"Moral disorder" Margaret Atwood

An audio book. 11 pieces.

A woman - or a few women - dealing with different stages in life. It begins with the PoV of an old woman with an old man. Likable stories.

In "My Last Duchess" a girl tries to help her science-oriented boyfriend with his poetry revising.

"The headless horseman" (my favourite) deals with the relationship between 2 sisters through time from the PoV of the elder sister. Her younger sister was always a bit different. “I couldn’t figure out who you were supposed to be,” says the younger sister, looking back to the days when the older sister made people. Once she made a head and the younger sister said it's "not his fault he has no body, it's just the way he is".

Some stories are about Nell and Tig. Una and Tig had 2 sons, which was the only reason they were still living together. Una encourages Nell and Tig to pair up. They do, and buy a farm. "Cows want to be with other cows. They're like shoppers" says Tig.

Other reviews

• Ursula LeGuin (Seven of the stories are told by an "I" who remains nameless, four from the third-person point of view of "Nell". It's easy to project Nell into all the stories, because they run in chronological order from childhood to age, the central figure is always female, and there are definite clues that Nell is the protagonist even when not named. Such clues are needed, for there isn't very much in the first-person stories of childhood and adolescence to connect the girl to the woman Nell. The last two stories concern a woman's experience with her father entering dementia, her mother in extreme old age. The daughter may well be Nell, the parents may be the parents of the child in the earlier stories, but I had no feeling of recognition, of rejoining the same people at a later stage of life. The book did not quite form a whole for me, an architecture, a life story however episodic.)
• Alice Truax (the linked stories “Monopoly,” “Moral Disorder” and “White Horse,” which open in the early 1970’s, are as much a portrait of an era as anything else)
• bookescapade