Daniel Mallory Ortberg's 'The Merry Spinster' puts horrific twists on your favorite fairy tales
Everyone knows how classic fairytales are supposed to go: they start with "Once upon a time" and end with a "happily ever after."
But for Daniel Mallory Ortberg's story collection The Merry Spinster, "happily ever after" comes with a heavy price.
The Merry Spinster is a collection of short stories, each that riff off of the classic fairy tales you read as kids. In Ortberg's retellings, The Little Mermaid becomes "The Daughter Cells," a story that seems, at first, ambivalent at best about its protagonist ("Daughters are as good a thing as any to populate a kingdom with — if you've got them on hand.") before descending in incredible violence. Meanwhile, Cinderella is merged with Shakespeare's King Lear and the Bible's book of Psalms to become The Thankless Child.
"I don’t know that I had a special interest in subverting anything," Ortberg told Entertainment Weekly about his process in writing the book. "I think sometimes there’s this sort of idea that older stories or fairy tales are from a 'bad' past and we are smart and good now, and the work to do in retelling one is to correct the mistakes of the past and include new, enlightened ideas of whatever we think is important at this time, and that’s not something that I felt was necessary for any of these stories."
And yet, these stories do feel subversive. Riddled throughout each story are sharp observations and commentary about who has control over what type of body, what type of people do we value, and more. ("A sea-witch was just another sort of king's daughter," the narrator of The Daughter Cells muses, refusing to assign the labels of good and evil on a character we traditionally view as wicked.)
This week on the MashReads Podcast, we read and discuss Ortberg's Merry Spinster. Join us in the episode above as we talk about his dark retellings.
Then, inspired by The Merry Spinster, we talk about our favorite books that riff off of fairy tales. And as always, we close the show with recommendations:
Peter recommends the video game "God of War." "It is just an incredibly well wrought game in terms of basically everything. It feels great, it looks great, but I think what's captivated me most about it is how the story itself is such a mature standing for a character that had previously been an incarnation of greedy bloodbaths. I think it's symbolic of a lot of growth in the video game industry as a whole." (You can check out Peter's full article about how the video game industry has grown with God of War, and how much it still has to mature here.)
Martha recommends the 1997 version of Cinderalla featuring Brandy and Whitney Houston. "These are all legends and it's fantastic. It's the black Cinderella. It's perfect." She also recommends doing face masks during your flights. "You put your face mask on and so that you wake up wherever you're landing, you feel fantastic and you look fantastic."
MJ recommends the New York Times podcast "Still Processing"'s episode about Beychella, Beyonce history-making Coachella performance. "They talk about Beychella in terms of pop culture, pop culture history, race. It's the smartest deconstruction and reading of what this performance is."
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Topics Books
