If we've known each other for any length of time, and you've ever suggested an interest in writing (or literature), then I've probably pulled you into some dark corner of a bar at some point to talk about the virtues of "essays by women writers."
"Essays by women writers" is a recent theme for me. I read almost no essays while growing up. In college, I read love letters by James Joyce, Will Faulkner and Franz Kafka, mainly because these letters were obscene. But reading obscene letters didn't get me anywhere when it comes to understanding writing, although it told me a lot (possibly more than I wanted to know) about the kind of people who become writers.
After that, I started reading memoirs, and didn't fare much better. If you're an American adult today, you've probably read a memoir somewhere, even if it's only NYT's "Modern Love." I spent a few hours trying to crack "Eat, Pray, Love" - and then, totally bored and unimpressed, I went off to find examples that could redeem the genre. It was the best and worst of times for memoirs, the post James Frey era, but for some reason I went retro and found "Burning the Days," and "The Great Railway Bazaar." And these were interesting. "Burning the Days" is good fun just like all of Salter is fun, and "Bazaar" was enjoyable, to the extent that you can enjoy someone like Paul Theroux in the world after Edward Said.
But the essays I'm talking about moved me more deeply, and it began with Siri Hustvedt. I was working my way through Siri Hustvedt's novels and had just polished off "What I Loved." I walked away from that novel with an abiding sense that here was an author whom I wanted to get to know. I wanted to understand how her novels moved so smoothly between intellect and passion, and whether she'd figured out a way to make that work in real life. So I bought a "A Plea for Eros," in which she talks about growing up, about feminine identity, about authors she's loved. I remember one piece, in particular, in which she describes how she met and fell in love with her husband (the novelist Paul Auster). Hustvedt captures perfectly the beauty, hope (and often despair!) of meeting someone whom you profoundly desire. Her essays exposed a journey - mental, personal - that in many ways I wanted to be on.
Is it odd to turn to fiction writers for advice on how to live?
There is a streak of self-indulgence in Hustvedt's essays. And there's more than a streak of grandiosity in the writings of the other two women who make my list: Ayn Rand and Anais Nin. I've written about Rand's essays before, so I won't revisit them (and to be honest, Rand is an odd addition to this list because she's not a feminist, although she might be if she had lived in a different time or had a more forgiving past). Anais Nin's essays are passionate about the world of ideas, without neglecting the world of flesh and blood. In her writing, she lays out her vision for the "new woman", a woman who is sensitive and smart, aware of the power of both her emotions and her intellect. Nin also profiles several talented women whom history hasn't paid much attention to, often because they were overshadowed by the more famous men in their lives: Louis Andreas-Salome, Caitlin Thomas, Suzanne Valadon, Zelda Fitzgerald. Nin's essays are a conversation not just with herself, but with many women whose ideas have informed her. Of all the three women I've mentioned, she's the only one who deliberately makes a point of citing other women as examples and role models. It's amazing how many people can talk about feminism without ever naming a single female writer who has had an influence on their thoughts. You have to wonder what kind of feminism they actually aspire to.
Today's talented women novelists (Chimamanda, Jhumpa, Zadie, Jane Smiley, Jennifer Egan, Antonya Nelson) seem more able to reconcile their female identity with their drive for work than Jane Austen, the Brontes, or Emily Dickinson (although not a novelist) ever were. Being an intellectual or ambitious woman was in the past a lonely road, and these essays demonstrate an awareness of that fact. But they also illustrate to me ways in which women can reconcile - or at least try to reconcile - the challenges of ambition with the challenges of life. There is no shame in not being men, they say. That doesn't make us - as thinkers, anyway - any less significant.
"Essays by women writers" is a recent theme for me. I read almost no essays while growing up. In college, I read love letters by James Joyce, Will Faulkner and Franz Kafka, mainly because these letters were obscene. But reading obscene letters didn't get me anywhere when it comes to understanding writing, although it told me a lot (possibly more than I wanted to know) about the kind of people who become writers.
After that, I started reading memoirs, and didn't fare much better. If you're an American adult today, you've probably read a memoir somewhere, even if it's only NYT's "Modern Love." I spent a few hours trying to crack "Eat, Pray, Love" - and then, totally bored and unimpressed, I went off to find examples that could redeem the genre. It was the best and worst of times for memoirs, the post James Frey era, but for some reason I went retro and found "Burning the Days," and "The Great Railway Bazaar." And these were interesting. "Burning the Days" is good fun just like all of Salter is fun, and "Bazaar" was enjoyable, to the extent that you can enjoy someone like Paul Theroux in the world after Edward Said.
But the essays I'm talking about moved me more deeply, and it began with Siri Hustvedt. I was working my way through Siri Hustvedt's novels and had just polished off "What I Loved." I walked away from that novel with an abiding sense that here was an author whom I wanted to get to know. I wanted to understand how her novels moved so smoothly between intellect and passion, and whether she'd figured out a way to make that work in real life. So I bought a "A Plea for Eros," in which she talks about growing up, about feminine identity, about authors she's loved. I remember one piece, in particular, in which she describes how she met and fell in love with her husband (the novelist Paul Auster). Hustvedt captures perfectly the beauty, hope (and often despair!) of meeting someone whom you profoundly desire. Her essays exposed a journey - mental, personal - that in many ways I wanted to be on.
Is it odd to turn to fiction writers for advice on how to live?
There is a streak of self-indulgence in Hustvedt's essays. And there's more than a streak of grandiosity in the writings of the other two women who make my list: Ayn Rand and Anais Nin. I've written about Rand's essays before, so I won't revisit them (and to be honest, Rand is an odd addition to this list because she's not a feminist, although she might be if she had lived in a different time or had a more forgiving past). Anais Nin's essays are passionate about the world of ideas, without neglecting the world of flesh and blood. In her writing, she lays out her vision for the "new woman", a woman who is sensitive and smart, aware of the power of both her emotions and her intellect. Nin also profiles several talented women whom history hasn't paid much attention to, often because they were overshadowed by the more famous men in their lives: Louis Andreas-Salome, Caitlin Thomas, Suzanne Valadon, Zelda Fitzgerald. Nin's essays are a conversation not just with herself, but with many women whose ideas have informed her. Of all the three women I've mentioned, she's the only one who deliberately makes a point of citing other women as examples and role models. It's amazing how many people can talk about feminism without ever naming a single female writer who has had an influence on their thoughts. You have to wonder what kind of feminism they actually aspire to.
Today's talented women novelists (Chimamanda, Jhumpa, Zadie, Jane Smiley, Jennifer Egan, Antonya Nelson) seem more able to reconcile their female identity with their drive for work than Jane Austen, the Brontes, or Emily Dickinson (although not a novelist) ever were. Being an intellectual or ambitious woman was in the past a lonely road, and these essays demonstrate an awareness of that fact. But they also illustrate to me ways in which women can reconcile - or at least try to reconcile - the challenges of ambition with the challenges of life. There is no shame in not being men, they say. That doesn't make us - as thinkers, anyway - any less significant.
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