The Sheila Variations

ewww, i need to go bathe.

Isn't that weird??

Very.

"My first collection of short stories was titled ''Nightwork'' because I wrote it at night while I was divorced and raising two sons. How else can I pay my dues?"

By writing a good book that people see some value in and want to read...

"But what I mean is that a piece of writing should be hard and clean in the sense that there is nothing extraneous about it, no feathery adjectives."

My patents and publications are exactly that. Doesn't mean I should get a book award for writing scientific prose.

"It was Gordon Lish at Knopf who bought my first stories, and he was fired before the stories came out. "

Fired because he bought shitty stories that didn't sell, perhaps?

"It is called ''What Have You Been Doing?'' and it's about a woman who teaches her son how to kiss. "

What would be the reaction if the genders were reversed? Pervert. Bold, brave and nasty are adjectives that describe SOG troops. This woman is a hack.

Ick, Sheila, I'm going to have to go read some good fiction tonight just to wash this woman out of my mind. And I was so looking forward to reading Applied Physics Letters before bed.

I am going to have to take a peek at her book, if I ever see it at Barnes & Noble. Just to get a glimpse of the prose, see for myself. Very very strange.

what about that book, "The Surrender," by the woman who became obsessed with anal sex? Her televised interview by Tina Brown was one of the most uncomfortable things I've ever watched.

Steve -

Wonkette wrote a book?

hahahahahahahaha

dang nabbit, got to clean the monitor now....

But seriously folks ... I think there's a difference between someone who openly writes a book about sex (and I've got no problem with that - I have some of those books myself) - and then ... this weird and ikky article.

Her sons must have read the interview and been like: "GOD, Mom! You've just ruined my life!"

I'm not really talking about the content of the story - you can get away with anything if you're a good writer - I'm just pointing out the weird-ness (in general) of this interview.

She has a book that has sold 1000 copies. She has won the National Book Award. Other authors think she doesn't deserve it. Many think you need to have paid more dues than she has ... I can't comment on the prose, because I haven't read it.

But John's right (in my opinion) - her view on writing needing to be "hard and clean" is a clue that I probably wouldn't like it. To my taste, her comments seem defensive (which - who can blame her - she just wins the National Book Award and no one thinks she deserves it) - and bizarre. Like - I can't get a line on how she actually feels about writing, about herself as a writer.

It just left me with an odd feeling.

just out of curiousity, how many people vote on this award? it would be pretty funny if it were more than 1000...

Apropos nothing, she's a near-dead-ringer for my ex-girlfriend (albeit 20 years older).

john, you gleaned all that from one interview? do you read palms as well?

the ickiness is the mention of the story involving incest. she's not the first person to write about such a thing. i think judgement should be reserved till you've read her work.

there's another writer, amy hempel, that very few people know about. another writer, chuck palahniuk, who wrote fight club, has sold millions of books and created a cult following, and still says he'll never have her skill.

i think you hit the proverbial nail when you said there's always controversy with literary awards, sheila. they could try to give a literary award posthumously to hemingway, and you'd find all kinds of people who'd protest it.

meanwhile, my favorite book ever is called Famine by an author named Todd Komarnicki. Another favorite of mine is The Cool of the Wild by Howard Tomb. any of you ever heard of them? does that mean they're shitty books?

Beth - I haven't heard of either of them. I will put them on my eternal reading list, however!

A couple of my favorite books ever are books no one's ever heard of.

Hopeful Monsters by Nicholas Mosley.

Lives of the Saints by Nancy Lehmann....

These are great books.

Again, it's not the topic of her short story that bugs me. That's not what I'm trying to get at here.

Anais Nin wrote about incest, and rape in a very erotic way. Nabokov?? Come on. It's not like this Schutt author is opening up new ground.

However - I still maintain there's something ikky about that interview I linked to.

She speaks about her own work in a very uninspired way. I would bet that there's probably a very good reason that other writers are pissed off (even though you're ALWAYS gonna piss someone off with a literary award.)

i guess she tries to come off as witty and hip and urbane...but instead she comes off as smarmy and weird.

if red is tim from SG, you'll love cool of the wild.

beth - does "SG" stand for Surviving Grady?? Wild guess. heh.

Actually, "red" is my own nickname here on the site. "Red" is Sheila.

Sheila,

I actually think the interviewer contributes something to the 'ickiness' here.... she's rather condescending, a little sneery. Imagine telling someone that they're:

"Better on the page than in life!"

No wonder the poor woman's defensive!

wen:

Yes, you do have a point there!

sorry!

good luck finding either of those books...both are out of print. :-/

Lives of the Saints (one of my faves) is also out of print - occasionally you will find copies in second-hand stores, etc.

One of my favorite books ever (I think I wrote about it here once) is a ridiculous book called I was a teenage dwarf by the great Max Shulman. He was one of the most popular comedic writers in the 1950s (Dobie Gillis, anyone??) - and I remember reading it in high school in the public library and laughing so loud I had to leave the premises.

I lost track of the book for many years - and finally - last year, my dad found it (he works in a library, and bless him, remembered how I used to blither: "I cannot find that damn book! I have no idea if it was as funny as I thought it was at 14 ... but I would love to read it again!) Anyway - my dad sent me a copy of it.

Heaven!!

And yes.

That book is definitely as funny as I remembered it.

btw, that trackback is from me. i have four blogs.

Red, did you see the post on Erin O'Connor's blog regarding Tom Wolfe? She quotes from his recent Guardian interview:

"My idol is Emile Zola. He was a man of the left, so people expected of him a kind of Les Miserables, in which the underdogs are always noble people. But he went out, and found a lot of ambitious, drunk, slothful and mean people out there. Zola simply could not - and was not interested in - telling a lie. You can call it honesty, or you can call it ego, but there it is. There is no motivation higher than being a good writer."

Wow. Contrast that with the "ick". Actually, as soon as I read the "hard, clean" comment, I thought: 'she wants to give a book award to someone who just washed their erect penis?', but the reviewer came back with the washing machine comment, much cleaner, in more ways than one.

Although good writing and mass appeal don't necessarily go hand-in-hand, it is true, as my marketing prof used to say: "90% of what is outside the box is outside because it's crap". I also need to browse for a copy of this in a bookstore to see if the prose is as bad as the interview. Interviews are hard, and you don't always come out sounding your best. But if this woman has been getting flack for a while, she obviously should have been thinking of responses to common criticism. If this is the best she can do, it does not bode well for the book.

Here's one of Schutt's stories:

http://www.randomhouse.com/boldtype/0997/schutt/sstory.html

Not terribly impressive. Not all that hard & clean , either.