Title & author
The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna by Juliet Grames
Synopsis
Throughout the course of this 400+ page novel, readers are brought through the consummation, birth, and life (including the almost seven or eight deaths) of Stella Fortuna. A poetic expression of global womanhood, Grames’s debut novel explores the relationship women have socially, politically, and emotionally with a patriarchal society.
Who should read this book
Mrs. Everything and Scarlett Thomas fans
What we’re thinking about
How women support women
Trigger warning(s)
Sexual violence, physical violence, sexism
The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna (HarperCollins, 2019) is a poetic expression of global womanhood, the story of a woman detailed and only completed by the narratives of the women closest to her. Throughout the course of this 400+ page novel, readers are brought through the consummation, birth, and life (including the almost seven or eight deaths) of Stella Fortuna. And within it all, the relationship women have socially, politically, and emotionally with a patriarchal society is examined and aptly, beautifully detailed through flowering, yet neither exhaustive nor excessive prose.
Early on, Stella’s mother Assunta wonders “Was the doctor’s narrative just a progression of statements, or was its implication true? Was a life without children a life at all, for a woman?” (61). In her mother’s reaction to Stella’s potential diagnosis, we see the societal expectations for women. Assunta has already begun to carve Stella’s path, expecting her to have children, regardless of her daughter’s desires and wishes. A society (and world) rooted in the patriarchal values of equating womanhood with motherhood solidifies her future when she’s barely even six years old.
But Stella, despite her mother’s will, fights against the expectation. She wonders “what the point of having a husband or father was, when he seemed to be a source of arbitrary disorder and suffering” (81). The thought of a marriage or of having a family is equated with a sickness in Stella’s mind. “Stella felt sick to her stomach—a mixture of the wine, the memory itself, the indignity her sweet mother had endured because she owed her obedience to a brute…Stella realized her thighs were throbbing; she was clenching them tightly together. That was never going to happen to her. Never” (185). She possesses a hatred towards masculinity, one that impresses itself on her mind. “We pretend virginity is everything, a woman’s only asset, but the truth is the only thing about a woman that matters is whether she can work” (100). Stella’s own thoughts are echoed by the narrator’s, allowing for poignant depictions of reality. The narrator’s bluntness resonates with the audience’s thoughts, calling forward acute observations on these expectations for women.
There’s an easy solution to Stella’s suffering, as prompted by her family: to marry. And readers, wanting Stella to find happiness, may root for this. “I’ve always wondered why no one took it more seriously; why later, when Stella told them, over and over, that she never wanted to get married, no one remembered that time her subconscious chose to die rather than be violated by a man” (201). We are who the narrator addresses, the author wisely predicting our natural desire for a traditional happy ending. As readers, and as women, it is our duty to support Stella, yet we don’t. Grames writes of the nice men that court the protagonist, shows brief moments where Stella is drawn to them, making the reader believe for a second that Stella might have an easy life. But then a line later, when the male character is revealed as corrupt, the reader is forced to acknowledge Stella’s will, unable to simply keep reading what they might want to read.
Grames masterfully weaves in topics that span centuries, conversations that women were thinking a hundred years ago and are still having today. On Stella’s wedding day “her perfect blue-suited body was a package for a man to unwrap, to consume and interrupt and dismantle” (295). When she gives birth to her first child, the doctor asks Stella’s husband whether he wants to save his wife or his son, the narrator’s heart “break[ing] for Stella, who had to live in that marriage. How lucky I am that I can’t imagine being married to a man who wouldn’t immediately pick me” (333). And, when Stella’s husband dies, “Everyone besides Stella cries like hell. I cry like hell… But no one else had to forgive him for the things Stella had to forgive him for” (432).
The story begins and ends not with Stella, but with the women who love her-- the same women who didn’t support her true wishes. And perhaps it is just this that the text means to leave on the tips of our tongues: how do we love if we don’t support each other, especially women? Do we really if we don’t support decisions and actions? How much of this is because we still hold women to a standard of womanhood that is rooted in patriarchal values? Like Stella’s sister says at the end amidst years of silence between the two, “I love her… I always love her. Maybe you can write that,” and the reader believes she is telling the truth (440). We believe we love; we believe we support. But at the end, what is love without undying support?
“I’ve always wondered why no one took it more seriously; why later, when Stella told them, over and over, that she never wanted to get married, no one remembered that time her subconscious chose to die rather than be violated by a man.”
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