A rousingly angry (and funny) essay by AL Kennedy about "women writers". Damn. I'm gonna have to print this baby out.
Once and for all, writers are human beings - they are as different from each other as any other cross-section of humanity and the range of expression and interests between male and female writers is as variable and unpredictable as any sensible psychologist (or, indeed, human being) might expect. I've just finished reading Anna Karenina - I happened to know it was by a man, but I wouldn't have assumed it was by a woman, just because it dealt with affairs of the heart and the domestic lives of several interconnected families. I kept on reading it because it was good - quite frankly, I don't give a toss who wrote what I'm reading, as long as it's good. It gives me another one of my pains when somebody tells me that love stories, or domestic sto ries are somehow a women's speciality, when Raymond Carver and Richard Ford and Ernest Hemingway and lord knows how many men plunge into them on every side. As far as I am aware, human beings' homes are quite often domestic interiors and falling in love is something human beings do. Why would they not write about it ? Why make this sex-specific?
Amen. Her comments on the publishing industry are really interesting and disheartening. You're a woman and you want to write a book? Make sure it has a woman fleeing a divorce and going to live with "bee-keeping lesbians" where she learns the meaning of sisterhood.
Bah, humbug. Cookie-cutter books. Par for the course, publishing is after all a business, but that doesn't mean people can't complain about it. I love Kennedy's comments here:
There are still publishers with integrity and courage, but they are under massive pressure. You may not feel immediate sympathy for them, but if you care about short stories, or poems, or novels outwith the mass-produced mainstream that don't rely on lists of trivia or dissecting spelling mistakes, then you do need publishers to be there and free to do their job - which is to provide you with books you didn't know you wanted, books which are not clones of those you read last year, books which may be risky, or offensive, or unsuccessful, or shocking, or delightful, or the one thing that kept you going during the worst month of your life.
'to provide you with books you didn't know you wanted"
So true.
Posted by sheila