What should be done about someone who makes a mistake and wants another chance? Jane Roper's The Society of Shame is a wicked and wickedly funny send-up of cancel culture and a serious examination of the distinctly modern thrill of taking offense.
As the novel opens, Kathleen Held, a wife, mother and production editor, pulls up to her house in Greenchester, N.Y., in a taxi to find a fire in her garage; her U.S. Senate candidate husband, Bill, in his underpants; and a woman in a cocktail dress passed out on the property. Kathleen fears that news of Bill's infidelity will get out, making her "the subject of other people's pity and prurient fascination for the rest of her life." If only that was the extent of it.
Kathleen's taxi driver snaps a picture that he posts online: it's a shot of Bill, Bill's incapacitated paramour and, from behind, Kathleen, who is unmissably having her period. Overnight, Kathleen becomes the figurehead of the Yes We Bleed movement, which is dedicated to the cause of menstrual rights and the end of period shaming--which she's all for, but shouldn't she have been asked first?
While she's packing to leave the adulterous Bill, Kathleen intercepts and opens an envelope intended for him. It's an invitation to a luncheon hosted by an organization called the Society of Shame. Figuring that, as a wronged woman whose feminine hygiene mishap went viral, she should be the one getting the sympathy, not Bill, Kathleen goes in his place. She finds herself at an image-rehabilitation-cum-support group comprising a clutch of others who have been, as Kathleen sees it, "exposed, thanks to the unchecked power of the internet and people's appetite for scandal." The group members encourage her to embrace her newfound celebrity status; as the society's leader puts it, Kathleen is "[t]he patron saint of wronged middle-aged wives and menstruation."
The Society of Shame is brilliantly executed, improbably well sustained and truly hilarious. The Yes We Bleed movement spawns legions of activists in knitted hats resembling menstrual cups; Kathleen is called everything from, affirmingly, the Tampon Tigress to, derisively, Menstruation Luther King. Roper (Eden Lake) nails the shameless theatricality of politics and the anarchy of social media, but within her uproarious indictment is a quieter, rather moving consideration of a woman who's a feminist living in a man's shadow but determined to do right by her daughter. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer
Shelf Talker: Following a feminine hygiene mishap, a woman unwittingly becomes the figurehead of a menstrual rights movement in this brilliantly executed, improbably well sustained and truly hilarious novel.