Yoga studio or sex cult? A queasy satire on ‘normal women’
Most women are convinced that they’re the only one to see through the racket of “being a woman”. Yes, they’re wearing the same yoga pants, and their faces are plumped with the same fillers as the “normal women” – as Ainslie Hogarth calls them in her novel of that title – but unlike those dupes and fools, they’re aware of, and agonise over, the compromises they make.
Dani is a stay-at-home mother, but she has a degree in philosophy: “Dani was special. A creative.” She experiences her self-awareness as a curse, and envies the vacant women in her “mommy group”, who have no problem meeting society’s expectations that they be both sexy and nurturing. With her financial dependence on her husband, she knows she’s failing the feminist cause – but she has a baby and a four-bedroom home to manage. What’s a “creative” to do?
Dani’s anxiety makes her vulnerable to The Temple, a wellness cult disguised as a yoga studio that promises a healthy glow, spiritual relief and self-actualisation. Its leader Renata, with the “deep, intensely dark eyes of a dove,” coerces Dani into working for her, including some light sex-work. It’s good for her femininity and finances, after all. But just then, Renata mysteriously disappears.
The Temple is a satirical mishmash of various contemporary cults: it’s like those multi-level marketing schemes that promise American women they can make six figures selling leggings from their garage. Like Dani, the women who fall for such schemes have too much time on their hands, an unsatisfied hunger for “more” – vaguely defined – and such a burning need to be special that they’ll take as a guru anyone who pets their heads. Normal Women is particularly good at teasing out this manipulative strand.
But beyond Dani, Hogarth struggles to populate her novel. The various other women are a long line of feminine automata, indistinguishable in how they speak or behave; Clark, Dani’s husband, isn’t so much a character as he is the result of an image search for “clueless husband”. He performs the sitcom shtick that gets the canned laughter.
The cult of wellness is already well satirised, and Normal Women doesn’t offer much new. There are some good jokes trapped in an unconvincing frame – women want it all! women can’t have it all! something about toxic masculinity! – but it’s a letdown after Hogarth’s 2022 novel Motherthing, which was about a cosmic battle of the wills between a young mother and the ghost of her mother-in-law. Normal Women, by contrast, is a lot like Dani: too similar to all the other girls.
Normal Women is published by Atlantic at £16.99. To order your copy, call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books
