November 30, 2016
Books of the Year (and on the radio too!)
49thShelf’s Books of the Year list came out on Monday, and I’m thrilled with it. It turns out that 2016 has not been a total disaster—maybe the books will save us after all? And I was on CBC Ontario Morning today talking about some of the picks that would also make great holiday gifts. You can listen to the podcast here; I come on at 37.30.
November 27, 2016
Swing Time, by Zadie Smith
I can plot my adult life with Zadie Smith novels. I first read White Teeth during the summer of 2001 when I had a job that was in proximity of too many bookshops, and it was the first time it occurred to me in an undergraduate English stupor that there was such a thing as contemporary literature. (I reread it years later and the book was still brilliant, and shockingly prescient.) I got The Autograph Man out of the library a couple of years later when I was living in Nottingham, and I didn’t think much of it, and wasn’t the only one, but that didn’t matter much because On Beauty would come along in 2005, the year we moved to Canada and this modern take on Howards End would continue to expand my ideas about what contemporary literature could do. I bought her last novel, NW, the day that Harriet started playschool in 2012, when I was five minutes pregnant with Iris, and I can’t remember it so well now, partly because I was pregnant, but also because it was a difficult novel to hold in one’s grasp (as suggested by the surprisingly articulate review I wrote, but have no recollection of). And four years and a few months after that, it would be time for me to pick up my pre-ordered copy of her latest, Swing Time.
It took me nine days to read Swing Time, which for me is a literary eternity. Thankfully, I’m not pregnant, but I was busy and also distracted, and it’s not a novel whose plot exactly rivets. It’s also more than 400 pages long, which is heavy to lug, but I did so. It was not that I didn’t enjoy reading it, but sometimes I wondered what the point was. If NW took its reader up and down the streets and alleyways of northwest London, Swing Time transports across continents via jumbo jet and through decades too—its canvas is immense. It’s a novel about girlhood, friendship, race, dance, musical theatre, social media, celebrity, and social mobility. It’s more White Teeth than NW, and Irie even makes a cameo on page 34. And in all its material, I kept waiting for patterns to emerge, for parallels, binaries.
It’s the story of two girls, our unnamed narrator and her childhood friend Tracey who meet at dance class, and they’re both mixed-race children growing on the same housing estate. The novel moves between chapters that take us through their shared history and another contemporary storyline in which the narrator is a personal assistant to an international pop star, Aimee, modelled on Madonna and Kylie Minogue, and helping to establish a school for girls in an unnamed West African country. The notion of time is important through the book, in terms of music and rhythm, narrative time, and also just chronologically. Swing as in swing music, but also in how time swings back and forth between the two narrative threads. (Swing Time is also a 1936 movie musical starring Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire). Common to both threads is the narrator’s relationship with women—to her mother, to Tracey, to Aimee—and her tendency to lose herself to another’s command. Except that such self-effacingness seems more like a convenient front than actual reality—the narrator is thoroughly in command of the 400+ story she sets out to tell, bending time to suit her own sense of things. Her tendency to not be present is a curious aspect of the book—to the point where other characters are replying to things she said that we never get to read, and what is her name?—but she’s also everywhere, in charge of shining the spotlight even as she ducks out of its glow.
For me, Smith has always been a masterful novelist whose works just kind of peter out before the end, and my explanation for that is that her stories are so excellent that the endings are always going to be a let-down and/or do we really expect her to come up with a novel like that and properly end it too? But in her fourth book, it seems she’s finally got the conclusion that comes with a gut punch, the last fifty pages or so finally bringing the pieces together, the patterns emerging. The conclusion of Swing Time is wonderful, devastating, and ambiguous in the most engaging fashion. Yes, the book is a bit bloated in the middle, but reading any of Smith’s prose is a pleasure. And all of it matters—you just don’t know how until the end.
November 25, 2016
How Do You Feel?
I’m going to say it—it’s been a rough few weeks. Yesterday I asked a parent in the school yard if he was American, intending to wish him a Happy Thanksgiving, and he looked so upset when I asked him. “I’m not accusing you of anything,” I said. “I’m just trying to create some distance from that mess,” he responded, and I got that. I’ve been trying to create some distance too. I took Twitter off my phone. Between conspiracy theories, white supremacy and CanLit ridiculousity, the platform has ceased to have much value except for to constantly have me exclaiming, “What that actual fuck?” I’ve tried telling men’s rights activists to eat various bags of dicks, and attempted to engage with a woman who insisted that the patriarchy wasn’t real (“That’s what they want you to think,” I told her, with a winky face, which she didn’t think was very funny, and my goodness, I thought feminists were the humourless ones) and watching what’s happening at Standing Rock just causes me to despair.
There are a whole lot of people on Twitter who, before November 8, I’d been in adamant disbelief that they were actually real. But it seems that they exist, human bots. Who refuse to read anything but Wikileaks emails, have eggs instead of heads (remember when once upon a time that implied intelligence?) and have no passion for anything except the things they hate. Which is anything the least bit challenging. And there is this atmosphere of disdain for feelings. Slinging “crybaby” like an epithet. This from people supporting a man whose supporters had been stockpiling arms for the event of their disappointment—and suddenly crying was something terrible? Speaking of alternate universes.
Who are they, the people who make fun of feelings. Do they not understand that it’s feelings that underline the dangerous fabric of nationalism? That there is nothing rational about screaming nonsensically at a rally, or screaming, “Kill the Bitch? (I am never going to forget that phrase.) That the notion of safety has become a joke. Why would denying others such a thing be the hill you’d choose to die on? And I keep getting emotional—of course I do. I feel terrible. I am sad, and angry, and frustrated, and disappointed. And really, really confused by the determination of others to put our precious, fragile, precarious arrangement in peril.
Pendulums swing though. And back. It’s the way of history. And it’s healthy to keep asking ourselves questions. “How do we keep what we believe in and know it’s right from becoming dogma?” I asked my friend May yesterday, and that’s a whole other blog post. We talked about how apparent injustices are now, all those things we were able to ignore before that have risen to the surface. To be acknowledged, looked in the face. Finally. It’s all very hard, but necessary. And in the meantime, the question of feelings are going to be more so. (See also this post: What are you going through?)
On Thursday I went to the Canadian Children’s Book Centre Awards Gala, and drank all the wine, which helped a bit with the whole feelings thing. And in my silly bubble of happy, I felt grateful to be surrounded by people who acknowledged the power of books and of story and truth and history. We need books more than we’ve ever needed them, books to keep us asking questions, books to make sense of the madness, and to underline to our children the things that are important and ever shall be.
Harriet remains a hedgehog fanatic, and therefore we have all become fond of the book, How Do You Feel?, by Rebecca Bender. I love the double meaning of the question (because anything that teaches that a single thing can have two realities is important), and that the answers to the questions are all about words and similes. The whole book is about connection, and it’s sweet and lovely, and also powerfully subversive in the most important way.
November 23, 2016
Mini Reviews
The Keys of My Prison, by Frances Shelley Wees
I loved this one, a reissue of a 1956 novel by Wees who wrote more than 20 romance and mystery novels. The Keys of My Prison fits comfortably into the contemporary craze for domestic suspense novels; its a terrifically Toronto book*; and it reminds me of Hugh MacLennan’s The Watch the Ends the Night in a vague kind of way. It’s the story of a young wife and mother (and heiress!) whose husband is injured in a car crash, and when he emerges from a coma, he’s not the man he was before. Could the man in the bed really be Rafe or is he an imposter? Or is it possible that none of them really ever knew Rafe at all? *Had a bone to pick with the jacket copy though, which describes the family as residing in their Rosedale mansion, but they in fact live north of St. Clair on Russell Hill Road. There is also a mention of the “Bay Subway” which someone takes downtown (and which stops on the surface at the corner of Yonge and St. Clair?) and I couldn’t figure out what that was all about. But that I cared so much is a testament to the book’s appeal. Heartily recommended.
*
I liked this novel a lot, and it’s a story that will appeal to anyone who appreciated Jessica Grant’s Come Thou Tortoise a few years back, another story about a quirky character with an affinity for a non-human creature. Structurally, Cluck is a bit lacking, a big and sprawling narrative that could use more focus and tautness, but it has charm and the twists are interesting, and I appreciated the humour throughout, as well as the sensitivity with which Rowntree writes about mental illness and social exclusion. (She previously co-edited an anthology of stories about mental illness.) It begins with Henry playing with his farm set at a young age, and moves through his life as he struggles to find a place for himself in the world, build his own community, and discover an outlet for his passion for poultry. In a hopeful and realistic way, Rowntree depicts the complicated experience of a character for whom conformity is not an option, and has her readers plotting along with her on the road to his ultimate triumph.
*
Sex and Death, edited by Sarah Hall and Peter Hobbs
This book was so good. I must confess that it initially gave me a case of CanLit Inferiority Complex, because the internationally-authored stories were so stellar I wondered how poor old Canada could ever compete. BUT…then I realized that it was just that the pieces in this anthology were so well selected (by acclaimed writers including Ben Marcus, Claire Vaye Watkins, Kevin Barry, Taiye Selasi, Ali Smith) rather than the rest of the world setting the bar so high (I am sure there are middling short story writers in the UK; I just never have to hear about them). AND Canadian literature has two stand-out contributions to this anthology, the amazing Lynn Coady and Alexander MacLeod (whose own story is worth the price of the entire book). My favourite story is Ceridwen Dovey’s “Fixations”, however, which is one of two postpartum stories in the collection and the best story I’ve ever read about an anal fissure. I also appreciated the badassedness of flashing this book’s cover on public transit. Funny too how much the thematic concerns of the anthology cease to be the point, partly because the stories are just so great, but also because sex and death pretty much covers everything you’d ever want to write about.
November 21, 2016
Destination Bookshop: Hunter Street Books
Saturday started pretty badly: literally seconds into our road trip to Peterborough, I hit a bollard while backing out of a parking space and took the front bumper off a giant Toyota. How was this even possible? My front wheel well hit the bollard and away went the bumper, and this was as upsetting as you might expect. I tried to put it back on myself, but it turned out the car wasn’t made of lego. I’m going to be getting an unpleasant bill. I cried and two teenage boys came over to marvel at the damage while I cried. Miraculously, the car sharing company gave me use of another car, however, and this one I managed not to destroy. And so we were off, flying down the highways toward Peterborough’s brand new bookstore, as planned, and we were talking about how I’d never had a car accident before, and if one has to have such a thing, this one is probably best case scenario, and how nobody was hurt, no other cars were involved, and even the bollard was unscathed. How the Toyota was too big anyway.
And so the stakes were high. This trip to Peterborough has now cost us perhaps $1000. Hunter Street Books had better be worth the journey and the damage. But I had a feeling it would be. A brand new bookstore in the city I’d grown up in—I knew how much downtown Peterborough needed a store like this. I knew how excellent it was that writer Michelle Berry had taken a chance on a new business. I’d seen photos online of the space and it was beautiful. Though, as always, a true mark of the store’s goodness would be the quality of the books on the shelves.
Well, Reader, I bought them. The books, I mean. The books I’d planned on buying, because Michelle had them in stock and facing out even—did she knew I was coming and was intending to purchase a copy of Elena Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter? And Hot Milk, by Deborah Levy? And then I ended up buying I’m Judging You, by Luvvie Ajayi, which I hadn’t known I’d needed, but Michelle made me realize. I bought Marnie Jackson’s new book too, because I’d only had an ARC and it’s stayed on my mind in such a way that I realized I needed something more substantial.
I go to a lot of bookstores. I’ve been to ones that are good, bad and middling, and my standards are higher than most people’s because I’ve been around a bit and because I have a million books at home already. You have to be more than adequate to satisfy me. You have to stock small press titles and prize lists and the books everyone has heard of and those we haven’t yet. You have to have both of Anakana Schofield’s novels and Double Teenage, by Joni Murphy, facing out. You need mysteries and commercial favourites and Maria Semple and books in translation. You have to stock all the books I love best, and the ones I’m still looking out for. And Michelle Berry has done it all—Peterborough is so lucky.
Check out the curated shelf, with picks by Dave Bidini, Esta Spalding, Eden Robinson and Madeleine Thien. (Madeleine Thien used to have more books on her shelf, but people bought them all). These books are selling well, Michelle Berry says—and then she asked me to curate a shelf of my own for January (and just you wait and see what I’ve come up with…)
The space is big and airy and full of light. My husband reports that the chairs are comfortable—and he’s sat down in a lot of bookshops. More than that, he also had a good time browsing—the Oliver Sacks book in our stack was his pick. And then he sat down and waited for me to finish exploring, and he was happy to do so. He saw it coming when I hung up my coat on the rack by the door—we’d be there for a while I perused every shelf. A small table and chairs is set up in the back for littler readers. There will also be space for events in the New Year, and I can foresee this being a very good spot for literary-minded people to come together.
And they already were—coming together, that is. I took a photo of the line at the till, for lines at tills in bookshops are my very favourite thing in all the universe. I’d happily wait in one forever. Well done, Michelle Berry, for supporting local authors, boosting your downtown community, putting more books in the hands of people of the world, and for doing it all so well. You’ve made the world a more beautiful place, and I can’t wait to come back.
Although next time I’ll try to drive more carefully.
November 18, 2016
Missing Nimama
Congratulations to Melanie Florence and Francois Thisdale, whose hauntingly beautiful picture book, Missing Nimama, about a murdered Indigenous woman won the TD Children’s Book Prize last night at The Canadian Children’s Book Centre Awards. This book is an extraordinary demonstration of what the picture book can be and do; you can read my review here. I’m also thrilled for Danielle Daniel who won the Marilyn Baillie Picture Book Prize for Sometimes I Feel Like a Fox, another book we’re big fans of at our house.
A complete list of winners is here. It was a terrific night.
November 16, 2016
Notes
On the evening of Friday November 4th, I was walking down the street with a copy of Erin Wunker’s Notes from a Feminist Killjoy in my bag. Striding with purpose, something vital playing through my headphones, and a man on the street approached me. He was holding a clipboard, wearing a vest that identified him as a fundraiser whose job it is to get passersby to sign on in support of a charity. The kind of person I tend to smile at, shaking my head, as I keep on walking. Usually I am also herding recalcitrant small children, which makes me less of a target. But that night I was unencumbered, and although I gave no indication of wishing to engage with this person, he wouldn’t relent. Walking alongside me, asking questions, even though I was listening to music, never made eye contact, never answered him.
He didn’t stop and finally I had to say to him, each word delivered with such deliberateness as I waited at the intersection for the light to turn green: “I don’t want to talk to you.”
The light turned green, and I stepped into the street, and I could hear him behind me: “Oh, that’s really nice,” he was calling out to me, as though I’d refused him something he was entitled to, as though his invading my space necessitated a kind of niceness that ought to be returned.
But, No, no, no, I was thinking. I’m not having any of that.
*
There is something about notes. Notes have an irrefutability that a manifesto lacks, albeit in a shrugging-off kind of womanish way. “When I started this book, I wanted to write something unimpeachable,” writes Erin Wunker in the introduction to her Notes From a Feminist Killjoy, but her book turned out to be something very different. Or not. “Unimpeachable” is like a red rag to a bull in the realm of discourse. You’re going to go out and build this solid thing just to have someone break it. They call this “debate”. It’s logic, rhetoric. When you debate you’re not meant to get emotional, to remain at a remove, which is easier to do when you’re not personally invested. When it’s theoretical and you can examine it cooly, not getting all hysterical. Okay then, let’s talk about you policing my body, for example. About campus rape. Let’s call abortion a debate.
It’s back and forth. It gets you nowhere. Turns my actual life into a game of ping-pong. I get hysterical.
Notes, on the other hand. Wunker: “I remember that I tell my students that reading and writing are attempts at joining conversations, making new ones, and sometimes, shifting the direction of discourse.”
*
“Notes” is a way of ducking.
Also, ducking is a mechanism of survival. What is wrong with being unwilling to be a target, with refusing to play that game?
“Notes” is different game happening on a whole other level.
*
If I wanted to “impeach” Notes From a Feminist Killjoy, there would be a couple of points I’d start from. The chapter on feminist mothering, for one, which seems to be unaware or else does not to take into account the substantial body of scholarly work on this subject—Sara Ruddick, Andrea O’Reilly, my friend May Friedman, for just a start. Although the chapter poses something familiar to those of us who’ve lived it—the woman on the verge of discovery of this vast world of motherhood and feminism, the questions motherhood necessitates and the unfamiliarity of it all. The complete inapplicability of everything we’ve ever learned before to serve as solutions to our problems. This is a chapter written by an author who is still lost at sea. And there is usefulness in that kind of documentation. But yes, it might have been helpful to have some suggestion of the shore.
My other problem with the text was with the nature of the killjoy, whose moniker I’d wear with relish, actually. Particularly a feminist killjoy. That IS the kind of no-fun I most want to be. (Wunker takes her title from Sara Ahmed’s blog, feministkilljoys, which has been a tremendous discovery for me since reading her book—”joining conversations, making new ones.”)
But I kept being tripped up by the noun becoming a verb—the killjoy actively killing (patriarchal) joys. For a few reasons, one being the violence implicit. I don’t want to kill anything. And also that I have certain amount of reverence for joy. (One of my daughters’ middle name is “Joy.” The other’s middle name is “Malala,” which means sadness, so don’t think I don’t get the whole picture, but she gets to be named for a kickass feminist heroine so it all comes out even.) Joy and happiness, which Wunker writes about as a socialized and commodified product, a social imperative. “Happiness as restricted access. Happiness as a country club, a resort, an old boy’s club for certain boys only.” Happiness as an impossibility.
And yet it’s that notion, not of happiness itself but of its impossibility, that chafes me. Partly because I believe in (even insist on) a genuine happiness that need not be commodified at all—the way the afternoon sun shines right now on my cup of tea, for example. It’s about being present, eyes wide, curious and ready to receive it. It’s about the peace of a moment. Happiness is small and it is slippery, but it’s real.
There really is such thing as joy, and to refer to patriarchal violence as such a thing undermines it. Undermines the spaces we need to create for joy to exist in our personal corners of the world.
*
Of course, there has been very little joy for anyone who considers herself a feminist in the past week. (It is November 15 as I write this.) That Friday evening as I asserted myself and said, “I don’t want to talk to you,” seems like a relic of a bygone age. When we were reading (excellent, amazing) news articles with headlines like, “The Men Feminism Left Behind.” When I was thinking that progress was slow, but how far I’d come to be able to speak up and say those words to the man on the street. To not have to worry about being nice. When I was taking comfort in my daughters coming into the world on the headwinds of so much necessary, vital change.
After I crossed the street that night and left the man behind, I got on the subway and read Wunker’s chapter about rape culture. The part about her running through the woods to flee a man who’d tried to lure her into his car on a country road. I remember the details: her Birkenstocks, the wound on her foot. The sense that all of us have had of being chased, the fear. Rape as a thing and rape as a sceptre, an inevitable that we steel ourselves for. By not walking at night, for example. There is no joy here either. There is darkness illuminated by streetlights, but even there you can’t be safe.
*
Notes is a way of starting. Trying. Essai. If a manifesto is a red rag, then a note is a building block, a puzzle piece. The reader responds not by charging, but by saying, Yes and, or Yes but. She doesn’t respond by tearing the whole thing down.
I love the way the narrative thread of Wunker’s book makes its way with seeming effortlessness. There is nothing laboured about how a discussion of rape culture leads to the Jian Ghomeshi trial leads to women coming together leads to a chapter on friendship. (Which references The Babysitters Club. Yes, and!!) Why are so few of our formative texts about female friendship? “What is it about female friendship that inspires such insipid descriptors?” What are relationships between women often so fraught?
“Is it too hard to write your own narrative and witness another’s, simultaneously?”
*
As I watched the election results last Tuesday night (and felt as heartbroken as I’ve ever felt in my life, perhaps, which is saying something for how lucky I’ve been in a world that’s notoriously hard to live in) I was trying to read the book I’d been reading for a couple of days, Making Feminist Media: Third Wave Magazines on the Cusp of the Digital Age, by Elizabeth Groenveld. I started reading it because those third wave magazines (Bitch and Bust) were what taught me to call myself a feminist, made me realize that I’d been a feminist all along. I’ve always loved magazines—you know, the kind that smelled like perfume—but then one day I stumbled into the magazine rack at the Toronto Women’s Bookstore and discovered there was a kind of magazine that didn’t make me feel like less than a person. That there were things other than just a boyfriend that could make my soul complete—do you know what a revelation this was to me? It’s still shocking to consider just how much.
I never noticed when I was writing them that everybody in the magazine was white. It would take me years to realize there was anything strange about that, what a departure from reality such whiteness actually is. I also recall reading letters in Bitch about whether this was a magazine for feminists or lesbians, and (I say this with shame) feeling similar consternation. I didn’t know there was such a thing as intersectionality then. I have learned a lot since I started reading these magazines a decade and a half ago.
What occurred to me though on the day after the elections as I finished reading Grovenveld’s book was the difficulty all these magazines have had in surviving—how the feminist message remains so niche. Considering this in the context of the number of white women who voted for a misogynist fascist seems sort of unremarkable. Why doesn’t feminism sell more? Thinking too about what Grovenveld writes about identity politics and how focusing on distinct groups creates a sense of community among the group’s members, but ultimately it keeps the focus too narrow for widespread change to occur. For the magazine to be sustainable, she means. (Although she writes that a magazine being short-lived is not fair as a standard of failure. The fact that it even existed at all, and was read, defies so many odds.)
On Friday morning I was walking with my friends and we were talking about that group of women who voted for a misogynist fascist, and one friend framed this too in the context of intersectionality, which I’d never properly considered. I’d been thinking about the failure of intersectionality as women break apart instead of coming together (although I understand entirely, and I get that #solidarityisforwhitewomen) but never thought about the troubling intersectionality of these white women with their allegiances to the patriarchy. No woman is a highway.
What is it that makes women go so far out of their way not to support other women? Why did so many people dislike Hillary Clinton so much. To the point of going out of their way to elect a fascist, I mean. Is it because of the lack of representation of female relationships that Wunker references? To the end of getting to the answer to that question, Sady Doyle’s Trainwreck came in for me at the library.
*
Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear…and Why is a historical and pop-cultural look at the women who’ve stirred up shit from the margins and who (as Doyle posits) may have actually been prophets but it’s just that the world wasn’t ready yet. (Billie Holiday on rape culture, anyone?)
I needed a bit of levity these last few days, but also some more context as to how we’ve arrived here, and this book offered both. Why do we set up women to fail with impossible standards, and then decide it’s our job to punish them, to destroy them, when they do?
What the trainwreck shows us, Doyle writes, is that “in a sexist culture, being female is an illness for which there is no cure.”
*
Which bring us to here.
And no, no, no. I’m still not having any of that.
November 11, 2016
We All Count.
Turning to books for comfort and wisdom this week. This gorgeous title is one of my favourites. At our play school’s blog, I’ve made a list called Picture Books for a Better World, of which We All Count is a part.
November 10, 2016
How Women’s Fiction Can Save Us All
On Tuesday night I started reading The Little Virtues, by Natalia Ginzburg (which came to my attention in Belle Boggs’ essay in The New Yorker, “The Book That Taught Me What I Want to Teach My Daughter”). Not a comfort read, exactly, although there is some of that, but then the first essay is about her years in exile from the Fascists in Italy before her husband died in prison: “Faced with the horror of his solitary death, and faced with the anguish of what preceded his death, I ask myself if this happened to us—to us, who bought oranges at Giro’s and went for walks in the snow.”
There are some moments when it’s important to face things head on, and to learn from someone who has gathered wisdom from decades of experience.
Women’s fiction doesn’t usually get that much credit for helping its readers face things head-on: these books are escapes, they’re beach reads. Fluffy rather than edgy, entertainment instead of education. Women’s fiction that takes on “issues” is its own sub-genre, and there tends to be a formula as to how these stories are executed, with tidy resolutions. Faced with a tyrant being elected American President, we’re supposed to be turning to weighty French philosophers, right? Or Natalia Ginzburg (which I really do recommend). Certainly not Jodi Picoult.
What is political? I’ve been thinking about this in terms of the novel I’m writing at the moment, about two women’s friendship over decades. About my forthcoming book too, Mitzi Bytes, which is about a woman who dares to have a voice and what the consequences are—but it’s also more complicated than that, because she’s not entirely innocent in her own downfall. My character is flawed, scared, arrogant and insensitive. A lot of the book is about her relationship with other women—her friends, her sister-in-law, her mother, the other other mothers at her children’s school. And what’s the point of a story like this, I wonder, at the moment of onset of a world like that?
The question of how women get along and the ways in which they don’t is fascinating to me. I suspect that every story I ever write will be about this. And I am also fascinated by how 53% of white American women voted against a strong, experienced feminist and instead for a noted misogynist. I am fascinated by the women who cheer for him exuberantly and claim that he could grope their pussies anytime. Who are these people? What planet do they live on? Could it possibly be the same one as me?
Women’s fiction tells women’s stories. Women’s fiction also sells. And it occurs to me that this genre has the best capacity of any to help us better understand each other. The authors who are writing nuanced stories about the dynamics of sisterhood are laying out a path of relations. Why are women’s friendships so intense? How come when we don’t like a woman we don’t like her so much. Why is it so challenging to see a woman making choices that are different from yours? Why is it all so personal? Why can mother/daughter relationships be so fraught?How come when we have so much in common (and when so much is at stake) we can be so vehemently opposed?
Part of it is because we’re human, of course. Human beings are complicated. This is awkward, but is in fact one of the best things about humans. While these differences are difficult to navigate, it would be terrifying if we were all the same. Who would push us to be better? How would we know what to rise above? Part of it too comes down to something I’m working out about gender and specificity—a guy in a suit is a guy in a suit, and any guy is going to see that and identify, but women have different hair colours, and different hair styles, and maybe she’s wearing a pantsuit and maybe she’s wearing a dress, and does she stay home and bake cookies or is she Diane Keaton in Baby Boom, and all these differences make it easier to find something to dislike about somebody. Unless, of course, you just happen to dislike guys in suits as a blanket rule (and lately I am thinking there is something to that).
In women’s fiction, I think, we can get to the point of figuring it out. We need authors to consider these questions and write thoughtful and nuanced stories about them (and this is happening now). We need readers too to pick up these books and reading with questions in mind, to allow themselves to be challenged by some of the ideas contained therein. I need to get a better sense of that 53% of white women and what they were voting for or against. The women who supported Clinton but did not dare to admit it beyond the confines of a secret Facebook group need to grapple with these questions too, because they bear some responsibility as well for what happened—women who won’t dare to make Thanksgiving dinner uncomfortable. White liberal women who need to (for the sake of their children, their country) rise up and flip that fucking table, and let their fathers and brothers (and sisters and mothers) know just what has been stolen from them with this election.
And what better place to find stories of uncomfortable dinners and torrid family dynamics? Why, women’s fiction, of course. (And Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections too, which totally falls into the category.)
We need to be reading more authors of colour too to find out what’s happening at the dinner tables of families who might not necessarily look like yours. I’ve been so grateful to those who chose to market books by Brit Bennett and Angela Flournoy as mainstream fiction this past while so that their books came onto my radar. I am going to continue to actively seek out diverse voices in commercial fiction and use whatever platform I have to amplify them, and hope that other white commercial writers will do the same, for its a genre that’s as disturbingly white as any other.
We need to support, and promote too, commercial writers who dare to be overtly political in their work, to read them as thoughtfully and generously as Roxane Gay reviewed Jodi Picoult in The New York Times. Let’s celebrate the commercial writers who are daring to take risks, as Marissa Stapley suggests in our conversation on commercial fiction. Writers need to keep striking that perfect balance between books that people are actually going to want to read, and books that give us something to think about. Books that build bridges, or at least look-out points.
The work commercial women writers are doing has always been important, but perhaps it’s never been more important than right now.
November 9, 2016
Work
One of the most fascinating (if dispiriting) endeavours in which I’ve ever partaken is following Reese Witherspoon on Instagram. Not for the fact of Reese herself, who is perky, inoffensive, and avidly marketing her southern lifestyle brand, but for her followers. These are people who, apart from the fact of Reese Witherspoon, I seem to have absolutely nothing in common. Though you wouldn’t know it at first—click on their accounts, and they’ve got jobs and kids and gardens and they’re instagramming their pie just like I am. But when Reese Witherspoon posted admiration about Michelle Obama this summer, they went ballistic. “Unfollowing.” “I’m never going to be able to watch Sweet Home Alabama again.” “Reese, you’re an entertainer. We don’t come here for the politics.”
We don’t come here for the politics.
As though politics was a channel on television and not the world we live in, and the streets we walk down (though I suspect these people drive down) when we take our kids to school. It was shocking to me, that decent-seeming people can operate in the world in this way. And not just in this regard of politics as a kind of accessory, something you can put on and shrug off. But that these decent people were coming at it with politics of their own,with their #NeverHillary and hash tagged support for the Republican candidate for president. These ordinary people are the monsters in our midst and they’re so emboldened. Moreover, they hate Michelle Obama. I didn’t know anyone hated Michelle Obama. They all seemed upset about her influence over school lunches. I don’t know. It was so much nicer when I had never considered Reese Witherspoon’s twitter followers, back when I lived in a bubble.
Yesterday the writer Glennon Doyle Melton posted a photo of her and her daughters wearing Wild Feminist t-shirts, ready to rock the vote. The photo received overwhelming support, save for a few people. People who wrote how they really respect Melton and value her work, but can’t believe she is supporting Hillary Clinton. (How? How? How? I would love to sit down for a drink with the woman I heard of the radio the other day who claims she’s voting Republican because she’s a Christian and has morals and values. What are they? How did the Republican candidate align with these? What is it like to live in a world that makes absolutely no sense. Although I’m started to get an idea…)
Somebody told Melton though, why are you involving your children in this? They’re young, this person said. Let them be kids and why concern them with politics? And this morning even more than yesterday I’m considering how abjectly wrong this is. That we have to involve our children. We can no longer expect others to do the work for us, and Facebook posts and tweets just aren’t cutting it—we’ve got to get out there and do the work, and our kids have to see us doing it. They have to know what the stakes are. It makes me think of Advice for the Young At Heart, by Tears for Fears. “When are we going to make it work?” I’ve spent a good decade being bitter at Baby Boomers for the world we’ve been stuck with, but I’m nearly forty—I need to do a better job for my own children.
“I could be happy. I could be quite naive. It’s only me and my shadow, happy in a make-believe.” And it’s not just me and my general complacency. It’s all the people who seriously considered Hillary Clinton the lesser of two evils, the people who are right now on twitter claiming that Justin Trudeau is just as bad—this fucking moralizing has to stop, pragmatism has to prevail. The current Liberal government has to use this moment of crisis to live up to their promises and underline the faith Canadians put in them a year ago. We have to work together with what we want. I don’t want a revolution. Although it’s easy for me to say—I’m not living on a remote First Nations reserve with no access to clean drinking water, for example (or in Flint, Michigan, with no access to clean drinking water) but I’m not sure these are the people who want a revolution either. I’m not sure the revolution some people are looking for would make life necessarily better for either of us.
The idea of politics being something you can take off or put on is continuing to trouble me. I wrote about it last March when Rob Ford died—I can’t put my politics aside. The idea that women are human beings worthy of respect is my politics, and it’s the foundation of everything. And this is what drives me nuts—not the idiots and the white supremacists because these people seem to have an astounding sense of their own identities, but instead the ordinary, decent people (your dad, your husband) who found making the choice between Clinton and Trump a difficult one. Do you know how radical that is? Do you understand how extremist and terrifying it is that any ordinary decent person who was of two minds about it even entertained the notion of voting for Trump, not even to get to the fact that they actually did so? If that were my dad, my uncle, I’d never be able to speak to that person again. All those families who quietly agree not to discuss politics at the table, lest it make anybody uncomfortable. But we have to be made uncomfortable. Look how impossibly uncomfortable we are this morning after a season of trying to be civil and understanding. The daughters of American need to turn to their dads and ask them, How could you do this to us?
(This is also why we have to raise our children to be feminist. Actively, whether they are our sons or daughters. Do not think the world will do it for you.)
My seven-year-old daughter crawled into bed with me this morning and her entire body was wracked with sobs. She is a bit melodramatic. 14 years of living with an English person has taught me not to get hysterical about things, but Harriet is still little. And I suppose I should be sorry that I involved her so much in what was happening yesterday, that she became so invested—this would be a victory for justice, for women, for feminism. But it’s not the worst lesson to learn, either, that the world is a deeply imperfect place and that the things you dream aren’t everybody else’s dreams. That there are disappointments and set-backs, but we fight on anyway. In fact, we fight on even harder. If it was important to be a feminist yesterday, today it is beyond paramount. We cannot stop.
I’m going to write a letter to my MP and to the Prime Minister today imploring them to see this as a pivotal moment—you must be the thing you promised you could be. I’m going to take action to stand up for the people of Standing Rock, who are defending their precious resources from the likely possibility of environmental disaster. I am going to continue to insist that Black Lives Matter. I’m going to lay down my life on the principal of public education so that we stop having people who fail to understand that #BlackLivesMatter means that all lives matter, and that they don’t right now. All this is a failure of intelligence, of empathy and understanding. I’m going to keep talking back to pro-life numpties on the street and online and using my voice and my story. I’m going to keep reading and learning and asking questions and rejecting cliches and trying to put the pieces together. To understand Reese Witherspoon’s instagram followers even, and where the common ground lies—the world does not need any more othering. I’m going to use my voice and my body and stand up for the things I believe in—which include goodness, the world, and people.
