Mike Omer is a writer from Israel who pens excellent thrillers in English. These are undemanding, light reads that tilt politically to the left, but then, what doesn’t?
Today I finished his book Behind You, and I want to recommend it as a hilarious unintended parody of the Girl Boss trope.
Gemma, the novel’s main character, got into some trouble as a teenager and had to run away. At 30, she’s a married manicurist in Chicago and a mother of a little boy. When Gemma’s teenage troubles catch up with her, she decides to be a lonesome hero and solve them herself. Of course, she could ask her husband for help but she decides he’d get too emotional and it will be too much effort to manage his feelings.
The funny part is that Gemma is not a self-reliant, well-organized, emotionally self-contained woman. She’s a clucking, over-dramatic hen of a person who sees the most trivial daily mishaps as calls for extraordinary heroicism. I’ll give an example so that you see the kind of femininity that Gemma practices:
She rummaged in her bag. Moisturizer. Eye cream. Just massaging her puffy eyes with the eye cream made her feel so much better. Next came her makeup base. She’d left her blending brush in the bathroom at her mother’s house. Well, she would tough it out. She was hard core; she could rub it in with her fingers, no problem.
This isn’t meant to be funny. Gemma routinely congratulates herself for being tough and hardcore while flipping out over such tiny mishaps. Omer has a gift for spotting this fussy, self-involved womanhood that despises men as loser primitives while acting like the most loserishly primitive people in existence.
Like any writer, Omer wants his books to sell, and his audience is almost entirely female. He writes in a way that will make his female readers feel flattered. He adopts their habitual exasperated sigh of “ugh, men!” to attract them to the book.
Clarissa's Blog 