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Against The Fairy Tales

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Genres: Memoir/ Cultural History

When Carolin Würfel was seven, her grandmother told her the story of the girl who was sent into the woods and warned never to trust her own hunger. Nobody called it a lesson in obedience. That's what it was.

Berlin, now: in the wake of MeToo, Würfel goes back through the fairy tales the women in her family used to control what she wanted, what she feared, and what she kept quiet about, and asks who those stories were actually built to protect. AGAINST THE FAIRY TALES sets that reckoning against the two systems that shaped her: an East German state that policed women's bodies and speech through domestic mythology as much as through the Stasi, and an Istanbul where she watched a different set of rules do the same work under a different name.

What emerges, tale by tale, is an account of everything she was taught not to say, and everything she is finally saying now. This is a book about the machinery of consent and coercion running underneath the stories women are told as children, and what it takes, one state, one language and one tale at a time, to name it.

For readers of Annie Ernaux's The Years, Rachel Cusk's Aftermath, Fatma Aydemir's Djinns, and Miranda July's All Fours.

Author: Carolin Würfel

Genres: Memoir/ Cultural History

When Carolin Würfel was seven, her grandmother told her the story of the girl who was sent into the woods and warned never to trust her own hunger. Nobody called it a lesson in obedience. That's what it was.

Berlin, now: in the wake of MeToo, Würfel goes back through the fairy tales the women in her family used to control what she wanted, what she feared, and what she kept quiet about, and asks who those stories were actually built to protect. AGAINST THE FAIRY TALES sets that reckoning against the two systems that shaped her: an East German state that policed women's bodies and speech through domestic mythology as much as through the Stasi, and an Istanbul where she watched a different set of rules do the same work under a different name.

What emerges, tale by tale, is an account of everything she was taught not to say, and everything she is finally saying now. This is a book about the machinery of consent and coercion running underneath the stories women are told as children, and what it takes, one state, one language and one tale at a time, to name it.

For readers of Annie Ernaux's The Years, Rachel Cusk's Aftermath, Fatma Aydemir's Djinns, and Miranda July's All Fours.