It feels a lot like standing on a beach. Early in the season. The sun’s hot, but the breeze is brisk, and you know exactly how that cold, cold water will burn as it touches your skin. First, just the feet, and as soon as they begin you numb, you have to go deeper. Because once you start, you have to go all the way.
Whoo. Ok. Next step.
Months ago, I realized I’d been cheating myself. I had been at a party and a friend later asked me if I’d met a particular person… no. Who? What was she wearing? Hum. Then I realized I hadn’t talked to any of the women. Couldn’t recall a single name or face. The men? Sure. I’d paid plenty of attention to them. I could list and rank them in order of cleverness and appearance.
At home, my bookshelf betrayed the same biases. All those guys. Amis and McEwan and Ballard. Roth, Ellroy. I even have two books by David Foster Wallace, whose writing I don’t even really like. There were women, too, of course: as much Highsmith as Ellroy and more Wharton than James. But not enough.
It turns out I’d been ignoring women. Deliberately. The drive to seek male approval had been beaten into me, and I sought intellectual approval within the male world. (Other kinds of approval, too, but that’s a rigged game.)
And so I vowed to read only books written by women for a time. A year, let’s say. I didn’t announce this, I don’t want to be obnoxious and pretentious about it. I’m not totally catholic about it; I’ll read magazine and news pieces by men. But, just for a while, I’m turning my ear to my sisters.
The reason I’ve been loathe to make a big announcement is that I reserve the right to change my mind. What if something brilliant comes out and I want to make an exception? I don’t want to make a big stupid prideful announcement, I just want to expand my literacy in a direction I’ve neglected. And there are other woman writers who’ve made similar announcements (later, I will truthfully say, than my own decision) and this is not a competition. Stepping out of competition is half the point. I don’t stress about how fast I’m writing or how much I am publishing. I don’t. I won’t.
This experiment has been good for me. Almost immediately, I realized I was looking at mostly white women, so I’ve been seeking out work by a broader array of women. And I thought I’d learned a lot.
But tonight I had one of those New York thrills. In SoHo, saw a famous TV star and comedian, someone with whom I strongly identify. He’s a divorced dad, I’m a divorced mom. We’re each trying to balance paying work and creative work and being a good parent in a world we see all too clearly for what it is. And we live in the same town. Our kids are in the same grades. We actually know people in common. I could run into this guy at a PTA meeting. He’s a real guy. And there he was, walking with his teenaged kid, as I was walking with my teenaged kid. They were probably going to the movies, I felt. There’s a great art cinema a couple of blocks away, and they were headed in that direction. He’s a big film buff, and there’s nothing better than introducing your budding-intellectual kid to a great film. I was taking mine to the sporting goods store to buy a duffel for his class trip. We were two New York parents, each out on a Saturday night with our kids.
I waited ten or fifteen minutes, then tweeted my excitement. Later, after we concluded our errands, had dinner, and came home, I checked Twitter to see if anyone else commented or noticed my Tweet. And, omg, one person saw him too! There was another tweet, someone echoing my excitement. A famous female punk musician from the 80s, still active today.
I didn’t see her. Now, she may well have seen him a block away and five minutes later than I did, but the fact remains that even if she and I had crossed paths, I probably would not have noticed her. Because, despite my reading, I still have a lot of work left to do. I’m still seeking that boy-approval on some level.
Sorry, guys. (Not sorry.) It’s going to be another year…