talking about him with two other girls before she fell to her death off an unfinished deck. Did she have another seizure? Was she pushed? Was it an accident? Was it suicide?

As Women and Children First unfolds, Grabowski gradually brings the reader closer to Lucy while planting seeds that any sense of the truth of what happened to her will ultimately be asymptotic. Her narrators' stories are at times contradictory, revealing how their perspectives and memories are blinkered by their own biases and experiences. As I read, I kept flipping back to earlier chapters, re-contextualizing each girl or woman's story, underlining the ringing moments of insight that Grabowski has a knack for, like, "We're always in the paths of others, but it can be disorienting to reconcile that proximity with the impenetrability of a stranger's choices," or, "when someone disappears without explanation, you have the power to determine what happened to them."

Ultimately, the novel is less about the mystery of Lucy and more about how our actions impact one another, even when — especially when — we think we lack agency. The women and girls of Nashquitten tend toward self-preservation, even selfishness. The older women especially have learned how hard it is to hold men to account, and instead try to protect their daughters, even when it means hurting others. Maureen, the PTA president who seeks absolution at confession for choices she can't forgive herself for, believes that her daughter's generation will never understand "that we were never girls, not really. For a moment we were children, yes. But a girl and a child are not the same. A child is a pet. A girl is prey."

This is not to say that Women and Children First presents a bleak vision of human nature. At the center of the novel, a teenager named Marina retells a story that Grabowski herself grew up hearing, about Rebecca and Abigail Bates of Scituate, "the American Army of Two." "The duration of the tale reminds me that the actions of two girls can have a lasting effect on many," Grabowski writes in her acknowledgments. Rebecca and Abigail were the daughters of the lighthouse keeper, left in charge one day during the War of 1812; when they spotted a British warship approaching, they played their fife and drum so fiercely that the soldiers thought an army was awaiting them on the shore. When Marina's mother first told her the story, the girl called it fake. "And if I was lying? How does that change the story?" her mother quipped back. Women and Children First serves as a reminder that not only do our actions and choices effect change, but so too do our stories.

Kristen Martin is working on a book on American orphanhood for Bold Type Books. Her writing has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Believer, The Baffler, and elsewhere. She tweets at @kwistent .

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Two tourists battered each other over Disney World tickets and a golf cart in a brutal brawl that landed both of them behind bars last week, Florida authorities said.

Missouri women Katherine Northrup, 31, and Gina Danforth, 28, fought each other inside a Wildwood, Florida home where they were hanging out with several other people, local police said, according to Fox 35.

The two started bickering over Disney tickets and the golf cart when their fight turned physical.

Northrup claimed Danforth “got in her face and was spitting,” and then grabbed her hair and pinned her down, according to an arrest affidavit from Wildwood police.

Both women allegedly admitted to taking a swing at the other, the affidavit obtained by the local Fox station states.

When cops reached the home, the two women had to be separated as Northrup allegedly became “belligerent,” the document states.

Northrup had a visible scratch on her neck that can be seen in her mugshot. She also had scratches on her elbow and stomach, Fox 35 reported.

Meanwhile, Danforth was “not feeling well,” and was taken to a local hospital, per the affidavit.

Both women were taken to the Sumter County Detention Center after authorities couldn’t figure out who sparked the fight “due to the lack of credible witnesses,” according to the affidavit.

Danforth and Northrup were both charged with battery and posted $1,000 bond.  

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Girl, Woman, Other

Bernardine evaristo, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

Girl, Woman, Other

By bernardine evaristo, girl, woman, other quotes and analysis.

“Privilege is about context and circumstance.” Yazz, p. 68

Yazz and her friends are involved in contemporary discussions on topics like race, gender, and privilege. Yazz enters university cocksure about her lack of privilege as a black woman, but then she meets Courtney, a white woman who, though white, has grown up in poverty in rural England. Courtney, citing feminist theorist Roxanne Gay, argues that Yazz should stop "playing 'privilege Olympics'" and consider that "privilege is relative and contextual." Courtney essentially asks Yazz to consider contexts and circumstances outside of race and gender that could play a role in shaping one's access to opportunity, or privilege.

“Her friendship with Amma is based on historic loyalty and comfortable familiarity rather than shared interests and perspectives” Shirley

Amma has a large circle of artistic, flamboyant, queer, and edgy friends, but that was not always the case. In grammar school, Amma was somewhat more withdrawn, and as the only two black girls at the school, Shirley and Amma were drawn to each other. Though Amma quickly became outspoken, eccentric, and openly gay, Shirley remained shy and more conservative. The lives of these two childhood best friends diverge after grammar school, with Amma going down a nontraditional path working in theater and having strings of lovers, and Shirley going down a sensible, more traditional path as a schoolteacher who quickly marries a responsible man. Even so, out of loyalty to a shared past, the two remain friends. Many sorts of friendships exist between the characters in this novel, and this quote highlights one sort of friendship, based not on the present, but the past—on "historic loyalty" and "familiarity" rather than active enjoyment of present company.

"She was his expedition into Africa, he said, he was Dr Livingstone sailing downriver in Africa to discover her at the source of the Nile" Joseph, p. 406

Joseph says this to Grace as he makes love to her. Since Grace's father was Abyssinian/Ethiopian, she is half black. Her husband, who seems to have a penchant for darker-skinned women, and especially women from Egypt (where the "Nile" is), thinks of her as his gateway to Egypt. Unfortunately, as Grace corrects him, she is not of Egyptian but rather Ethiopian descent. In fact, though Grace repeatedly tells her husband that she is Abyssinian rather than Egyptian, he continues to refer to her as "Queen of the Nile" and "Cleopatra," especially during sexual acts like this. Joseph's behavior seems to reflect an exoticized, perhaps even fetishized, view towards his half-black wife.

Penelope wanted to embrace self-love and self-acceptance / getting rid of the full-length mirrors in her home was a good start. Narrator, p. 299

In the midst of middle age and two failed marriages, Penelope no longer feels desired or beautiful. In fact, she actively feels ugly, unhappy, unshapely, and most of all, lonely. She recognizes that contemporary movements on self-love and self-acceptance could help her move past her discontent—perhaps if she could just accept the way her body looks now, perhaps if she could just love herself enough to live in the world alone, she would be happier. Though she accepts these tenets in theory, she does not put them into practice because, ironically, she chooses to get rid of all the full-length mirrors in her home. That is, rather than accept the way that her body looks, she chooses to ignore it, quite a different action altogether.

"if it was twenty years later, Rachel, I'd have left him there and then / if it had been thirty years later, I'd have lived with him before marrying him, you see it occurred to me that I didn't really know this man who wanted me to follow him around like a mindless idiot." Winsome, p 231

Winsome shows her granddaughter Rachel just how different times are now than they were when she was a young adult. Referring to her choosing to marry her husband, Clovis, Winsome recounts that she was not equipped to choose her husband the way she would have been if she were born twenty years later, in Shirley's generation. She claims that when she was young, she had to follow her husband "around like a mindless idiot," but that if she were living in more liberal times, she surely would have either left Clovis or at least tried cohabitating with him before marrying.

Neil Armstrong walks on the moon with the caption: one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind / like her / every step she takes will raise these children up, she will leave no child behind Narrator, p. 220

When Shirley begins teaching at Peckham, she is filled with a grandiose and idealistic mission: to uplift every single one of the working-class children at her school. She envisions herself like Neil Armstrong, improving the world every day, one child at a time. This idealism of young Shirley is eventually eroded away by changes to the British education system, which leave her cynical, mean, and overly strict.

"dear Augustine, who died of a heart attack while driving over Westminster Bridge transporting drunken partygoers in the early hours of New Year's Day / after too many unbroken nights with junk food on the go / doubling his salary in the busiest period of the year while halving his already unknowingly, genetically, chronically heart-diseased life" Bummi, p. 160

Bummi recalls the death of her husband, Augustine, in the passage above. While he held a Ph.D. in Economics from a Nigerian university, he was relegated to driving cabs and eating fast food after immigrating to the UK. To support his family, according to Bummi, he would work night shifts for the better money it paid, and in order to maximize profits, would not stop to have proper meals. Instead, he would buy fast food—quickly prepared and quickly consumed—so that he could get back to work and continue making money. Unfortunately, this relentless chase to support his family ended up becoming fatal, cutting Augustine's life short, and leaving Bummi to take care of Carole on her own.

[Bummi] decided there was no great spiritual being watching over her, protecting her and the people she loved...the space once occupied by God was now hollow, and with no god to promise everlasting salvation, it hit her hard how much she was on her own. Narrator, p. 160

The name Augustine carries a reference to Saint Augustine, the North African bishop who chronicled his personal path to finding faith in the face of struggle. Bummi's husband is likened to this saint—and indeed, Bummi's recollection of Augustine does paint him in a saintly manner. Crucially, however, when Bummi sees her husband's dead body, she loses her faith. Losing the saint in her life causes her to lose her faith, and leaves her with an emptiness in her heart.

"[Margaret] had been born in the newly created Union of South Africa after her English parents sold up their failing barley farm at Hutton Conyers in Yorkshire to take advantage of the Natives Land Act of 1913 / which allocated over 80% of land ownership to the only people capable of looking after it, her mother told her / the white race" Penelope, p. 246-7

Penelope's mother, Margaret, is considered by her daughter to be an incredible "dullard," though with an interesting upbringing. Part of this upbringing, likely in the late 1910s to early 1920s in South Africa, involved a deeply help belief in the superiority of white people, who were, according to Margaret, rightfully allowed to wrest land from the natives as the "only people capable of looking after it." This belief propelled and justified government colonial action, like the Natives Land Act of 1913, and individual colonial and discriminatory action on the part of British citizens like Margaret's parents.

"Megan was part Ethiopian, part African-American, part Malawian, and part English / which felt weird when you broke it down like that because essentially she was just a complete human being / most people assumed she was mixed-race, it was easier to let them think it" Morgan, p. 316

Megan/Morgan's ancestors have come from different parts of Africa and Europe, leaving her to be, according to those around her, "a mixed kid." However, Morgan themself disagrees with this characterization of who they are—rather than being disparate parts chunked together into one, Morgan thinks of their own identity as one undivided whole.

Girl, Woman, Other Questions and Answers

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