Loving female writers
One man’s reading journey from male to female novelists
A publicist working for a book publisher recently said, “Jason, I’ve noticed that you really like female writers.” Sheepishly agreeing, I realized she was right and spent the rest of the day figuring out why, because it wasn’t always like this.
I write for the literary blog Three Guys One Book. We champion books, review them, and offer writers the chance to write an essay, “When We Fell in Love,” about the first book they read that made them want to be a writer. For me, it wasn’t one book that I fell in love with but a whole stack, all written by guys.
I didn’t learn how to read until I was in the fifth grade. By the time I was in high school, I had fallen in love with Ed McBain and spent my nights in his criminal world. I had to give an oral book report on Stephen King’s Pet Sematary, but I waited until the night before to read the book. I ended up getting an A on the report because I basically entertained everyone, leaving them hanging on the ending (reading the book the night before helped keep it fresh). Between 1988 and 1991, I stopped reading books. I went to The Rhode Island School of Design, which consumed my imagination. Reading books of any kind never crossed my mind.
I became an avid non-reader and, after college, marched off to the South of France to become the next Robert Frank, whose photographs The Americans fueled my creative side. What could go wrong? While I chased that dream, my father sent me Raymond Carver’s short story collections, and a friend gave me Ladies’ Man by Richard Price. I remember feeling terrified by what would happen next to Carver’s people, and listened to them suffer. Richard Price inspired me to write a dozen screenplays. After France I moved back to New York City and got his phone number and called him up. Mr. Price gave me sound advice: “You want to write a screenplay? Move to Los Angeles. You want to write a novel, stay in New York.” So I stayed.
Ladies’ Man is the one book that nails what it’s like to be a young man in New York City. It should be given to anyone under twenty-five years of age when they sign a lease for an apartment. What’s most important about Price and Carver? They made me feel what their characters felt, a true transference of emotion.
Cut to fifteen years later, when I was working in the publishing business. Suddenly books were everywhere, and I was getting manuscripts of novels I’d never read before, going to book signings for people I never knew existed. Dave Eggers launched A Heart Breaking Work of Staggering Genius into the world. I discovered Nick Hornby and his brilliant High Fidelity, and Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn. At a certain point I started to figure out what I really like, which was male authors, or that’s what I really connected with. I was in my late twenties and constantly searching out the writers who reminded me of Richard Price. I thought I found it, but it was just a copy of a copy, not a real connection. This stubborn wandering lasted for years.
In the last five years I can point to a select group of male authors that I connect to emotionally. David Gilbert and his forthcoming novel & Sons isn’t just amazing; it will ruin you for other books. The emotions his characters feel are intense and poured all over the page like an AA meeting gone sideways. Mr. Peanut by Adam Ross screwed to the floor what it’s like to be married. His characters are angry, bitter, spiteful, and full of blood lust and palpable revenge. They make me feel what they do and don’t stop at entertainment. Tom Rachman did something incredible with The Imperfectionists, a story about a group of people trying to keep a newspaper alive and failing enthusiastically. That book could have gone on for another three hundred pages, and I wouldn’t have noticed. These are male writers I wanted to read over and over, but somehow, it wasn’t enough.
Right around this time, someone forced Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children on me, and I couldn’t care less. I was trying — and struggling — to read Richard Price’s latest. Claire Messud poured cold water down the front of my pants. This book was the gateway drug to female writers. Messud made me realize that you only have one life, and you should read this story about this family. The main characters are both exciting and compelling in a way that makes you want to find them and move into their house.
Soon I noticed other female writers and moved on to Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, which portrayed another family that you feel so close to that it’s impossible to put the book down. There is a dinner party scene where Smith commands the main characters; we see all of the action and then dip inside each of the minds of the people there. We hear and feel what they do, and it’s magical. I felt included and part of the process of the story.
Claire Messud and Zadie Smith write the inside of a woman’s mind better than any writer I know. It’s like I’m learning about life for the first time from their perspectives. These women see things calmly and with great patience, which can sometimes seem like arrogance. Their assessment of male-dominated environments can be mistaken for hysterical thinking. These writers seem to be saying that men get to do and say anything they want. Women are expected to agree with these men, and nothing else. When women disagree, and make noise — code for doing things their way — it seems like The Doll’s House on repeat.
This is where my relationship with woman writers officially began.
Claire Messud and Zadie Smith were quickly followed by Jennifer Egan. I will admit, A Visit from the Goon Squad made me wish I could be in that bathroom stall with the main character, kleptomaniac Sasha, as she steal’s the purse. The opening scene itself is simple, but since I had been avoiding the book (because I hated Look At Me, an early book of Egan’s), I read that first chapter with a kind of jealousy and envy because everyone said to read this book. But I was wrong. A Visit from the Goon Squad is a sharp, poignant short story collection (Egan admits that it is a short story collection, not a novel) that got mistaken for a novel and went on to win every award not nailed down. If a man — like Paul Auster — did that, he would be championed; there would’ve have been a delivery on expectation. If Auster had won the Pulitzer for a book of his, the tastemakers of the literary world would probably have said that this was overdue. Egan had written other books, but no one expected a woman to write a novel that was so engaging and resonated with endless emotional urgency.
But I like I said, I had a bad experience with Jennifer Egan, which made me ignore A Visit from the Goon Squad. I had read Look At Me at the absolute wrong time of my life. I had just witnessed 9-11, and I remember being on the train that day, on the way back to New Jersey, reading this book and thinking how useless it was in the face of what I had just witnessed. I detested Egan’s selfish, savaged, and careless main character, Charlotte, who made her way in a world dominated by men looking for the next pretty thing. When I read A Visit from the Goon Squad, I realized that Charlotte and the story in Look At Me had everything I wanted in it. If I read Look At Me now, after reading A Visit from the Goon Squad, I’d be knocking guys out in a bar just to have the chance to buy her a drink. Charlotte was a lonely, shallow, vapid model that got what she didn’t deserve, and then turned a page in her life and stood on her own two feet. I look back at the missed opportunity of dating her, and I would kill for the second chance to meet her with fresh eyes. After figuring out that Jennifer Egan, Claire Messud, and Zadie Smith were my first female literary crushes, I suddenly felt loved.
But it was when Hannah Pittard delivered the blistering The Fates Will Find Their Way that I fell deeply in love. Pittard doesn’t write sanitized, observational prose filled with witty banter but gives you smothered feelings. Her debut novel is about a girl on the brink of being physically erased. Pittard shines the light on the pretty girl, slides in between the sheets with her, and asks what it feels like to be a woman trapped inside a teenaged body. There isn’t much like that in current male fiction. Exceptional presence, I like to call it — where I’m so close to a character that I’m in the room with her.
Female writers put me right next to the action, whereas male writers seem to just tell me the story. It’s not important to point out the male writers I’ve read recently, just to say that in general, men seem to want to entertain the reader, and women want to engage their audience in every aspect of their characters’ emotions. Male novelists also tend to lean on overused themes — characters that wreck their lives, leaving a sea of ex-wives, saddened lovers, and lonely children in their wake, usually to search for the unicorn. They all want to reinvent sliced bread. I’d like to know what that feels like, that lonely desperation and profound despair.
In these years of discovering the power of female writers, I found Emily St. John Mandel, who seems to write about the absence or disappearance of women from the world around us. There are levelheaded people who would say she writes about bad things happening to a good woman. There is nothing good about what happens to Lilia Albert in The Last Night In Montreal: the footprints in the snow, the still-warm receiver at the phone booth, the crackling static on the line. Mandel writes about women disappearing from a world that’s being ruined by men. Each of her three books concentrates on women in peril who are attempting to run from a bad situation. Every time I pick up a new book of hers, I want to find these women and tell them it’s going to be okay. (Then again, maybe I’m the man they’re running from.) On the beach of literary fiction there should be someone handing copies of Emily’s books out to each and every person, because these stories are vital.
When I finally realized how great women writers were, I found Alix Ohlin and her masterful novel Inside, about a coven of lost people who don’t know they are connected. Annie, whom I like to call the main character of Ohlin’s novel, reminds me of Denise from Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. It’s the part of the book that I tell everyone to read. Sometimes I run into women who remind me of Denise — strong, odd, witty, charming, observant, and happily alone. Denise and Annie are like geese that are meant to mate for life but got separated during a tornado. These are women who start off at a certain point and change dramatically, typically by events of their own making, with the reader as coconspirator. They shed their pasts and become people they didn’t even know they wanted to be, and not once did they need a man to do it. I witnessed it, almost alone, which makes reading them all the more special. Over ten years have passed between the time I read The Corrections and Inside, and these books act like mirror twins, or bookends to my realizing the difference between male and female writers.
Women writers had taken up permanent residence in my life when I read the just-released novel You Are One of Them, by Elliott Holt. The main characters, Sarah and Jennifer, are best friends; one gets famous, while the other stays home. The loneliness at the bottom of the friendship well is the one thing we all try to avoid. What do men do when they lose a friend? Go it alone, mostly (just ask Richard Russo, Raymond Carver, John Cheever, Richard Ford, and John Updike). Characters in novels written by women never stop searching for that friend; at least, Sarah doesn’t. When Jennifer disappears,Sarah feels like a part of her broke off and has been lost in the darkness of life. Maybe Jennifer never really existed in the way Sarah thought she did. If Holt taught me anything, it’s that I should hold my friends close, but my best friends closer. Men go it alone, and women know why wolves are so strong.
When I first started reading in high school, I went to the writers that entertained. I realize now that those writers only offered surface emotions, like they were reading from Emotions For Dummies. Stephen King and Ed McBain entertained me because I didn’t know how to identify how I felt about myself. By the time I discovered female writers, I was at an age where I was starting to question: What was it about the books I was reading that I liked so much? Were these male writers telling me anything new? Did they make me think about my own life and how I was living? I discovered they were not. Women writers ask questions about life, what it’s really like to be alive and feel something about your place in the world — questions that I’ve asked myself and for which I still seem to be looking for the answer. Male writers seem to be having a completely different conversation, writing about a place that only exists in their minds, somewhere far away in the foggy past. Which makes me wonder: How far back in time will male writers go before they give up and realize that they need to be in the present, enjoying it with the rest of us?
