My Notorious Life
By Kate Manning
(Scribner, $26.99, 448 pages)
Who is this author?
Kate Manning, who lives in New York City, won praise for her earlier novel, “Whitegirl.” She has a background in TV documentary television production and has won two Emmy Awards. She also has been a contributor to The New York Times, Glamour, and More magazine and has taught writing at Bard High School Early College.
What is this book about?
If you think contraception and abortion and women’s rights are just contemporary hot button issues, then get acquainted with Axie Muldoon, a fictional mid-19th century character based on the real-life female physician who was called “the Wickedest Woman in New York.” We meet Axie as a starving fatherless street kid who is taken away from her family, and apprenticed to a doctor. She later marries and with her husband sells “Lunar Tablets for Female Complaint” and becomes a successful midwife (and abortion provider) and a wealthy woman. As her fame and outspokenness grows, she runs afoul of the self-important and self-anointed moralist Anthony Comstock, founder of the Society for the Suppression of Vice. But there’s no suppressing the indomitable Axie, who knows how to fight for herself and for the women she helps.
Why you’ll like it:
Axie, and the woman she is based on, are great characters and Manning draws her with wit and verve that echoes the real-life qualities. Besides being a fascinating historical novel that pulls back the curtain on women’s health and issues some 150 years ago, it’s also a lively tale in its own right. You won’t soon forget Axie’s voice – here is a sample from Chapter 2:
“We stood in the doorway of the bakery. If you stayed there long enough, you could get maybe a roll that was old, maybe the heels they would give you of the loaves. We were not particular. We would eat crumbs they swept out for the birds. We was worse than birds, we was desperate as rats. That day the smell was like a torture, of the bread baking, them cakes and the pies and them chocolate éclairs like all of your dreams coming up your nose and turning to water in your mouth. We Muldoons had not eaten since yesterday. It was February or maybe March, but no matter the date, we were frozen, no mittens, no hats, us girls without no woolies under our skirts, just britches full of moth bites. We had baby Joe warm in our arms, heavy as beer in a half keg. Dutch had my muffler I gave her, she was so cold. We wrapped it around my head and her head both, and there we stood looking like that two-headed calf I saw once in Madison Square. Two heads, four legs, one body. Two heads is better than one, but we children should’ve been smarter that day and seen what was coming.”
What others are saying:
Amazon.com’s review in The Big Fall Books Preview 2013 says: A historical novel of Dickensian sprawl, My Notorious Life is loosely based on the experiences of an infamous midwife in late 19th century New York. While she’s eventually dubbed Madame X by a rabid press. our heroine’s strength is that for all her success at self transformation, she remains forever the orphaned guttersnipe Axie Muldoon–a pioneer for women’s rights before anyone much knew that such rights could exist. But this novel is never pedantic or preachy, just compelling, assured and irresistible.
Says Booklist: “These fictionalized pages from the diary of the infamous Madame X, a self-proclaimed “expert in the subterranean sanguinary aspects of feminine existence,” tell a compelling and tragic (in its way) success story. Manning convincingly presents willful nineteenth-century child Axie Muldoon, based on an actual person, who was born of piss-poor Irish immigrants but was as prideful as the queen herself. And it’s a good thing too, or else Axie—later to become Mrs. Anne Jones then Madame DeBeausacq then Madame X—might have died of starvation or hypothermia on the streets of an indifferent New York City. Or worse, she might have died in childbirth like her mother. But witnessing her mother’s unnecessary death inflamed a coal in Axie’s heart that burned for every woman she encountered who faced uniquely feminine perils. Manning’s fascinating dramatization of the hazards of her protagonist’s pillar-to-post childhood and slave-labor apprenticeship, followed by her creation of Madame X’s above-and-around-the-law career vividly and movingly portray an unsympathetic world for women.”
Kirkus Reviews says: “A rollicking romp through 19th-century American contraception inspired by the true story of a Manhattan midwife. In 1860, Axie, née Annie, is “rescued” from a New York slum along with her siblings and sent West on an orphan train. In the Illinois prairie, Axie’s younger sister Dutchie and brother Joe find homes, but the irascible 12-year old is sent back to New York along with Charlie, another street-wise urchin. Axie reunites with her mother, but her joy is short-lived: After “Mam” delivers an infant who dies shortly after birth, Mam herself expires of childbed fever at the home of Mrs. Evans, a midwife and, some say, abortionist. Truly orphaned this time, Axie is apprenticed to Mrs. Evans and by the age of 16, is an accomplished midwife’s assistant who has picked up many helpful hints about all aspects of pregnancy, including avoiding it and ending it. After her mentor’s death, Axie, who is now married to Charlie, a would-be journalist, concocts and peddles a female medication that, often enough, has a side effect of inducing miscarriage. Aided by Charlie’s marketing smarts, Axie is soon running a thriving and lucrative business, dispensing pills, sex education, birth control advice and, when necessary to help her clients avert certain death or ruin, the occasional first trimester abortion. Her clients range from tenement dwellers to Manhattan’s upper crust, and while amassing tremendous wealth, Axie, operating as Madame DeBeausacq, sees her main mission as freeing women from the consequences of men’s unbridled lust and profligacy. However, when Manhattan’s penny tabloids, egged on by two disgruntled doctors, foment a scandal accusing “Madame X” of child murder and infant trafficking, Axie is consigned to Manhattan’s notorious Tombs jail. The ensuing events highlight controversies regarding “reproductive health” that are still raging today. Axie’s profane Irish brogue is vividly recreated with virtually no anachronistic slips, and though a certain degree of polemical crusading is unavoidable given Axie’s proclivities, her voice never fails to entertain.
Publishers Weekly says: “Loosely based on the life of Ann Trow Lohman (aka Madame Restell), the infamous abortionist who became known as “the Wickedest Woman in New York,” Manning’s second rags-to-riches novel (after Whitegirl) nimbly resurrects the bold woman behind the scandalous headlines. Manning’s Axie Muldoon endured a scrappy childhood as the fierce and foul-mouthed eldest daughter of Irish immigrants living amidst the filth of lower Manhattan. She began her midwifery apprenticeship at 14, and learned when to administer “Lunar Tablets for the relief of Female Obstruction,” before becoming the renowned Madame X with a thriving business (her newspaper ad reads “Renowned Female Physician”) of her own. Manning paints a vivid portrait of this daring yet deeply compassionate woman who is willing to flout convention and defy the law in the name of women’s reproductive rights. While Muldoon’s public battle against the “lying weevils and scandalmongers of the New York press” as well as old codger Comstock—the Chairman of the Society for the Suppression of Vice—take center stage throughout the latter half, it’s the details of Madame X’s private life, told in her thick Irish brogue—about the search for her long-lost siblings, her fiery relationship with her devoted husband, and her growth as a mother—that lend a human face to a this sensational figure.
When is it available?
You can find it now at the Downtown Hartford Public Library and its Barbour branch.
Do you have something to say about this book, this author or books in general? Please post your comments here and I will respond. Let’s get a good books conversation going!
Recent Comments