She (Oxford World's Classics)

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I wish I would take more joy in this moment, I do take a sense of relief and satisfaction that I’m at the end, but it wasn’t something I relished. I just felt an obligation to tell a difficult story.”

Guys, get up. Walk around,” Lorente said. “Look at books. It’s not a chitchat session. You need to be up and actively looking at books.” Monroe’s pose is focused and intimate. And there is something distinctly racy about the specific edition she is pictured holding. Monroe and her copy of Ulysses bring together two symbols of sexuality, transgression and American modernity. For readers in the 21st century, Joyce’s work is known as a modernist masterpiece. In the middle of the 20th century, however, it had not yet shaken off the scandal attached to its early publication history. Serial publication of the novel was halted in 1920 by an obscenity trial and copies of the first edition, published in Paris by Shakespeare and Company, imported to Britain and the United States were intercepted and confiscated. All we need to know here is the ominously Victorian name of the director of public prosecutions at the time: Sir Archibald Bodkin. His selective reading of the book’s final section was sufficient to convince him that Ulysses was obscene and therefore publication of it should be banned in Britain. Similar measures were taken in the United States. Her answers were bizarre, off the rails,” she says. “She seemed first of all thrilled that I had found June Cobb. I expected her to walk out in a huff that I was looking into this or I had come up with a wild theory. I felt that she presented a facade, some of which was true. She was a pioneering woman, that was true, she was a very capable woman, but there is an enigma that is almost impossible to pin down.” She heard the first-period bell ring, 7:15 a.m. She’d wanted to get to the box right away, but now she saw one of the school administrators at her door, asking whether she’d heard about the latest education mandate in Florida.I was worried enough that the Babushka Lady could be Jerrie that I confronted Jerrie,” she says. “It took me a while to be able to work up to the conversation with Jerrie and her answers to that conversation were not particularly reassuring to me.” It wasn’t just Tania doing this. It was more than 1,400 librarians in all of Florida’s 67 counties, each district interpreting the law in its own way. In the panhandle, Escambia County had instructed its schools to close parts of their libraries entirely until every book on every shelf had been reviewed for sexual content. In Charlotte County, near Fort Myers, schools were told to remove any books with LGBTQ characters from elementary and middle school libraries. And sometime in the middle of all that, as she showed up every weekday at 7 a.m. and tried to focus on the job she had signed up for, which was, she thought, to help students discover a book to love, Tania could feel something shifting inside her 21st-century media center. The relationships between students and books, and parents and libraries, and teachers and the books they taught, and librarians and the job they did — all of it was changing in a place she thought had been designed to stay the same. It would have made for fascinating viewing, but the more time she spent with Cobb the more she began to suspect that something about her story didn’t add up. Decades before the latest eruption of war in Israel and Gaza that began with Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre — and well before Internet algorithms amplified misinformation — the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was already a source of confusion, competing claims, “Rashomon”-like narrative clashes. Even basic facts seem to defy confirmation or debunking.

Tania flips through a book in the library's storage area. Much of her time on the job was spent reviewing books to make sure the school was adhering to new state content laws.Like so many before her though, she found herself in the irresistible tractor beam of the Kennedy assassination, and the unanswered questions about what happened on that sunny day in Dealey Plaza that still affect attitudes to government to this day. A number of people fell down the JFK assassination rabbit hole never to return,” she writes, “and I wasn’t in a hurry to become one of them.”

There was no deathbed confession, no tell-all letter, no smoking gun document left for the chronicler of her life. She decided to look at photographs to see if she could spot Jerrie in Dallas, and came across the “anomaly” of the Babushka Lady. But she was happy; she technically denied being June, then proceeded to tell me lots of things about June that no one would know unless they worked closely with June or were June. That was before the school board meeting on April 5, 2022, when Tania watched parents read aloud from books they described as a danger to kids. It was before she received a phone call from the district, the day after that, instructing her to remove four books from her shelves. It was before a member of the conservative group Moms for Liberty told her on Facebook, a few days later, that she shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near students. It had been 18 months since then. Nine months since she had taken Florida’s new training for librarians, a mandatory hour-long video, and heard the state say that books in the library must not contain sexual content that could be “harmful to minors” and that violating this statute would result in a third-degree felony. “A crime,” the training had said. “Districts should err on the side of caution.” It had been seven months since she began collecting Florida’s laws and statutes in a purple folder on her desk, highlighting the sections that made her mad, and also the ones that could get her fired. Six months since she broke out in hives, since eczema crept up the side of her face, since she started having trouble sleeping and got a prescription for an anti-anxiety medication. Five months since she stood in her house crying and her husband said it wasn’t worth it anymore. He could work two jobs if he had to. “You need to quit,” he’d told her. Six weeks since the start of another school year. Five weeks since she had given her notice. She had wanted to leave on her own terms. But as she walked out, she wasn’t sure that was what she had done.

Tania asks students to hold up their wristbands granting them access to a homecoming pep rally. Students at the Tohopekaliga pep rally in late September. She says that while she cannot be certain who the Babushka Lady is: “I am certain that the Babushka [Lady] is an under-researched character, that she was completely overlooked. If that happened today there would be a manhunt for her and you would expect to see the footage.” They would tell each other about the gifts people had made for them, the cards, the flowers, the cake, the lemon meringue pie. Last first period, last lunch period. Erin would tell Tania that her assistant principal asked her three times whether she had changed her mind about leaving. Tania would say her assistant principal asked her to say something on the systemwide radio, and what she said was “Mrs. G signing off. Media center closed until further notice.” They would sit in the store they had just leased, the crystal shop in Kissimmee that was becoming a bookstore. There were no books yet on the shelves, but there would be soon. Every book they could afford. Any book at all. The first is the 17th-century The Great Picture, produced for Lady Anne Clifford and now at Abbot Hall in Kendal. Clifford spent much of her adult life in legal battles for her Yorkshire inheritance. Her tenacity finally paid off and she celebrated her triumph by commissioning an extraordinary life-sized painting of herself, her parents and her siblings from an artist thought to be Jan van Belcamp.