Greek girls don’t cry. Or do they?
It’s tough being brought up in the straight jacket of a Cypriot home in London. Many women want to break the mould, but how?
What you would do if you were an attractive British-born Cypriot woman, full of creativity with the word ‘rebellion’ written all over your brain? You could do what Ambrosia did – graduate from St Martin’s, come back to Cyprus, get married to a Cypriot, have three sons, become a freelance interior designer and write a book. Or you could follow in the steps of her book’s main protagonist, Helena, who, after graduation, stays in London, marries a Cypriot, has two kids, and… well, I’m not actually supposed to tell you what happens next. After all, you can read it yourself. But I am allowed to let you into one secret: everything Helena does is very sexy…
“Helena is searching for her identity,” says Ambrosia sitting comfortably at a table in her new interior design shop Rubber Duck located just off Ledra Street. “She has been messed up, not intentionally, by her parents who conceived her in London but want her to be a Cypriot. All her life she has been told that she should be a good cook, marry a Cypriot, be a good wife to him and have kids. Nobody listens to what she wants. So in the end she starts experimenting and having sex with other, ‘foreign’ men.”
I listen to this statement and point out that it seems we have already had a story like that. Even though My Big Fat Greek Wedding is about mainland Greeks the issues are the same – Greeks in a foreign land and how their Greekness prevents them from becoming anything else. But Ambrosia disagrees.
“In every comment I have had about my book, My Big Fat Greek Wedding is mentioned,” she says. “They all buy it thinking it is going to be like the film. But it is not. The girl in the film is all the Greek clich?s and I never wanted to write a book like that. I think people know by now about Greeks, what they think, what they eat. It has been done too many times. Cypriot and Greek writers have moved on. Look at Jeffrey Eugenides and his Middlesex. And Greek Girls Don’t Cry is also something else. It is about a beautiful, intelligent, unhappy woman who screws around because all her life she has been told that she should not have sex.”
Liberation through sex is an interesting issue and Ambrosia is clearly a free spirit one can talk with about anything so for a while we dwell upon that. But then I remember that I need to work so I focus on the book again. Does she think that all Cypriot women are as unhappy as Helena or it is only her?
“The reason I called my book Greek Girls Don’t Cry is because I think they do cry all days. They are complete drama queens and very, very unhappy. I think Cypriot men take advantage of the fact that Cypriot women are unhappy and give them a lot of materialistic things to get on with.
“Besides, Cypriot women always feel they have to keep up with something else,” she continues. “It first started with Scandinavian girls. They came here and Cypriot women felt threatened by them so they dyed their hair blonde to look Swedish, had liposuction on their bottoms to look Swedish, had boob jobs to look Swedish. Then we had an influx of Lebanese, and since Lebanese women were extrovert and cosmopolitan, it happened again. Now we have Russians… and exactly the same happened in London. Cypriots went there and all these women from Cypriot villages thought ‘English women wear fur coats and high heels and pencil skirts, and dye their hair blonde. We will do it too’. I think Cypriot women have completely lost their identity.
“Plus the Greek Cypriots in London are in many ways worse than the Greek Cypriots in Cyprus because they went there 40 years ago to work and they have kept the same mentality ever since. Like all other emigrants, they have preserved values from the past. They haven’t evolved and have brought their daughters up in much more traditional ways than people here. Cypriots in Cyprus have moved on but Cypriots in London haven’t.”
But she herself must have been brought up to be “a good Cypriot girl in traditional London-based Cypriot family”. Is it true?
“Yes and no,” confirms Ambrosia. “My parents were more open minded than most but still my mother is a real Cypriot mother and she always wanted me to have all Cypriot values. I adore her but I couldn’t do that. I tried, I did everything. I struggled. I married a Cypriot man and had three kids with him. But I couldn’t have these values because I was brought up in a different society. Still I think I have eventually made her proud because I do all the things that Cypriot women do but also I manage to do everything else I have ever wanted.”
So has her mother read the book?
“No, she hasn’t,” admits Ambrosia. “I think there is too much sex in it for her liking.”
Greek Girls Don’t Cry by Ambrosia is available at Moufflon Bookshop
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