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423 reviews for:
Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube: Chasing Fear and Finding Home in the Great White North
Blair Braverman
3.89 AVERAGE
423 reviews for:
Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube: Chasing Fear and Finding Home in the Great White North
Blair Braverman
3.89 AVERAGE
This is a book about how men are scum:
"I thought of a another man, the day before, who had wrapped his arms around me from behind. Treasure, he'd whispered, you're north of the moral circle now.
"But he was tugging my long underwear off my hips, kissing me even as I pressed my mouth shut. Pulling a condom from his pocket, rolling it on. As soon as I saw it, my heart sank: he had come here for this. I pressed my knees together. He shoved them apart easily. 'Please stop-' I whispered, but he put a finger to my lips. 'Shh,' he said. 'We don't want everyone to hear us.'"
"But one night, two of the male guides stood and watched me, murmuring about the way my wet shirt stuck to my skin. I felt intimately exposed, humiliated, as I dipped my head once more into the bucket to rinse the last soap from my hair, feeling their eyes on my back, making my body theirs. By the time I stood up, they were gone. I wondered what they would have done if I wasn't Dan's girl. I stopped washing my hair, and wore more hats."
"Though there were a few female mushers, the men on the glacier dominated social life; their authority came with and edge of sexism that seemed at once inevitable and disconcerting. In my first weeks, men flicked their gaze down my body, then caught my eye and smiled. Someone walked behind me in the snow, and when I slowed to walk beside him, he urged me forward: 'We don't get this kind of view much around here.'"
and although I was hoping for more dog sledding, I'm pretty partial to Norway & misandry, so this was quite enjoyable.
"I thought of a another man, the day before, who had wrapped his arms around me from behind. Treasure, he'd whispered, you're north of the moral circle now.
"But he was tugging my long underwear off my hips, kissing me even as I pressed my mouth shut. Pulling a condom from his pocket, rolling it on. As soon as I saw it, my heart sank: he had come here for this. I pressed my knees together. He shoved them apart easily. 'Please stop-' I whispered, but he put a finger to my lips. 'Shh,' he said. 'We don't want everyone to hear us.'"
"But one night, two of the male guides stood and watched me, murmuring about the way my wet shirt stuck to my skin. I felt intimately exposed, humiliated, as I dipped my head once more into the bucket to rinse the last soap from my hair, feeling their eyes on my back, making my body theirs. By the time I stood up, they were gone. I wondered what they would have done if I wasn't Dan's girl. I stopped washing my hair, and wore more hats."
"Though there were a few female mushers, the men on the glacier dominated social life; their authority came with and edge of sexism that seemed at once inevitable and disconcerting. In my first weeks, men flicked their gaze down my body, then caught my eye and smiled. Someone walked behind me in the snow, and when I slowed to walk beside him, he urged me forward: 'We don't get this kind of view much around here.'"
and although I was hoping for more dog sledding, I'm pretty partial to Norway & misandry, so this was quite enjoyable.
I want more going of age stories like this.
The title of this book made me think I was about to read a funny book about how “spunky” girl had made her way in the arctic. Nope. No. Nah.
Instead I just read a memoir about one woman’s journey of accomplishing a nearly impossible task: learning to protect herself in this world that makes it clear that to be a girl means to be constantly in peril. Said memoir just happens to be set in northern Norway.
Braverman slices a place for herself into the world around her and it was an absolute pleasure to witness it.
The title of this book made me think I was about to read a funny book about how “spunky” girl had made her way in the arctic. Nope. No. Nah.
Instead I just read a memoir about one woman’s journey of accomplishing a nearly impossible task: learning to protect herself in this world that makes it clear that to be a girl means to be constantly in peril. Said memoir just happens to be set in northern Norway.
Braverman slices a place for herself into the world around her and it was an absolute pleasure to witness it.
I picked up this book to soothe the ache of my upcoming exchange to Norway being cancelled. If I can't be a Jewish girl who grew up in a desert suburbia, daydreaming about dog-sledding and below zero temperatures, slowly making her way northward before landing in the northernmost city in the world, then goddamnit I would read about a strong woman who had succeeded. Instantly I felt a kinship with Blair, her enthrallment with an unknown Northern Arctic close to my own. The similarities between us gave me comfort; our good-girl, rule-following personalities and desire to break from the place we grew up in. Reading this I imagined Blair like a friend telling me her stories, at no point demanding authority or self-importance like some memoirs do.
Blair is a story-teller. It's obvious from the first chapter. And while I was expecting more pages to contain stories of exciting Arctic adventures and breath-taking dog-sled races, the story I found instead was almost more special. Blair didn't just write a story about traveling to Norway, she wrote her story about her relationship with the North. If you're looking for a book about dogs and training and the difficult life in the North, maybe go somewhere else. But if you're searching for an intimate experience of what it feels like, so often, to be a woman in a world that's not always kind, this is for you. Blair finds her way in an inspiring way that encourages me to fight my way North. Someday, I'm going to sit at the top of the world too.
Blair is a story-teller. It's obvious from the first chapter. And while I was expecting more pages to contain stories of exciting Arctic adventures and breath-taking dog-sled races, the story I found instead was almost more special. Blair didn't just write a story about traveling to Norway, she wrote her story about her relationship with the North. If you're looking for a book about dogs and training and the difficult life in the North, maybe go somewhere else. But if you're searching for an intimate experience of what it feels like, so often, to be a woman in a world that's not always kind, this is for you. Blair finds her way in an inspiring way that encourages me to fight my way North. Someday, I'm going to sit at the top of the world too.
Much as I love Bler on Twitter, it took me a while to get into her memoir. But once I did? I was in for good. This is a well written, thoughtful coming of age story that’s unlike anything else I’ve read, at least in terms of its setting.
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
Interesting memoir about time spent north of the arctic circle.
This book was fascinating. Braverman's reflections on gender and relationships are poignant and touching. At times the narrative was a bit jerky--there were a few times where I was confused about what part of the world she was in (it probably didn't help that I was reading this book in 95 degree heat, so I was probably a bit delusional).
I started following Blair on Twitter around 6 months to 1 year ago and I think she’s great (wonderful dog content). I was excited to start this book and now being on the other side I was a little disappointed. It was okay. If you’re looking for a book that spends a lot of time focusing on a woman in northern Norway boy this is the book for you. I think overall the writing and the stories were fine (a little too much Norway imo) but the back and forth of time and all over the place-ness left me disoriented and I often was trying to calculate what year it was and if this was before or after Norway the first, second, or third time. Actually im not even sure how many times she went to Norway. After the first trip when she was 16 it felt like she never left. I think it could have done with some time and place markers before each chapter or new story.
I’ve read some of her other pieces she writes for magazines so I know she’s not a bad writer and if she comes out with another book I will be sure to read it.
I’ve read some of her other pieces she writes for magazines so I know she’s not a bad writer and if she comes out with another book I will be sure to read it.
A while ago now I read this book, expecting it to be a much different sort of read than it turned out to be. I expected a more adventure centred narrative where the relationships and personalities that the author would be most focused on would be those of the various dogs that she would encounter in learning how to mush and eventually run her own team - culminating perhaps in a major race such as the Iditarod (ok maybe I have watched one to many Disney movie :P )
Instead, what I found was a different sort of story. A more internal story about Blair's mental and emotional journey in relation to the people and especially the men who populate this world of ice and a certain 'Jack London' macho sensibility. It is a journey of a woman finding herself in this culture, surviving sexual assault, and how she makes her way through it.
As she layers and intertwines her various experiences from different points in her life, especially where they resonate together, the result is that her memoir is not always packaged in a tidy linear format, and may not have been one I would normally have selected. But I am glad that I did end up going into it - not only because of the quality of her writing, which is both richly descriptive and as someone else has said 'entertainingly dry' (can't remember where I read that review it was years ago), but because after reading the book I was inspired to keep track of her online posts and have since been rewarded with some fabulously funny doggo posts, accompanied by many photos.
A story about Grinch:
https://twitter.com/blairbraverman/status/1050226513717669888?lang=en
Her twenty dogs currently in training:
https://twitter.com/BlairBraverman/status/1080283717329797120
Appendum:
Reading an interview, given by the author on why the focus of the book is how it is, also helped to give me a new appreciation for it:
...
This is a book about travel, adventure, and the kind of peril readers are used to encountering in stories about the North, but it’s also about the bravery and peril of life in a female body. What were the challenges of exploring this dual subject matter? Were there works by other authors that you drew particular inspiration from in this regard?
I pitched the book as a straightforward adventure story, because it was the only way I could conceive of it at the time: I thought I could get away with telling a flat story of events, rather than exploring the complex reasons I was drawn to male-dominated communities, why I was drawn to danger, etc. I didn’t want to write a “female emergence narrative,” as my agent was calling it at the time, or a “traumoir” as my boyfriend called it. But after a few publishers turned it down because they didn’t find my character sympathetic (probably because she wasn’t), my agent ended up calling me in a semifrantic state. She was like, look, you don’t have to add it to the final manuscript, but if you have a history of being a drug addict or something you better tell me now before it’s too late. I told her that there was nothing more to the story, and then I hung up, and then 10 minutes later I took a deep breath and called and told her about the way that sexual assault and abuse played into my connections to men and to wilderness, the way those dynamics were entwined with the adventure itself. I’d been toying with the idea of adding all that to the story, anyway, but I hadn’t even talked about it with my family, so the thought of talking about it publicly felt paralyzing. I ended up writing a 40-page supplement to the proposal that very night, and flying to New York first thing in the morning to meet with three publishers who had responded to my agent’s announcement of “breaking news.” Even at that point, though, I told myself that nobody except for the editors themselves would ever see that material. I said I’d write about it, but secretly I was sure I wouldn’t.
And then…I started writing. And the story was flat, because events and adventure aren’t particularly interesting if the characters involved aren’t human. And the truth was, gender and sex and violence were the things I had in my head at that time, the things I was desperately trying to make sense of, and it was only in starting to write about them that I felt that my mind could rest. I ended up writing two versions of the manuscript, one for publication and one just for me, and then at the last moment I took an Ativan and sent my editor the personal one instead. And I’m so glad I did.
What helped you make the decision to submit the “just for me” version of the book?
The personal version of the book was undeniably better, and I knew that, and as scary as it was, I couldn’t turn in a manuscript that was less than it could be. That wasn’t fair to the reader, and it wasn’t fair to the people who had helped me along the way. If I wanted to stand behind my own book, I had to turn in the personal manuscript—the real manuscript. That less-personal version might as well have been fiction. Everything that made it real had been stripped away.
I had a sense, too, that I’d never be able to get over the story if I didn’t tell it. I’d never recommend writing as therapy. It’s hard, it’s time-consuming, it doesn’t work, you’re half likely to make the trauma worse. But if I didn’t tell the hard story, I felt that I’d still be letting those events—those men—have control over my life. And what I wanted more than anything was to let go of that.
I wrote about trauma by obsessing over craft. Yeah, I’d go to bed and have nightmares. But when I was writing, it was as if I’d turned off the emotional part of my brain. The process was almost mathematical. For the scene of rape—or assault, or shitty sex, or whatever you want to call it, I still have trouble using the word “rape”—I’d focus, line by line, on the rhythm of the words. I couldn’t think about the content. I thought about tempo, speed. I wanted the reader to move through those moments at the same pace I had: tentative here, overwhelmed there, time alternately freezing and rushing by. I concentrated more on the rhythm of that scene than on the actual story....
https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/iced-out/blair-braverman-gender-trauma-and-dual-realities-life-arctic
Instead, what I found was a different sort of story. A more internal story about Blair's mental and emotional journey in relation to the people and especially the men who populate this world of ice and a certain 'Jack London' macho sensibility. It is a journey of a woman finding herself in this culture, surviving sexual assault, and how she makes her way through it.
As she layers and intertwines her various experiences from different points in her life, especially where they resonate together, the result is that her memoir is not always packaged in a tidy linear format, and may not have been one I would normally have selected. But I am glad that I did end up going into it - not only because of the quality of her writing, which is both richly descriptive and as someone else has said 'entertainingly dry' (can't remember where I read that review it was years ago), but because after reading the book I was inspired to keep track of her online posts and have since been rewarded with some fabulously funny doggo posts, accompanied by many photos.
A story about Grinch:
https://twitter.com/blairbraverman/status/1050226513717669888?lang=en
Her twenty dogs currently in training:
https://twitter.com/BlairBraverman/status/1080283717329797120
Appendum:
Reading an interview, given by the author on why the focus of the book is how it is, also helped to give me a new appreciation for it:
...
This is a book about travel, adventure, and the kind of peril readers are used to encountering in stories about the North, but it’s also about the bravery and peril of life in a female body. What were the challenges of exploring this dual subject matter? Were there works by other authors that you drew particular inspiration from in this regard?
I pitched the book as a straightforward adventure story, because it was the only way I could conceive of it at the time: I thought I could get away with telling a flat story of events, rather than exploring the complex reasons I was drawn to male-dominated communities, why I was drawn to danger, etc. I didn’t want to write a “female emergence narrative,” as my agent was calling it at the time, or a “traumoir” as my boyfriend called it. But after a few publishers turned it down because they didn’t find my character sympathetic (probably because she wasn’t), my agent ended up calling me in a semifrantic state. She was like, look, you don’t have to add it to the final manuscript, but if you have a history of being a drug addict or something you better tell me now before it’s too late. I told her that there was nothing more to the story, and then I hung up, and then 10 minutes later I took a deep breath and called and told her about the way that sexual assault and abuse played into my connections to men and to wilderness, the way those dynamics were entwined with the adventure itself. I’d been toying with the idea of adding all that to the story, anyway, but I hadn’t even talked about it with my family, so the thought of talking about it publicly felt paralyzing. I ended up writing a 40-page supplement to the proposal that very night, and flying to New York first thing in the morning to meet with three publishers who had responded to my agent’s announcement of “breaking news.” Even at that point, though, I told myself that nobody except for the editors themselves would ever see that material. I said I’d write about it, but secretly I was sure I wouldn’t.
And then…I started writing. And the story was flat, because events and adventure aren’t particularly interesting if the characters involved aren’t human. And the truth was, gender and sex and violence were the things I had in my head at that time, the things I was desperately trying to make sense of, and it was only in starting to write about them that I felt that my mind could rest. I ended up writing two versions of the manuscript, one for publication and one just for me, and then at the last moment I took an Ativan and sent my editor the personal one instead. And I’m so glad I did.
What helped you make the decision to submit the “just for me” version of the book?
The personal version of the book was undeniably better, and I knew that, and as scary as it was, I couldn’t turn in a manuscript that was less than it could be. That wasn’t fair to the reader, and it wasn’t fair to the people who had helped me along the way. If I wanted to stand behind my own book, I had to turn in the personal manuscript—the real manuscript. That less-personal version might as well have been fiction. Everything that made it real had been stripped away.
I had a sense, too, that I’d never be able to get over the story if I didn’t tell it. I’d never recommend writing as therapy. It’s hard, it’s time-consuming, it doesn’t work, you’re half likely to make the trauma worse. But if I didn’t tell the hard story, I felt that I’d still be letting those events—those men—have control over my life. And what I wanted more than anything was to let go of that.
I wrote about trauma by obsessing over craft. Yeah, I’d go to bed and have nightmares. But when I was writing, it was as if I’d turned off the emotional part of my brain. The process was almost mathematical. For the scene of rape—or assault, or shitty sex, or whatever you want to call it, I still have trouble using the word “rape”—I’d focus, line by line, on the rhythm of the words. I couldn’t think about the content. I thought about tempo, speed. I wanted the reader to move through those moments at the same pace I had: tentative here, overwhelmed there, time alternately freezing and rushing by. I concentrated more on the rhythm of that scene than on the actual story....
https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/iced-out/blair-braverman-gender-trauma-and-dual-realities-life-arctic