Award-winning author Jessica Levine’s new book “Three Cousins,” follows three young women on the cusp of adulthood as they explore their sexual freedom and adapt to 1970s new ideas of feminism.
In this Five by Five article, Jessica talks about her three protagonists and their different personalities, the era of the 70s and its influence on the story, and the modern elements in prorated into the story.
How did your own life help shape the story?
In “Three Cousins,” three young women come of age while in school at Yale. While I never attended Yale, my best friend did, and later on my husband taught there, which is to say that I got to know Yale by proxy. As for the three protagonists, they were inspired by both my family and the friends I had in college. They are also personality types who embrace the new opportunities presented by second wave feminism in different, archetypal ways. Lastly, they are reflections of different aspects of my own character and experience. I describe Julia, the most conventional of the three cousins, as “being too in love to have feminist preoccupations.” Her romantic, choosy nature reflects the cautious, virginal teenager I was growing up in a sheltered environment. Robin, on the other hand, is reading feminist texts and exploring her bisexuality. I became Robin attending a women’s college and having relationships with both sexes. Finally, Anna wishes to travel solo and explore the world. Anna’s journey is based on the adventures I had after graduation when I lived abroad, teaching English first in Paris, then in Rome.
Your book explores themes such as sexual freedom and second-wave feminism. How are these woven into the story?
Because I attended a women’s college (Wellesley) and had a couple of lesbian relationships at the time, I was steeped in the women’s movement of the 1970s, and “Three Cousins” reflects not only my personal experiences, but also the rich feminist literature, both fiction and non-fiction, that came out of that period. For example, chapter two of my novel mentions Adrienne Rich’s “Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution.” Rich argues that motherhood is not “natural” but shaped by the (patriarchal) social and historical structures in which it takes place. Her book had a huge impact. Coming of age in the 1970s, we very much wanted to be different from our mothers, and that process began with understanding the obstacles and limitations our mothers had faced so that we could move beyond them. And one thing we definitely wanted was more sexual choice and more professional freedom than they’d had. My novel stages these themes through a depiction of the conflicts surrounding sexual partners, relationships with mothers and career paths.
I read that the book came out of “the disappointments of modern-day feminism.” What are these?
Those of us who believe in gender equality, LGBTQ+ rights, access to contraception and abortion, and support for working mothers, those of us who still hope to see the passage of the ERA and the end of homophobia and violence against women, we are all utterly dismayed at the current direction of public policy in the United States. A therapy client of mine, survivor of sexual abuse, said to me after the election, “Great. We’re going to have a government run by rapists.” The sense of needless cruelty and going backwards in history is palpable. And all these issues affect women and the LGBTQ+ community where it hits home: in their bodies, their romantic partnerships, their family lives, and their ability to earn a living. Never more than now has the personal been political.
The book is set in the 1970s. Why this time period and how does that factor into the story?
In my previous novels, “The Geometry of Love” and “Nothing Forgotten,” I fleshed out the stories of Julia and Anna in the decades after college. After my last novel, I returned to a long section I’d cut from an earlier version of “Geometry,” consisting of 200 pages about Julia and her cousins in college in the late 1970s. When I stumbled on that unused story many years later, it called to me, perhaps because my daughters had just entered their early 20s and I was processing the difference between my youth and theirs. Or because the period after the end of the Vietnam War now seems like a more hopeful time. Yes, the war and Watergate marked the decade with cynicism and anger, and historians like David Frum have argued that the seeds of the recent conservative takeover were planted then. But everything is relative, and compared to the normalization of misogyny, homophobia, and racism that we are currently witnessing, that time seems to have been a one in which at least we were able to imagine a positive, more inclusive future for our democracy. I was happy to spend time in that decade as I wrote the book.
Given recent events, such as the overturning of Roe V Wade, do you feel this book is timely?
I do think it’s timely. I hope this novel can remind young women today of the fighting spirit their mothers and grandmothers had. If we give in or give up, then there truly is no way forward. Feminist mothers need to hand the torch on to their daughters and remind them that we have agency so long as we protest, remembering the gains and victories of more hopeful times.
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