'the color purple' . 'all about my mother' . 'a home at the end of the world'

oddly, parallel themes run through the last two books i read and pedro almodovars ‘all about my mother’ which i saw again with ranjit and sonal last week. in all unusual constructs of family are born to confront loneliness and death. in ‘the color purple’ nettie finds love with her husbands ex-lover in the american south. somehow in the safe space of the unspoken sisterhood between women sexual love is allowed to exist without being expressly forbidden. it must also be living under the shadow of poverty and brutal oppression that forces traditional notions of family to be broken and new forms appear. in ‘all about my mother’ a mother grieving for her son finds solace in her own past and in the friendship of other women each coming to terms with their own suffering. the family of friends chosen ends up being stronger than the family born into. the scepter of aids hangs over the film as it does over the unconventional family of bobby, jonathan and carla, a shy bumbling man, a flamboyant confused gay man and an aging heiress in ‘a home at the end of the world’ by michael cunningham. the book follows the voices of the main protagonists as they fumble along constructing a loving space of their own outside what society imagines to be the norm.