“Twisted Sisters” is quite the appropopriate moniker for this wonderfully humorous and insightful analysis of the out-of-print dramatic fiction narrative by none other than Lynne Cheney, wife of America’s Co-President Dick Cheney. This is something else. Can you imagine the sounds from the shrieking gates of hell that is America’s conservative reich-wing media if this wonderful piece of literature had been drafted by, say, Hillary Clinton?

Highly recommended…

Years before she rode into Washington on her white horse, six-shooters loaded with righteous indignation, to clear the varmints out, Mrs. Cheney amused herself by writing fiction. Sadly, most of it has been languishing in obscurity; her novels are out of print, and her official biography at whitehouse.gov, which mentions many of the books she’s written in support of her intellectual-cleansing project, omits any mention of her distinguished career as a novelist. But true devotees of Mrs. Cheney’s work have at least rescued one of her novels from the remainder bin of history.

This would be Sisters, published in 1981 by Signet as part of their New American Century - I’m sorry, New American Library imprint. After disappearing without a trace, the book made headlines briefly when its publishers considered re-issuing it once Cheney rose to her current Olympian heights. Alas, Cheney convinced them to reconsider, claiming the novel was “not her best work.”

Not being familiar with the rest of Mrs. Cheney’s oeuvre I am in no position to judge; however, Mrs. Cheney’s embarrassment probably had more to do with the book’s content than with any imperfections of style or form. Sisters includes a storyline involving a love affair between the protagonist’s sister and her former schoolmarm - a topic hardly liable to endear Mrs. Cheney to the cadre of religious-right fanatics who now own her husband’s miserable carcass.

Actually, the religious right would be no more pleased with the heterosexual plot line. Though decidedly not a lesbian, the novel’s protagonist, Sophie Dymond, is meant to be a thoroughly liberated woman. On her way to becoming the owner of a large publishing empire, Sophie has, among other things, run away from her convent school with an acting troupe, spent several years in a menage a trois with her first husband and her lover, divorced said first husband in order to marry said lover, and become a dedicated user and tireless advocate of contraception.

I say “meant to be” because, though it grieves me to report this, the impression you would get of this novel from reading about it in the papers is woefully inaccurate. Sisters is not, in fact, a “racy” novel. Nor is it, as the blurb writers would have you believe, “the novel of a strong and beautiful woman who broke all the rules of the American frontier.” The most valuable thing this book has to offer us is an answer to an important question: how could a career woman like Lynne Cheney, who has benefited so much from the feminist movement that was an integral part of that “liberal agenda” constantly menacing us from the direction of Massachusetts, allow herself to be made the tool of a radical right-wing movement that seeks to bundle women like her back into the kitchen?

You can see the answer all over Sisters, which acknowledges its debt to feminist scholarship and then proceeds to showcase Lynne Cheney’s extreme discomfort with most of the implications of the feminist movement.

In Sisters, Cheney betrays herself as simultaneously fascinated and threatened by all the aspects of the women’s liberation movement that threatened the system into which she had married. In the end, the ‘bad’ elements of feminism - lesbianism, militancy, solidarity across class and cultural distinctions, and anti-capitalism - are contained and neutralized by the plot, which punishes and silences the sister who was tempted by such things, and rewards the sister who knows that she should demand nothing more than the freedom to realize her own personal (hetero)sexual liberation and professional ambitions.

Read the complete review of Lynn Cheney’s novel here…
http://www.democraticunderground.com/plaidder/04/37.html