Recommended: “Third Girl From the Left”
The Free Sh*t Fairy invited me to read and review a copy of Marta Southgate’s “Third Girl From the Left.” Here is my review. (Cross-posted on BlackFeminism.org).
Rarely can a book manage to be both funny and serious. Martha Southgate has managed to do just that with her novel, “Third Girl from the Left
Southgate’s novel tells the story of three generations of women — Mildred, her daughter Angela and granddaughter Tamara — using their shared love of movies as a foundation for their story.
Most of the novel centers around Angela, a former blaxploitation actress who left the stifling (as she saw it) culture of Tulsa, Oklahoma to become an actress in anything-goes Los Angeles. Her dream was to become a movie star. Instead she fell in love with a woman who became her life partner, although she rejects the labels “lesbian” and “dyke.”
Mildred, Angela’s mother, is a survivor of the 1921 Tulsa race riot. For her, movies are an escape — a way to vicariously experience how others live. Movies — rather, the movie theater’s projection man is also an escape for her. Eventually Mildred is confronted with having to choose what is expected of her or doing what she wants.
Tamara, Angela’s daughter, makes movies. That she makes films is progress. Though she struggles to make ends meet and produce her thesis film, she is confident in her craft. For her, creating movies becomes a chance to give voice to herself and be a voice for those women who came before her.
Throughout the novel, the women struggle to escape or change what other people think. In Mildred’s case, it was the notion that a proper woman is a homemaker. For Angela, it’s small town gossip and sexual standards. With Tamara, it’s being a black woman filmmaker when her mother and society tells her that it might not happen.
Rather than the heavy-handed, sometimes somber tone of other black women writers with similar themes, Southgate manages to make her writing fun and accessible to a pop-fiction audience. With this novel Southgate reveals the complexity of black women’s struggle for self-worth and self-definition.
