In the Media, November 2015, Part Two

In the media is a fortnightly round-up of features written by, about or containing female writers that have appeared during the previous fortnight and I think are insightful, interesting and/or thought provoking. Linking to them is not necessarily a sign that I agree with everything that’s said but it’s definitely an indication that they’ve made me think. I’m using the term ‘media’ to include social media, so links to blog posts as well as traditional media are likely and the categories used are a guide, not definitives.

There have been a number of powerful pieces published over the last fortnight by women about women reading books by white men and trying to please an establishment that loves white male writers. Rebecca Solnit wrote, ‘80 Books No Woman Should Read‘ on Literary Hub and Sigal Samuel responded with ‘What Women Can Learn From Reading Sexist Male Writers‘ on Electric Literature. Jennifer Weiner wrote, ‘If you enjoyed a good book and you’re a woman, the critics think you’re wrong‘ in The Guardian but the big one was Clare Vaye Watkins ‘On Pandering‘ published on the Tin House blog. On Flavorwire, Alison Herman published a response titled, ‘Claire Vaye Watkins’ “On Pandering” Describes a Specific Experience of Writing and Gender, But Has the Power to Start a Broader Conversation‘ and it did. Nichole Perkins wrote ‘A Response to “On Pandering” in the LA Times; Aya de Leon wrote, ‘In Gratitude for Claire Vaye Watkins and my own Fatherlessness as a Woman Writer‘ on her blog; Marie Phillips wrote, ‘Writers: we need to stop pandering to the white, male status quo‘ on The Pool; Katy Waldman argued, ‘Claire Vaye Watkins’ Tin House Essay “On Pandering” Has a Very Limited Definition of “Male Writers”‘ on Slate

The woman with the most publicity is Patricia Highsmith. The film of her novel The Price of Salt, renamed Carol was released on Friday (in the UK). In the New Yorker, Margaret Talbot writes ‘Forbidden Love: The Passions Behind Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt‘; there’s an interview with Phyllis Nagy, screenwriter and Highsmith’s friend on Bookanista; Frank Rich wrote, ‘Loving Carol‘ on Vulture

The Irish Book Awards were announced this week, including wins for Anne Enright, Louise O’Neill, Susan Jane White, Jane Casey, Sinead Moriarty,Sara Baume and The Long Gaze Back anthology edited by Sinéad Gleeson. While in London, the Costa Book Awards shortlists were announced.

The best of the rest:

On or about books/writers/language:

• Edwidge Danticat, ‘Best Untranslated Writers: Kettly Mars‘ on Granta
• Avril Horner and Anne Rowe, ‘Iris Murdoch is ‘promiscuous’ while Ted Hughes is ‘nomadic’. Why the double standards?‘ in The Guardian
• Kathleen Alcott’s ‘Ghosts of Thanksgiving‘ on Literary Hub
• Mallory Ortberg, ‘A Day In the Life of an Empowered Female Heroine‘ in The Toast
• Danika Ellis, ‘Every Book Should Have Queer Characters‘ on Bookriot
• Leila Roy, ‘2016: All Women, All the Time (An FAQ)‘ on Bookriot
• Huma Quershi, ‘How do I love thee? Let me Instagram it‘ in The Guardian
• Constance Augusta Zaber, ‘Dear Cisgender People Who Write, Publish, And Read “Trans” Books‘ on Bookriot
• Nick Ripatrazone, ‘Born from Books: Six Authors on Their Childhood Reading‘ on The Millions
• Cathy Rentzenbrink, ‘Can reading fiction prepare us for tragedy?‘ in The Guardian
• Kate Dempsey,  ‘on The Space Between: poetry beyond words‘ in The Irish Times
• Jennifer Maloney, ‘Betting Big on Literary Newcomers‘ in The Wall Street Journal
• Vanessa Thorpe, ‘Meet Britain’s new generation of fearless young female playwrights‘ in The Guardian
• Leila Aboulela. ‘How Anita Desai inspired me to write‘ in The Scotsman
• Elizabeth Minkel. ‘Alone Together: At Book Riot Live‘ on The Millions
• Katy Simpson Smith, ‘Motherhood, Writerhood, and Calling a Job a Job‘ on Literary Hub
• Catherine Simpson, ‘Writing a woman in crisis‘ on Isabel Costello’s Literary Sofa
• Nicola Skinner, ‘Why women’s diaries are the ultimate act of defiance‘ on The Pool
• Doreen Carvajal, ‘Anne Frank’s Diary Gains ‘Co-Author’ in Copyright Move‘ in The New York Times
• Rachel Charlene Lewis, ‘Yes, Your Writing Is Shaped By Your Identity – But What You Publish Is Too‘ on Paper Darts
• Vendela Vida, ‘Highly Unlikely‘ in The New York Times

Personal essays/memoir:

• Fanny Blake, ‘I went on holiday to India with my best friend and left my husband at home‘ on High 50 Travel
• Guadalupe Nettel, ‘Bezoar‘ in Granta
• Roxane Gay, ‘Breaking Uniform‘ on Good
• Heather Seggel, ‘A Life in Boxes: What it’s Like Being Homeless for Ten Years‘ on Broadly
• Alana Massey, ‘Theological Scars‘ on Hazlitt
• Michele Leavitt, ‘Hidden in a Suitcase‘ in Guernica
• Rebecca Giggs, ‘Whale Fail‘ in Granta
• Nicole S. Chung, ‘Language Lessons: On Adoption, Identity and Loss‘ in The Toast
• Neda Semnani, ‘Memoirs of a Revolutionary’s Daughter‘ on The Baffler
• Nicole Miller, ‘The River Rises to Meet You‘ in Guernica
• Molly Crabapple, ‘Drawn and Cornered‘ on New Republic

Feminism:

• Kui Kihoro Mackay, ‘Every Day a Feminist‘ on Mama’s Junkyard
• Johanna Thomas Corr, ‘Are you an unpaid emotional labourer at home, and at work?‘ on The Pool
• Mira Ptacin, ‘What Happens When You’re Pregnant in Prison‘ in Elle
• Holly Brockwell, ‘Desperate not to have children‘ on the BBC
• Alison Gee, ‘The trouble with saying you don’t want children‘ on the BBC
• Gaby Hinsliff, ‘When authorities show no respect for women, there are dire consequences‘ on The Pool
• April Woolf, ‘The Feminist Asylum That Redefined Women’s Mental-Health Treatment‘ in The Cut
• Rowan Forster, ‘Does Mixed-Gender Wrestling Promote Equality or Violence Against Women?‘ in Vice
• Azadeh Moaveni, ‘ISIS Women and Enforcers in Syria Recount Collaboration, Anguish and Escape‘ in The New York Times
• Rachel Syme, ‘Selfie: The revolutionary potential of your own face, in seven chapters‘ on Medium
• Yuan Ren, ‘“There’s a huge social stigma to being overweight”: one woman’s account of fat shaming in China‘ in Stylist
• AN Devers, ‘Good-bye, Uterus, Good Riddance‘ on Lenny Letter
• Isabel Rogers, ‘“Messy or Dressy?” Meet Glossy Bossy‘ on her blog
• Samira Ahmed, ‘Marriage, Margaret Thatcher & the closet of female expectations‘ on her blog
• Dayna Evans, ‘On Gawker’s Problem with Women‘ on Medium

Society and Politics:

• Lois Beckett, ‘How the Gun Control Debate Ignores Black Lives‘ on Pro Publica
• Meghan Murphy, ‘Why don’t we talk about the pain of friendship break ups?‘ in The New Statesman
• Molly Crabapple, ‘The Paris Attacks, Refugees, and the Brutal Fiction of Borders‘ on Vice
• Marina Weiss, ‘#Trigger Warning: Fear and Loathing on Campus‘ on Weird Sister
• Viv Groskop, ‘What (and what not) to say to someone who has lost weight‘ on The Pool
• Rebecca Omonira-Oyekanmi, ‘Spending Review 2015: The economy should be the next big feminist issue‘ in the New Statesman
• Eve Fairbanks, ‘Why South African students have turned on their parents’ generation‘ in The Guardian
• Raad Rahman, ‘Will I Die a Muslim?‘ on Guernica
• Laila Lalami, ‘To Defeat ISIS, We Must Call Both Western and Muslim Leaders to Account‘ in The Nation
• Fay Wells, ‘My white neighbor thought I was breaking into my own apartment. Nineteen cops showed up.‘ in The Washington Post
• Larissa Pham, ‘The Architecture of Racism at Yale University‘ on Guernica
• Lisa Hix, ‘How America Bought and Sold Racism, and Why It Still Matters‘ on Collectors Weekly
• Hanna Rosin, ‘The Silicon Valley Suicides‘ in The Atlantic
• Carol Spindel, ‘A Line Through the Heart of Paris, the French Prime Meridian‘ on Guernica
• Alexandra Schwartz, ‘Sunday in Paris’ in The New Yorker
• Rebecca Mead, ‘Our Bodies, Ourselves‘ in The New Yorker

Film, Television, Music, Art and Fashion:

• Helen O’Hara, ‘Finally, a superhero to call our own‘ on The Pool
• Gaby Hinsliff, ‘Cheer up Adele, life gets better as you grow older‘ in The Guardian
• Sara Pascoe, ‘Zoolander 2 isn’t just bad for trans people – it’s a step backwards for us all‘ in The Guardian
• Sarah Seltzer, ‘“The Hunger Games” Strange, Simultaneously Progressive and Regressive Take on Gender‘ on Flavorwire
• Lili Loofbourow, ‘The 17th-Century Breastoration: A Time Before Bras‘ on The Hairpin
• Limara Salt, ‘What’s to be done about the lack of diversity in TV and film?‘ on The Pool
• Maureen Dowd, ‘The Women of Hollywood Speak Out‘ in The New York Times
• Anna March, ‘Suffragette and Feminist Inaction‘ on The Rumpus
• Lilian Min, ‘A decade after the fact, I’m re-exploring my love of Enya‘ on Hello Giggles

The interviews:

• Josie Pickens on The Rumpus
• Margaret Atwood in The New York Times
• Jeanette Winterson (and Marlon James) in The Guardian
• JK Rowling and Laurene Laverne in The Guardian
• Anne-Marie Slaughter on Salon
• Mary-Louise Parker on Electric Literature
• Claire Messud in the Boston Globe
• Ottessa Moshfegh on Vice and inThe LA Times
• Melinda Salisbury on helloiammariam
• Sarah Jasmon on Rebecca Mascull’s blog
• Brené Brown in The Guardian
• Melissa Green on Stylus
• Diana Athill in The Guardian
• Yeonmi Park on the Huffington Post
• Edwidge Danticat on Literary Hub
• Annie Liontas on The Rumpus
• Mary Gaitskill in The New York Times
• Lauren Groff on Literary Hub
• Cathy Rentzenbrink on Northern Soul
• Angela Flournoy in The Paris Review
• Jenny Johnson on The Rumpus
• Sophie Collins on The Institute of Contemporary Art blog
• Rainbow Rowell in The Guardian
• Jennifer Egan (and George Saunders) in The New York Times
• Salena Godden on Opus Independents

The regular columnists:

• Laurie Penny in The New Statesman
• Lucy Mangan in Stylist
• Roxane Gay in The Guardian US
• Yasmin Alibhai-Brown in The Independent
• Caitlin Moran in The Times
• Lauren Laverne in The Pool
• Ella Risbridger in The Pool
• Sali Hughes in The Pool
• Bim Adewunmi in The Guardian
• Sophie Heawood in The Guardian
• Eva Wiseman in The Observer
• Tracey Thorn in The New Statesman
• Chimene Suleyman and Maya Goodfellow on Media Diversified
• Josie Pickens on Ebony
• Bridget Christie in The Guardian
• Lizzy Kremer on Publishing for Humans

Books of the Year 2014 (Part 1)

I’m being cheeky this year and splitting my books of the year into two posts. Tomorrow will be books published in 2014; today’s it’s books I’ve read this year and loved but that were published prior to 2014. I’ve decided to do it this way because (at the time of writing) I’ve read 131 books so far this year and there are 24 that I think deserve highlighting. That needs splitting into two, so this seemed like the fairest/easiest/most sensible way to do it. So, the books I loved this year that were published before 2014 were (click on the titles to see the original reviews):

 

Americanah – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

It’s not often as an adult that you read a book which changes your world view. Adichie uses her main characters Ifemelu and Obinze to explore race in America and the UK and love in Nigeria. It’s thought-provoking and compelling. A potential future classic.

 

 

The Lowland – Jhumpa Lahiri

A book that I nearly gave up on and ended up so pleased I didn’t. It begins as the story of two brothers, Subhash and Udayan, growing up in Calcutta, one involved in political protests, the other studious and well-behaved, but it becomes the story of Gauri, transported to America after Udayan’s death. Sparse prose and a woman in a situation she doesn’t know how to deal with. Superb.

 

 

All the Birds, Singing – Evie Wyld

Jake’s a sheep farmer on a remote island. She chooses to cut herself off from the locals but something’s killing her sheep. As her present day story is told, alternate chapters reveal why she left Australia – in reverse chronology. Inventive, tense and told in sharp prose. Deserves every award it won.

 

 

The Awakening – Kate Chopin 

A feminist classic, republished this year by Canongate. Edna Pontellier, treated as an object by her husband, begins to reject motherhood and decides to break from society’s expectations of her. Powerful and still relevant.

 

 

The Story of a New Name – Elena Ferrante (translated by Ann Goldstein)

2014 was the year of #FerranteFever. Fuelled seemingly equally by the compelling story of Elena and Lena in The Neapolitan Novels and her desire to protect her anonymity. The Story of a New Name is my favourite book of the series so far. Ferrante is superb at depicting the type of love/jealousy filled friendship that only women seem to have. The novels are brutal, both in terms of the relationship between the two women but also because of the backdrop of Naples and poverty. I intend to spend some of 2015 reading the rest of her back catalogue.

 

The Woman Upstairs – Claire Messud

Nora Eldridge is angry. She’s spent years as the woman upstairs, the one who’s well-behaved, who no one pays any attention to because she’s single without any children. She meets the Shahid family and life changes for a time but is Nora really being seen? I loved this book and if you don’t agree, well ‘fuck you all’!

 

 

Woman on the Edge of Time – Marge Piercy

Another feminist classic. Connie Ramos is committed to a psychiatric unit by her niece Dolly’s pimp after she attacks him in self-defence and he – and Dolly – tell the medics that she’s violent. But Connie discovers she can visit the future, a future where there’s no gendered pronouns, babies are all bred mixed heritage/race and have three parents, and people contribute equally to society. Inspiring and depressing in equal measure – how far have we come in 38 years?

 

The Notebook – Agota Kristof (translated by Alan Sheridan)

Twin brothers who are taken to live with a cruel grandmother, surrounded by other cruel people. A dark, twisted alternative take on fairytales and the nature vs nurture question. Brutal, stark and compelling. I’ll be reading the rest of the trilogy in 2015.

 

 

Thanks to Fourth Estate, Evie Wyld, Canongate and Europa Editions for review copies.

The Woman Upstairs – Claire Messud

How angry am I? You don’t want to know. Nobody wants to know about that.

I’m a good girl, I’m a nice girl, I’m a straight-A, strait-laced, good daughter, good career girl, and I never stole anybody’s boyfriend and I never ran out on a girlfriend, and I put up with my parents’ shit and my brother’s shit, and I’m not a girl anyhow, I’m over fucking forty years old, and I’m good at my job and I’m great with kids and I held my mother’s hand when she died, after four years of holding her hand while she was dying, and I speak to my father every day on the telephone – every day, mind you, and what kind of weather do you have on your side of the river, because here it is pretty gray and a bit muggy too? It was supposed to say ‘Great Artist’ on my tombstone, but if I died right now it would say ‘such a good teacher/daughter/friend’ instead; and what I really want to shout, and want in big letters on that grave, too, is FUCK YOU ALL.

I think that’s possibly my favourite ever opening to a novel. Nora Marie Eldridge, 42, Elementary School teacher, goes on to say ‘Don’t all women feel the same?’ To which I reply, ‘Fuck, yes!’ If you haven’t already worked it out, I LOVED this book. More on that later.

Nora is pissed off because by the time her third grade students get to her:

…they’re full of Lady Gaga and Katy Perry and French manicures and cute outfits and they care how their hair looks!…How did all that revolutionary talk of the seventies land us in a place where being female means playing dumb and good looking? Even worse on your tombstone than ‘dutiful daughter’ is ‘looked good’; everyone used to know that. But we’re lost in a world of appearances now.

Nora compares life in modern day America to the Fun House at the fair – doors that seem to be exits but never lead outside into real life. This is compounded by her being at that age when women become ‘invisible’. She is ‘the woman upstairs’, the one who lives alone, quietly, at the end of the third floor, who lives a life ‘of quiet desperation…We’re completely invisible’. Her wish was that she would be an artist with several children by forty, instead she has a teaching job and a second bedroom that she uses as a studio. Nora is angry at her failure:

The hubris of it, thinking I could be a decent human being and a valuable member of family and society, and still create! Absurd. How strong did I think I was?

No, obviously what strength was all along was the ability to say ‘Fuck off’ to the lot of it, to turn your back on all the suffering and contemplate, unmolested, your own desires above all. Men have generations of practice at this.

But, for a short time, things change for Nora.

It all started with the boy. With Reza…He walked into my classroom late, on the first day of school, grave and uncertain, his gray eyes wide, their millipedic lashes aflutter in spite of his visible effort to control them, not to blink, and above all not to cry.

Within a week, all the staff have ‘fallen in love with him, a bit’, this ‘exceptional’ child.

Reza’s mother is Sirena Shahid, an artist. She’s Italian. Her husband and Reza’s father is Skandar Shahid, a visiting lecturer at Harvard. He’s from Beirut. Nora meets Sirena when Reza is attacked at school and called ‘a terrorist’. The following evening Sirena telephones Nora at home to discuss the boys who’ve attacked her son and Reza himself. She suggests they meet for coffee and they organise it for two days later. Thus begins a relationship between Nora and the Shahids which allows Nora to feel as though she’s seen.

The inclusion of the Shahids also allows Messud to discuss race in America – or at least one facet of it. Skandar in particular, in one excellent scene, discusses the way you’re seen, the way assumptions are made about you, if you come from a particular country and how that differs – is whitewashed – if you study at university in America.

When The Woman Upstairs was published a number of reviews referred to Nora as ‘unlikeable’. Claire Messud gave a fantastic response in an interview with Publishers Weekly when the interviewer said she wouldn’t want to be friends with Nora. Well, you know what? I would want to be friends with Nora because if she’s unlikeable, so am I and so are most of the women I consider to be my friends.

Why is Nora considered in these terms by some people? For me, the answer is in her loneliness and her desire to be seen. Everyone wants to be seen by someone, to not feel alone but we’re not allowed to admit that. I see myself in Nora – I was the woman upstairs for ten years and I was angry – I still am often, especially when the discussion concerns inequality. (I was also a schoolteacher. There was a point when I was reading the book when I wondered whether Messud had been stalking me a few years ago.) There is an incident in the novel that could be used to support someone’s dislike of Nora, however, if the behaviour she exhibits was performed by a man it would barely be commented on. Nora is deemed unlikeable because she is a woman but her loneliness and her desire for attention is not a female trait, it is a human one.

The Woman Upstairs is a superb novel and Nora is a fantastic character. And if the novel has one of the best openings ever, it also has one of the best endings; as with so many moments in the book, I found myself exclaiming ‘Fuck, yes!’