Jezebel 
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New York, 8:54 AM
Sat Nov 7
62 posts in the last 24 hours
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11/06/09
I cannot believe that 70% of books are written by men. I'd guess the ratio is more like 60f/40m although that may just be my reading habits.
Assuming that it is a 50/50 split in gender, the odds of the entire list being male by chance are 1 in 1024. Obviously a best books list is based on skill, not chance but the numbers suggest a flat out bias. #booklists
11/06/09
I mean, duh. You go to the Oxford University reading list and, year after year, you see the very same 18th and 19th English authors held up as classics.
Dusty, musty, rusty, fusty. Never a difference. Nothing from Asia. Nothing from Africa. Nothing from Iceland. Or Norway. Nothing from the 20th damn century, even.
The only conclusion I can come to is that they get it and just don't give a damn. Which, as far as I'm concerned, is even more of a reason to just completely invalidate their "lists."
Just -- don't designate your critiques the mostest wellest-informedest of the well-informed the next time if you can't see past your own noses, Cri-Tee-Kays, okay?
/mini-rant #booklists
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Talking about how they "ignored gender and genre" reminds me of the discussion around Justice Sotomayor, when she dared mention that her race and gender had an effect on her world view. What they almost certainly mean by that is that they didn't give special consideration to female authors nor did they attempt to set up a quota system for books within different genres. What they almost certainly DIDN'T do was question whether their gender or race or class played a part in what books they chose to read in the first place, whether they undervalued certain genres because of personal biases, etc. etc. "Ignoring gender and genre" and attempting to construct a fair list for both men and women? Those are not the same things. #booklists
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11/06/09
"I love women and have tried all my life to read their novels but I finally gave up this year.
I am 78 and read only classic lit. Have read about half of the commonly accepted "greatest novels of all time"
Women just don't write like men. They write for other women.
They try too hard and they are too structured, too perfect in thier grammer and formatting etc. The avergae length of a sentence in all the women's novels written in the past 100 years is approximately 17 words.
The average length of a male writer in the same time frame is 28 words."
And it only took two comments to make me throw up my hands in disgust! #booklists
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11/06/09
To which I say,"Whatever, dude. Since more women than men read books, if you say this like it's a bad thing, feel free to imperiously opine yourself right out of a job, there, windbag."
*massive eyeroll* #booklists
11/06/09
Laura Miller is 1000% right when she says that the list is just proof of how narrow PW's editors' horizons really are. It's pretty amazing, since women constitute a significant majority of book buyers, editors and publishers. #booklists
11/06/09
NPR's series where they ask an author to choose three books within a particular genre or theme is great. #booklists
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11/06/09
1. Going Rogue
2. Going Rogue
3. Going Rogue
4. Going Rogue
5. Going Rogue
6. Going Rogue
7. Going Rogue
8. Something by Dan Brown
9. Going Rogue
10. Going Rogue #booklists
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11/03/09
That big guy upstairs can be one fickle bitch. #marykarr
11/03/09
When I started writing my story seven years ago, I had no intention of turning it into a book. Instead, I just wanted to tell my story, and so I typed it up, pasted it onto a bunch of pieces of paper, photocopied it and sent it to people for $3. There was no grander desire at play beyond a need to tell my story and a desire to publish a zine of my own.
Imagine my shock when people started writing back, from all over the country and even in other countries, telling me how much they appreciated reading my story, how it gave them insight into a religion they'd never really had before, or how they had gone through something similar and it was so edifying to know they weren't the only ones who had experienced it.
For the next seven years, I continued to get emails and letters at the rate of about one per month, all of them uniformly positive. At that point, I said to myself, well, if it's helping this many people, I might as well write a book, help even more people and achieve one of my life's goals in the process.
But this is the deal - my book isn't about ME as much as it uses my life as a critical entry point to examine something else. Yes, I write about the things that happened, but I also write at length about: the history of my former religion, strains of feminism within that religion, the history of the areas I lived in, notable people in my ancestry, the role of riot grrrl and zines and punk rock in making me who I am, and so on and so forth. These things give wider context, and I hope my reader will come away from my book knowing things he or she didn't know before.
Besides, if I just wanted to write about myself, I'd write in a fucking journal. #marykarr
11/03/09
I love the bitchy-pants tone of this post, Anna! "The other option is just to be convinced that your bullshit is intrinsically worth reading. " Whoa ho ho. OK.
Here's another option not presented, wrt Karr: Maybe she think her life is interesting enough to write about --and maybe she's right! She's a supreme talent, and she has, in fact, had an interesting life.
I've written and published two memoirs, both after a late-90s aversion to the Bad Girl memoir of that era (Wurtzel, Harrison, et al etc ad infinitum). Laura Miller, of Salon and the NYT dubbed the genre of writing about the troubled part of one's life as "Pathography," and I've loved that term ever since. And I knew I wasn't hugely interested in dwelling entirely on the downer parts of my life on the instances when I wrote autobiographically. That aversion was instructive to me: Hey, I'm a writer, and I like the intractability and stark declarative nature of autobiography, but I can't spend an entire book in the dark. It's just not who I am.
But I DID have to learn to stop being a fucking bitch about other female writers who did like to write that way.
Memoir is visceral to write, but also, to read. On one hand, it can be irritating, especially if you just don't warm up to the narrator or find the particular pathology or life story refreshing or sympathetic. (I'll be frank: I read memoirs of women, queers, and alt.people. Privileged white boys? Next to never. OK. Never.)
On the other hand, I personally have learned a TON from reading good memoirs. Dorothy Allison's autobiographical essays? Jeanette Walls? Shawna Kenney and the rest of my sex business cronies? Forgetaboutit. I love these books not just because of the "souls laid bare" aspect, but because of the entry into a world that is either foreign to me, or close enough to my own life that I'm curious how they trod similar roads.
But mostly, I just like to read about how women and those outside the mainstream live, and how they choose to tell the world about it.
The complaints against memoirists are also the complaints against bloggers: How dare you disturb the universe with your mewling, self-indulgent, narcissistic, navel-gazing wha wha wha wha whaaaaaa? In some cases, it's first-person burnout, in some cases, sour-grapes, and in many cases, it's just life: if you step into the spotlight for even one second, someone whips a rotten tomato at you.
I didn't write memoir to "help people," per se. I wrote like a travel writer, wanting to take readers someplace they have curiosity about--I have had the (mostly awesome) opportunity to live/work in two very misunderstood and under-examined worlds (strip club world/Army wife world), and, in a way, the memoirs shaped up as default extended FAQs. The incessant questions about these stages of my life indicated enough interest to support book-length projects. Luckily--and I thank my stars daily for this--I was right.
I'm no Mary Karr, and I'm sure as hell no Dorothy Allison, or even Dorothy Allison's cast-off potato peels, but I jumped in and wrote the books anyway, to the best of my ability at the time.
But I found that even though it wasn't my intention to "help" people, readers have told me that I did! GIRL POWERRRRRR. And I love it. I'm just a midlist plonker, so I can't say I write "for the money," (ahahahahaha. AS IF) so hearing that there's some soothin' going along with the schoolin' helps me live to write another day.
Will I write another memoir? Doubt it. Not unless there's enough interest in a book about a dork who farts around on Facebook and Jez all day, and needs to get her fake nails filled.
I don't believe that narcissism is a requirement for writing autobiographically. That is a punitive word, and one that people love love love to throw at women who irritate them! Spare me the "pathology as dart" amateur weaponry. SRSLY.
Anyhoo, read on, and write on, fair Jezzies. #marykarr