The women I think about at night Traveling the paths of my heroes

Finnish author Kankimäki profiles in this astute, entertaining work 10 daring female writers and artists who took risks in their quest toward fulfillment. At 42, Kankimäki sold her apartment and quit her job to travel and write ("I have no husband, no children... I'm free, but an outsider"), a decision she credits as being inspired by the women she writes about here. The women--all "guardian angels" who overcame sexism, oppression, or money woes to live out their dreams of traveling and creating art--include Italian Renaissance artist Artemisia Gentileschi, who was raped at 17 then became a renowned painter of "female-dominated" works; Isabella Bird, a depressed 19th-century British spinster who, at 40, revitalized her life when she took a trip around the world and wrote about her destinations; and Danish-born Karen Blixen, who started a coffee farm in British East Africa, lost her money, and moved in with her mother at 46 before writing the bestseller Out of Africa. Along the way, Kankimäki, a spirited narrator, highlights her own travels--to Tanzania, Italy, Japan--and shares advice ("Don't give a damn what other people think"). This insightful book will appeal to adventure enthusiasts and be an inspiration for those with an eye on hitting their stride later in life. (Nov.)

A middle-aged writer sifts through history for other women whose lives matched her wanderlust. "I'm forty-two. I have no husband, no children, no job," Finnish author Kankimäki writes early in this hybrid of history, memoir, and feminist essay. She feels a sense of liberation in that status but also a pang of isolation that draws her to "night women" who blazed their own paths. First and most prominent among them is Karen Blixen, author of the 1937 classic Out of Africa. As part of her research into Blixen's life, Kankimäki chronicles her journey in her footsteps in present-day Tanzania. Both strip away the author's sense of romanticism; the present-day country is malarial, poverty-stricken, and overrun with tourists while Blixen suffered from sexism along with the case of syphilis her husband gave her. Still, Blixen's stubbornness is inspiring. Kankimäki also writes pocket biographies of globe-trotters like Nellie Bly and Isabella Bird, who "seems like my doppelgänger: a fortyish, depressed spinster who suffers from headaches and insomnia, but who is fed up with the narrow confines in which her society has trapped her"; Alexandra David-Neel, who infiltrated the sacred Buddhist city of Lhasa; painters like Sofonisba Anguissola and Lavinia Fontana, who navigated the masculine world of 16th-century Italian art; and avant-garde Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, who committed herself to a mental institution. Though the book has a clear organizing principle, its execution feels aimless. The livelier travelogues of Tanzania and Japan clang against the more studious essays on Bird and Bly, and the author's explanations of her subjects' difficulties make her concluding "night women's advice" feel thin or cloying ("be buoyant as hell"). Kankimäki's repeated despairing that she's unsure where she's going with the book emphasizes the sense of disorder. However, the author engagingly maps her frustrations against those of her heroes, the "illnesses, self-doubts, weak moments…ordinary human reality" that echo her own. An enlightening if dense and patchwork study of the many hurdles women artists faced--and still face. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

I. Night Women: A Confession I Night Women: A Confession I'm M. I'm forty-three years old. On countless nights over the years I've thought about women--and it has nothing at all to do with sex. I've thought about women on those sleepless nights when my life, my love, or my attitude is skewed, and it seems there is no end to the dark night of my soul. On those nights I have gathered an invisible honor guard of historical women, guardian angels to lead the way. The lives of these inspiring night women have not followed traditional paths. They have transgressed boundaries and expectations. Many of them are artists and writers, people doing lonely, introverted work. Most have not had families or children, and their relationships with men have been unconventional. Many have traveled in or moved to foreign countries, and made massive life changes at an advanced age. Some have lived with their mothers their entire lives; some have suffered from diseases and mental disorders; but all of them have followed their passions and made their own choices. These exemplary women have been my plan B--the one I'll adopt if everything else goes to hell. One of the women is Sei Shonagon, a writer and court lady who lived a thousand years ago in Kyoto, about whom I wrote my first book. But there are many others. Some nights I lie awake thinking about Frida Kahlo, whose biography I read when I was eighteen. It transformed how I thought about womanhood. Other nights I think about Georgia O'Keeffe, who wound up alone in the New Mexico desert painting buffalo skulls and making her first trip around the world when she was in her seventies. I think about Yayoi Kusama, a Japanese woman who, deciding to become an artist, wrote to Georgia O'Keeffe to ask her advice, and later, after shaking up the New York art world in the sixties, returned to Tokyo and asked to be allowed to live in a psychiatric hospital. I think of Karen Blixen, who followed her husband to Africa and ended up running a farm on her own. I think of Jane Austen, who, though she lived unmarried in her parents' attic in the English countryside, transformed the art of the novel. I think of the poet-artist Ema Saiko, who lived in Japan in the Edo period. It is her calm that finally brings sleep to the dark night of my soul. I wonder where these women found their courage. What advice would they give me, if we could meet? And above all: Could I go exploring in their footsteps? I've been on that journey for some time now. And the amazing thing is that I keep finding more and more forgotten night women who churn up my imagination, an ever-expanding network of women who lived in different centuries and different corners of the world, slicing the waves through my brain. They are Marys, Karens, Idas, Nellies, Marthas, Alexines, Sofonisbas, Battistas--they are writers, artists, explorers, depressed spinsters, war correspondents, wives of Renaissance aristocrats. They are the women I think about at night. At first I thought about them on sleepless nights, in search of strength, inspiration, and purpose for my life; nowanights I stay up specially to think about them, my pulse pounding for them and with them. Why have they come to me, clung to me, swept me up in their lives? Why have I surrounded my desk with their faces? Why do books about them pile ever higher on my floor? Why do I collect facts about them like talismans? Let me start at the beginning, one picture at a time. But first let me pack my bag. I have a flight leaving soon. Excerpted from The Women I Think about at Night: Traveling the Paths of My Heroes by Mia Kankimäki All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.