The Eyes of Others

I found this article about Lionel Shriver pretty interesting. She wrote We Need to Talk About Kevin, a daring, devastating book that won the Orange Prize, sold very well, and was made into a movie starring Tilda Swinton. The article reveals that her own agent and 30 publishers turned down Kevin, which surprises me not at all, because its subject is very unpleasant. The whole situation reminded me of a quote from Cliff Bleszinski, an icon in the video game industry who led design on Gears of War and many other efforts: "When your marketing guy and numbers guy and others are kind of confused about how to market and sell your game, double down on it. It means you have something unique." He was talking about Bioshock Infinite, and the full context is here, although there be spoilers. I read this quote a few weeks ago, and it's been in my head every couple of days ever since. I consider it great advice for all creative endeavors. Dare to do what the marketing department can't figure out. (Slaughterhouse-Five. The Hunger Games. Fight Club. Back to the Future.)

I was also reminded of a vague set of ideas that's been swirling around in my head for the last couple of years, since I read Cheryl Strayed's Sugar column that coined write like a motherfucker. One of the central questions of the column is how to be a successful woman writer without feeling defeated by the patriarchy before you even begin. Strayed replied that you do what Flannery O'Connor did; you do what Elizabeth Bishop did; you do what Mary Shelley did; you do what the Brontes and Austen and Dorothy Parker and Rebecca West and Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Adrienne Rich and LeGuin and DuMaurier and Anaïs Nin did. You write "so blazingly good you can't be framed." You just. keep. writing. better and better, until your gender is irrelevant.

The more I looked around, the more I saw women who did it anyway, either without considering the patriarchy's interest in watching them fail, or without caring. Women about whom sexist criticism looked like exactly what it was, because they were that blazingly good. I thought of this idea when I read Gilead, because Marilynne Robinson's prevalence as a writer doesn't seem to be affected by her gender, and I don't know that she has drawn her gender into her career at all. Maybe she's struggled with it and written about it, but I don't see that from where I sit, which seems like a good sign. Margaret Atwood is arguably Canada's greatest living writer, and I didn't make that phrase up out of my head, I've read it in article after article. She writes especially about women's issues most of the time, but that doesn't lessen her stature.

The thing I've been wondering to myself is whether you can - whether certain women do - conduct a career as a woman writer without considering the patriarchy at all. If you can just turn your head to the other side and write on, not thinking about the statistics, not thinking about the possibility that you've been turned down over and over because of your first name and not because of the quality of your work. Not wondering whether, if you took on the name George instead, you might get an inbox full of acceptances. If I pretend this is a world where I have thoroughly equal shot of getting into Harper's (although it is demonstrably untrue), will that world come to exist? Or does my writing have to be 75% better than George's for me to make it?

This always leads me to the question of whether a woman writer will find more success - and inner peace - by trying to pass or by being an exceptional woman writer. By which I mean - do you be Margaret Atwood, a feminist, the person who wrote The Handmaid's Tale, which does nothing if not draw attention to the problem? Or do you be George Eliot, who more or less kept her head down in order to be taken seriously? (If you're Deborah Copaken Kogan, you get tired of keeping your head down and go viral in The Nation.)

I'm not offering answers. But it strikes me that turning my head to the side has two effects: one is that it helps me concentrate on improving my work, instead of being depressed by counting and comparing bylines in the publications and anthologies I read (and oh, it is indeed depressing if you stop to notice, my friends). The other is that it makes me feel I'm betraying something essential by not paying attention and speaking out. If I don't take notice, if I don't speak up, that's less attention that will be paid to the inequality.

To be perfectly honest, I would rather not be shrill than speak up every single time I notice a problem. I took this picture a couple of weeks ago

and haven't posted it on Facebook or here yet (well...until now), because I thought maybe I'd said too much in general about the horrid, contradictory, destructive power of the beauty-industrial complex to defeat women in this country. I don't want to drive people away by constantly beating the same drum, especially when there isn't much to be done to fix it.

I'd rather just write.

Dear Sugar: The Other Night I Went to a Reading

Margaret Atwood once said - and I don't remember if it was in this wonderful book or in an interview or what - that once of the very best things you can do as a writer is to give readings. I was close to dumbfounded at this advice. This might sound arrogant, but if you're a writer you probably recognize it as true: you hear the same goddamn advice over and over and OVER again. It comes in different forms, and sometimes it appears as the opposite of itself, but there are certain things that stay true and bear repeating and you can still get good and tired of hearing them from every possible source. But this was new. This was the first time I'd heard this advice.

It astonished me to hear something new in the sea of yeah-yeah-yeah, so I instantly doubted it. How are readings really going to help your bottom line? You reach a small roomful of people in most cases, a couple hundred in an auditorium at best (and most unlikely). But she's Margaret Living-Canadian-Treasure Atwood, so I figured she knows best, even if I didn't really understand.

As of Monday night, I understood. I went to my first-ever reading (...I think? There must have been another one before now, surely, I'm not that introverted) at Book Soup on the Sunset Strip, and the reader/writer was Cheryl Strayed. This UTTERLY FANTASTIC and not-large bookstore was quite packed with Sugar and Wild fans waiting to hear her. I stood up for about two hours, all told. From the personal perspective, the one where I'm me living in my skin and this is the woman who's inspired me to be a better and truer human in 84 different ways, it was incredible. When she signed my book, I said idiotic stuff, including "thank you" about 6 times in a row, which was really what I wanted to say most even if it didn't come out the way I wanted it to. I wanted to hug her and bow to her and ask her about my mom and cry into her nice black dress. But there were too many people also waiting to say thank you and watch her hand write into their books.

From the writer's perspective, so much was accomplished: big sloppy fans of hers, like me, got to hear her voice and see her in living life, which I'm sure was gratifying for her. People walking by looked in, saw the crowd, came in for a listen, and discovered her for the first time. She sold a ton of books that she wouldn't have otherwise sold (the bookstore sold out of Wild), all of which have the potential to be lent around to friends and lead to more sales. The bookstore itself profited quite a lot (yeah, I bought some more books, some of which I'd intended to buy and others not so intentional). People in line for the signing got to trading stories and learned about even more books that needed reading. And now I'm telling all of you that if you have the chance to hear Cheryl Strayed do a reading, don't miss it, and that will lead to STILL MORE sales and word-of-mouth. It's just a big round robin of book-reading and book-buying. Even though it's only a little, person-to-person thing, doing a reading - not like appearing on Oprah, for instance - it makes a non-insignificant, stone-in-a-pond kind of impact. Lesson learnt: Margaret Atwood is right about everything.

So go see Cheryl Strayed if she comes to your town. Here's her schedule for the rest of 2012. If you have no idea who this Cheryl Strayed is that I'm talking about, buy this book. Don't ask questions, don't protest, don't read about it and think about it before buying. Just buy it. I can pretty much guarantee you won't be sorry. If you insist that you can't afford it, here's the archive of her Sugar columns at The Rumpus, but it's less fun by an order of magnitude than reading it in book form, and harder to fold down pages and write YES!! in the margins.

In other news, I think there's an essay on its way out of me this evening. I'm feeling a little less confident about my KUFC book, for reasons I want to write about in the essay. It has to do with Salieri. That's all I'll say.