The Inspiration

The second book I’m officially reading in my Year of Reading Women (YORW, cool?) is a 1000-page behemoth -- Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke. This means I will post my next review sometime right before the YORW comes to an end, so in the meantime I thought I should offer up some of the links and thinks that inspired this project in the first place.  

The big story that got me thinking about the systemic privilege male authors seem to enjoy was the “#Franzenfreude” dustup that took place when Jonathan Franzen published his most recent novel, Freedom. For the record, Franzen (or J.Franz as I call him) is one of my absolute favorite writers, and I naturally devoured and loved Freedom.

And I admit that when I first started reading the various links -- checking out the twitteruckus and the various blarguments -- I was defensive for my main man, J.Franz, who seemed to have become the target of feminist ire for no other reason than that he was an awesome writer who wrote a great book which was also popular. That the pot was being stirred by two very popular female writers who I think of (rightly or wrongly - debate me!) as belonging to the cultural second tier made the whole thing smack of jealousy to me. But once my initial defensiveness passed, it became clear that the point wasn’t Franzen or Freedom, but rather the larger marketing machine(s) and media establishment(s), systematically promoting books by men over similar (equal?) books by women. 

Linda Holmes, the primary author of the Monkey See NPR pop-culture blog is both smart and really good at making larger, more interesting points from a mess of pop culture stupidity. Her post on the subject was ground zero for me.

In this related NPR piece, Jennifer Weiner makes an extremely compelling point:

"It's just interesting to sort of stack them up against a Lorrie Moore or against a Mona Simpson — who write books about families that are seen as excellent books about families," Weiner says. "And then to look at a Jonathan Franzen who writes a book about a family but we are told this is a book about America."

That point really resonates with me; I can see that as being a genuine unrecognized bias in myself. (But once recognized it's no longer unrecognized! Victory!) I like books about families, but books about families written by women probably tend feel like chick lit.  In this regard -- as I wrote in the first post on this blog -- I’m a sucker for marketing, and if a book has a pastel color scheme, I’m moving on. Maureen Johnson inspired a cool art experiment that underscores just how important the cover of a book is, and how easy it is to be manipulated.

And lastly, Meg Wolitzer wrote a great piece in the New York Times that says everything I’m trying to say here, only better.

At any rate, my little project obviously isn’t going to make any difference whatsoever in the larger cultural conversation about gender bias in literature, but I do think it’s important for people that care about this kind of issue (men and women alike) to take a step back and examine their biases. To think about some of the things (like the color and design of a book cover) that are seemingly innocent, but also have deeper, more insidious resonances. As Linda Holmes (generally) says, we may not have answers at this point, but the questions are fair...and important to ask.