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352 pages, ebook
First published October 22, 2019
She could hear the group of men running after her, the pounding of their feet growing louder as they continued to taunt her. She had never been so thankful to have a private office. She ran into it, turned the lock, then covered her face with her hands and let the tears of embarrassment and shame she had been holding back flow. As she caught her breath she could hear shouts on the other side of the door and then her colleagues’ insistent knocking…Bianca cowered in the corner, her heart beating wildly, and her panicky gasps for air becoming high-pitched…She knew that the team wanted her to be thoroughly humiliated. Her tears fueled their cruelty. The wooden door frame began bending now, the plywood and nails no match for the pressure of so many men on the other side. With a loud craack, the wood splintered, the door gave way, and a crowd of men tumbled into Bianca’s sanctuary. She buried her head in her arms, covering her ears to try to block their shouts, but it was no use. She would have to take it like a man (5-6).If this were a novel, I’d say, wow. That’s a pretty good scene. What happens next? But this is nonfiction so this scene seems ridiculous to me. When I search the notes section at the end of the book (which are not specified by page number, only chapters, so you have to look through all of the notes to find what you think might be the source for the specific story/quotation/event you’re looking for) Holt credits this “disastrous story meeting” to a “recollection” from another book. But even if the story is factually true (based on this recollection), Holt has dramatized it too much; it crosses the line from fact-based to fiction—and that’s how she wrote the entire book.
[Mary Blair has had several miscarriages.] She could not grieve openly for the loss of her babies, so Mary channeled her sorrow into her sketch pad and brushes. She painted the scene between mother and child in a dark, moody palette, the images destined to become iconic. Yet at the edges of her paper, the watercolors pooled like tears running from her eyes, betraying her sorrow (114).I often felt that large chunks of these women’s lives were left untouched. Holt starts the book with that dramatic scene with Bianca, but never follows up on what happened after that. Bianca is abruptly fired by Walt Disney; she doesn’t even know until she returns from vacation and discovers that her office is no longer hers—a coworker tells her she was fired. After this, Bianca is also essentially fired from the book and completely disappears until the last paragraph or so in the last chapter of the book. Mary Blair was in an abusive marriage and Holt describes a violent scene in which her husband breaks a chair over their young son’s head because he refused to eat his vegetables. The boy is described as having “deep wounds across his head” and she realizes that she too has “blood running down her own face” (249). So what happened after this? Who the hell knows. Holt drops the narrative. The stories of these women’s lives are fragmented and scattered.
[Mary Blair’s trip to Cuba to experience the culture.] She sketched furiously over the course of five weeks as she traveled the country, visiting cigar factories, strolling through fields of sugarcane, and twirling her heels in dance halls (165).