Fun Home
Alison Bechdel, 2006

I think the popularity of the term "graphic novel" is really unfortunate, because it sounds cheesy and pretentious, like something you proudly display on your shelf to prove how cool you are. For me, books with pictures (can I call them comic books? This seems to imply that they have X-Men, which, to be fair, I also like) are what I reach for when I can't sleep because I'm scared of the universe, and I want to be reminded that other people exist. Graphic novels (fuck it) seem more like company to me than their non-illustrated brethren, probably just because you can see people's faces, and in Fun Home the faces reveal fear and pain and love and confusion as eloquently as the words. The story is about Bechdel's coming-of-age as a gay woman and her realization that her father is also gay — a realization that comes along with family tragedy. Fun Home is especially touching and effective as a graphic novel because the drawings reveal the family resemblance between father and daughter — a resemblance especially striking when Bechdel compares their taste in clothes. The book is about lies and secrets, but it's also the public record of a daughter's choice not to hide her life story as her father did, but to tell it and to show it — and Bechdel does both very well.

The Last Of Her Kind
Sigrid Nunez, 2006

This was the best book I read in 2006, and for a long time it was my favorite novel. Two roommates meet at Barnard in 1968 — Ann comes from a wealthy family and Georgette is working-class. As Ann becomes a radical and gets deeply embroiled in the racial politics of the 1970s, Nunez examines her activism through the eyes of Georgette, to whom it sometimes seems like a luxury. Ann turns out to be disturbingly committed to her cause, but the position of a privileged person fighting for the underprivileged remains a fraught one. Nunez doesn't pull emotional punches — Georgette's narration sometimes simmers with resentment, and her observations exist outside polite American discourse in a way that makes the way we talk about "political correctness" seem restrictive and misguided. Nunez's writing, too, is beautiful, but what made me love this book was the way it managed to portray the ambivalence we feel in a world where all politics is personal.

The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel
Amy Hempel, 2006

Seriously, read this book. Especially if you think you don't like short stories. Some of Hempel's stories sound more like jokes — "Memoir," in its entirety, reads "Just once in my life—oh, when have I ever wanted anything just once in my life?" Many are the kind of jokes that make you sad. All of them — whether they deal with a possibly-fabricated motorcycle crash, a pre-mastectomy party, or the death of a best friend — are so witty and weird they remind you that art's purpose is not to represent life, but to augment it.

Veronica
Mary Gaitskill, 2005

This book gave me nightmares. I've always found Gaitskill's writing scary, not just because it often deals with abusive or otherwise fucked-up relationships, but because it reveals how the intensity of any human relationship can be enough to wipe you out. Veronica portrays the international modeling scene in the eighties as a heady and terrifying world of sex clubs and hard drugs and exploitation, but what really stabbed me in the heart about this book was its portrayal of how people love and hate and discard each other, how they create makeshift families every bit as loving and as awful as the ones they left behind, and how a platonic touch between friends can be as revelatory as orgasm.

Brother, I'm Dying
Edwidge Danticat, 2007
The beginning of this book made me tear up on the subway, and the ending made me shiver. Danticat writes about her childhood separation from her parents — they moved to the United States while she and her brother stayed in Haiti — their eventual reunion, her father's illness and death, and her uncle's ill-fated attempt to gain asylum in America with language whose matter-of-factness and precision become a perfect conduit for love, fear, regret, and outrage. It's impossible to read Danticat's account of her octogenarian uncle's incarceration at a Florida refugee camp, his shoddy medical treatment and ridiculous interrogation there, and his eventual death in custody, without raging against the way America treats people who wish to come here. But still the most moving part of the book for me was near the beginning, when Danticat's father announces at a family meeting that he is dying, and her brother asks, in a halting voice, "have you enjoyed your life?"

Runaway
Alice Munro, 2004
In a way Alice Munro is the opposite of Amy Hempel — while Hempel's stories are often short without feeling as though anything's been left out, Munro writes long, meandering pieces in which every word seems absolutely essential. Her stories feel like lives, not just because they often span many years and many miles, but because they render human interiority so clearly and completely that each character feels like a fully realized, functioning brain. In fact, her writing is often so consuming that it takes over my brain — I have been that character, I think, or I will be her. Her stories are especially strong when her characters look back at the past, with a perfectly rendered mixture of regret, resignation, and longing. The linked stories "Chance," "Soon," and "Silence," in which a lonely woman meets a man on a train, moves in with him, and has a child who later cuts off all contact with her, provide ample opportunity for looking both backward and straight ahead, and this may be why Runaway is the best of the collections Munro has published this decade.

Rent Girl
Michelle Tea (illustrations by Laurenn McCubbin), 2004
Yeah, okay, there are two graphic novels on this list. Whatever: my friends and I passed around Rent Girl the summer after I graduated from college, and I highly recommend both this method and this timing. Yes, Tea's story of her time as a sex worker was titillating to a bunch of still-relatively-sheltered 21-year-olds, but it also inoculated us against easy, black-and-white opinions about sex work. More importantly, Rent Girl is an incredibly absorbing tale of being young and dumb and in love, and slightly older and wiser and still in love, and how sex both paid-for and not fits into all this. The accompanying illustrations are both beautiful and hot.

Gilead
Marilynne Robinson, 2004

A lot of people describe this book as "boring," which it kind of is — if you think of the sum total of a man's life, examined in old age after both great disappointment and great, unexpected happiness, as boring. It's true that Gilead contains few fights, few twists, and few fireworks, and that it is in some ways about the struggle to be a good person, which is not traditionally seen as exciting. It's also true that this story of Reverend John Ames, married late in life, and the flawed young man he desperately wants to help, should be required reading for any coastal person who thinks midwestern Christians are all narrowminded assholes. But all this is kind of beside the point — I could not fucking put Gilead down (I should say here that Marilynne Robinson was my teacher for a semester, though I read and loved the book before I met her). I ordinarily like fights and twists and fireworks — the fact that this novel is one of my favorites of all time speaks to both the sublimity of its language and the deep importance of its subject matter. Many of us, at the end of our lives, will wonder if we did what we could for those around us — but we probably won't wonder it as beautifully as Reverend Ames.

Julie and Julia, the stunt-phenomenon that made Julie Powell a literary star, was a book very much about envy, and resentment, and discontent. So for those who related to Powell's jealousy, in that book, of her more successful friends, it may perhaps gratify you to know that her success, her portrayal by Amy Adams, did not spell contentment. Instead, she felt unmoored and unhappy and entered into a torrid, bondage-tinged affair, which morphed into the world's most awful-sounding open marriage, which turned into obsession and depressing sex with strangers, which in turn made her become an apprentice butcher. Memoirs, generally speaking, fall into two categories: "I can relate" and "I want to go on your adventure." This is somewhere between the two, and not quite enough of either.

And, yes, the butchery metaphors flow. Mind-numbing pages of carcasses being broken down (and I'm interested in this stuff!) as Julie tries to escape/find herself amidst locally-raised meats interlock with equally lurid accounts of sex. Relationships and meat get chopped up - repeatedly, and explicitly. Muscle and bone and grass-raised gore become preferable to the author's fixation on the guy who's dumped her - like having to watch a friend make really bad choices, but covered in animal blood. The writing is good - but as in all such writer-immerses-himself-in-new-world, there's an element of cultural tourism (I'm not even talking here about her fifth-act stint with the Masai) that made me, for one, relieved when Powell is rejected by a number of grizzled third-generation butchers and ends up instead at a new-wave artisanal spot in upstate New York. (It never seems to be that third-generation butcher - the one who does it every day, for years - seeing his work in terms of beauty and metaphor.)

I'm not questioning the author's genuine commitment to butchery, but it's pretty clear that more is going on with the meat metaphor - hell, the meat book, a genre in itself - than an enthusiasm for aged steak. Meat has become a cultural touchstone, be it old-school masculinity, new masculinity (looking at you, Jonathan Safran-Foer), defiance (The Shameless Carnivore), ambivalence (The Compassionate Carnivore) locavore rock-stardom or self-exploration like Powell's memoir or the recent Meat, A Love Story. And it's rarely about the protein. It's about masculinity, femininity, place in the world and planet. (Short-order short-hand, if you will.) It's a disingenuous return to the primitive, but it's suspiciously on-trend. That said, if Powell's book was designed to forestall envy of a freelancer-made-good, in one regard she failed: it's still hard to get past the freedom to pursue an interest for six months - not to mention the international meat tour she takes afterwards to Elizabeth Gilbert her heart and mind into order. And as her discontent seems far from resolved by book's end, I'd guess we haven't heard the last.

Cleaving [Amazon]

•  Last night John McCain told Fox News's Greta Van Susteren that he thinks people are being too hard on Sarah Palin, even if he does find it kinda funny. "I'm entertained and sometimes a little angry when I see this constant, vicious attacks by people on the left. I've never seen anything like it," he said. • According to a recent poll, 86% of men in Canada would rather be a driver than a passenger in bad weather. Unfortunately, 50% of men also claimed that they don't slow down in the snow, which makes things a little more dangerous for the rest of you up north. •  Researchers have found that a particular type of fertility treatment, ICSI, may produce more baby girls than boys. Even though few babies are born through this method, the authors conclude: "because our findings suggest that ICSI may reduce the sex ratio, we recommend that ICSI only be done if medically necessary, in an effort to prevent this potential side effect." •  19-year-old pimp DeShawn "Cash Money" Clark has become the first person to be convicted of human trafficking in Washington state. Clark faces up to 18 years in prison for his crimes. •  Years after doctors told her she was infertile, Sarah Wilkinson took an emergency trip to the hospital because she felt some pain in her stomach. Turns out, she was having a baby. She says she feels "fantastic" now, even though the pregnancy was a huge shock. • Did you know that there have been women in the Scotland Yard for 90 years now? Women first started working as officers in 1919, when they were introduced in order to help deal with prostitutes and suicidal women. Plus: here are some of their spiffy outfits. •  Vicki Kennedy told Oprah today that she has absolutely no interest in running for the senate seat left empty by her late husband, Edward Kennedy. She also told Oprah about the last days of her husband's life, including his determination to survive to see Obama elected president. •  Two teenage girls from New Zealand have been convicted of the murder of a retired school teacher. The girls, aged 18 and 15, broke into his house and beat him to death with his own walking stick before trashing the place and leaving with his wallet. •  Three lacrosse players from Sacred Heart University have been accused of conspiring to sexually assault a female student in a dorm room. The victim was engaging in consensual sex with one of the boys when his two friends crept in "as a prank," but their lawyers claim they had no contact with the woman. •  Lobna Abdelrehim used to work at a Wall Street publishing firm, until she got fed up with the rampant racism and sexism. She says she was constantly mocked for her faith and her looks, and has brought a lawsuit against the company. •  Michele Bachmann admitted to the St. Cloud Times that she sometimes says stupid shit: "I wish I could be more artful in the way I say things. But she went on add some qualifying statement about "bias in the mainstream media" and so on. • In other Bachmann news, she's headed to Nashville to join Sarah Palin for a Tea Party. Sadly, not the fun kind. •  A new study from the UK confirms that police often don't believe rape victims due to prejudices about their background, class, and "behavior." Officers were also found to be inadequately trained for dealing with rape, which can result in police that would rather "do nothing at all" than risk doing something wrong. • 

Palin kind of sounded like Tina Fey's parody of her when she told a Grand Rapids audience,

Thank you so much for showin' up! First stop on the tour. There's just somethin' about Michigan. I couldn't wait to get back to Michigan. Alaska and Michigan have so much in common, with the huntin' and the fishin' and the hockey moms and just the hardworking patriotic Americans who are here.

But far scarier are the words of support she's been getting on the Going Rogue promotion trail. Although the press won't be allowed at Palin's Fort Bragg appearance — ostensibly because the Army is concerned the appearance might become "a political platform" for comments "directed against the commander in chief," reporters have already had several chances to talk to the Palin faithful. Here are some highlights:

On Palin's book in comparison to dead animals

I already shot a small buck, but this'll be a bigger trophy. I think when Reagan was in office, he saved us from ourselves, and I think she's got the character and the morals to do the same thing.

On the fate of uppity liberals

Don't you know that we're the right-wing mob? Don't anger us, we have the numbers today and we remember your face.

On posterity

I'm looking at it from a historical perspective. Whether you like her or not, she's part of U.S. history.

On firearms

I'm passionate about Sarah Palin. She wasn't a princess. She cleans her gun the same way I clean my gun.

On liberals' faulty wiring

She's alive inside, and that radiates energy, and people who are not psychologically alive inside are fascinated by that. There's a wire in those left-wing liberals that has never been quickened, and Sarah's got it. [...] There is something about that woman that has destiny, whether it's in politics, to be president, or to host a talk show.

And finally, from an eight-year-old, on the future

You rock. I want to be just like you.

"Get Your Pit Bull On!" [Salon]
Palin Attracts Fort Wayne Throng [Politico]
Palin Book Tour Kicks Off Where She Started 'Going Rogue' [LA Times]
Thousands Line Up In Michigan For Palin [Washington Post]
AP NewsBreak: Army Keeping Media From Palin Event [AP via Yahoo News]

If you've got a great idea for transforming Sarah Palin book into more than the sum of its parts — hollowing it out and filling it with Moose Tracks ice cream, say, or folding the pages into an origami death panel — email us at tips@jezebel.com by Friday at 5 PM EST, with "Going Rogue contest" in the subject line. We'll pick the best one and mail you our copy of the book. Then you have your way with the book, send us a pic, and we'll feature it on the site. I promise, it'll be a lot more fun than the all-nighter I pulled reading the thing — although in answer to your questions, I did have some cake.

I've had the unenviable task of reading both Prejean's Still Standing and Palin's Going Rogue in the last couple of days, and I gleaned the following striking similarities:

Both were self-described "jocks" turned beauty queens.

Palin: "I thought it was a horrendous idea, at first. I was a jock and quite square, not a pageant-type girl at all. I didn't wear makeup in high school and cut my hair short because I didn't like wasting time primping. I couldn't relate to the way I assumed most cheerleader types thought and lived, and figured it was those girls who were equipped for the pageant thing.
On the other hand, there was the scholarship money."

Prejean: "When I told my parents and my sister about it, they looked at me like I was crazy. They knew me as the girl who scraped her knees sliding into second base, who got a fat lip jumping up for a rebound in the midst of flying elbows at a basketball game. But a beauty contest?"

Both were accused of skipping public appearances, but say they had good reasons.

Palin: "My opponents and the press had a field day with that one: "Palin a No-Show at Chamber Of Commerce Luncheon Debate." [...] I couldn't make the media understand why I had chosen to skip another rubber-chicken campaign stop and instead attend this significant military exercise. I tried to explain: the Chamber of Commerce be here next week; our troops would not."

Prejean: "The reason I was not at the press conference is that I had not been invited to be at the press conference. The first I heard of it was when a reporter asked me to comment on it a few days in advance. I told him I had no idea what he was talking about. [...] This was the second time in about a week that he and Shanna had "scheduled" an appearance for me (the other was the pro-gay marriage public service ad) when in fact they had never invited me at all and knew I would be out of town — and then portrayed me as running out on them!"

Both say they have the same views on gay marriage as Barack Obama.

Palin: "I explained to Schmidt that I oppose homosexual marriage, but that didn't seem too controversial in the campaign since the Democrat candidate for president held the same position."

Prejean: "When I later googled "Obama," "marriage," and "man and a woman," I found that Barack Obama's answer was almost identical to my own, although he managed to work in opposition to Proposition 8."

Both say they resisted pressure to give "safe" answers.

Palin: "The bottom line was that these were political answers — and I couldn't force myself to play it safe and sound like a politician. On top of that, there were probably ten cards for a single topic with a different set on nonanswers on every one. So in the end I'm thinking, Okay, which nonanswer do you want me to give?

Prejean: "Roger wanted me to reinforce the first part of my answer, and buck the whole question back to the right of states to regulate marriage. He wanted me to punt."

Both feel persecuted by the liberal media.

Palin: "Reporters from across the nation camped out at the end of our driveway in Wasilla and on the ice in front of our home. [...] Every once in a while a friend or family member would think they could trust a reporter, and so they'd talk to them. And almost 100 percent of the time Todd and I would get a call later from a panicked loved one saying, "Geez! We can't win! That reporter took what I said all out of context." Or even worse, "I never said that!" We assured them we knew, it was okay, it was just the unproductive game some chose to play."

Prejean: "Somehow the liberal media can get away with these degrading, disgusting jokes about a conservative woman, while still touting themselves as open-minded and tolerant. What is Sean Hannity or some other conservative media figure (male or female) had said something like this? Especially if he said it about a liberal woman? But for some reason it was perfectly acceptable for these men to belittle me on live television. Laura Ingraham pointed out the one-sidedness of "tolerance" in her television debate with Gloria Feldt (a liberal feminist who said I — another woman! — needed a "heart transplant" instead of breast implants). Laura commented — quite rightly — that she would be taken off the air if she spoke of liberals the way these media figures were speaking about me."

This last illustrates the most fundamental similarity between the two women: they believe that they are special, and have been singled out for special scrutiny. As we mentioned before, the conservative media is every bit as prone to attack journalism as the much-maligned liberal media, and Hannity, Ann Coulters, and others have said plenty of nasty things about liberal women. Palin and Prejean have both experienced sexism — Perez Hilton's post-pageant comments about Prejean
were a particularly noxious example. But instead of making them more sensitive to the problems of other marginalized groups, like gays and non-conservative women, their difficulties have only served to heighten their exceptionalism.

Still Standing is actually a more enraging book than Going Rogue, in that it deals more closely with its author's upsetting views on social issues. Prejean writes,

If it isn't right for the public schools to teach a single faith perspective, how can it be right for them to teach an anti-faith perspective, to teach that homosexuality is a normal lifestyle, when to faithful Catholics and Evangelicals and others who support traditional morality, it isn't? This sort of double standard in our public life is dangerous, but it's what political correctness is doing to us: it is putting just not just our freedom of speech, but our freedom of conscience at risk.

She also says,

I think my whole ordeal reveals just how the culture of political correctness uses shaming, blackmail, and other forms of emotional abuse to force people and organizations to either stick to our beliefs and suffer the consequences, or throw away our beliefs just to be left alone.

What she doesn't acknowledge is that people with beliefs the exact opposite of hers have been facing this choice for decades. Neither Palin nor Prejean seem to understand that while they ask America to sympathize with their victimization, they're also asking us to support policies that victimize others. Prejean's views on gay marriage and Palin's beliefs about reproductive rights (and welfare, and healthcare reform) aim to restrict people's freedom to live the way they want. To espouse these views while complaining about handlers who try to rein them in and reporters who criticize them reveals a staggering egocentrism. This is just one more thing Palin and Prejean have in common, and perhaps the reason both of them are still appearing on television long after each has arguably lost her relevance: both of them are tireless promoters of themselves.

Still Standing: The Untold Story Of My Fight Against Gossip, Hate, And Political Attacks [Amazon]
Going Rogue: An American Life [Amazon]

According to the AP, Palin never mentions her daughter's Playgirl-posing baby-daddy in her 413 page book. Instead, she focuses on her favorite target: the "liberal" media. In what sounds like an especially nasty section, Palin says she initially "felt sorry" for Katie Couric because a McCain aide told her that Couric was suffering from low self-esteem. But instead of thanking Palin for her pity, Couric "badgered" her, focusing on "gotcha" moments over more "substantive" issues. Palin also claims that Couric was the ignorant one, whose lack of knowledge about energy politics left Palin wondering what newspapers she read. Palin also has some choice words for Charlie Gibson — he "peered skeptically" at her like a principal during their interview, yet also refused to talk about "substantive issues."

But the real villains of Going Rogue may be McCain's operatives. Palin said they stuck her with a $50,000 bill for her vetting process after the campaign was over, an interesting claim given that many at the time wondered if she had been vetted at all. The McCain campaign's lawyer denies that Palin was ever billed. Palin also complains that even though she rewrote the statement prepared for her about her daughter's pregnancy, TV anchors read the McCain camp's version anyway, which she felt "glamorized and endorsed her daughter's situation." It's tempting to wonder what kind of condemnation Palin had in mind for her daughter's pregnancy, but Bristol may be lucky that the McCain campaign, and not her mother, controlled her public shaming.

In general, the leaked info makes Going Rogue sound like vintage Palin — she's still trying live in her own version of reality, and she's mad when anyone challenges it. At a Nov. 6 Wisconsin appearance, closed to both press and cameras, she apparently claimed that Obama had made the decision to move the phrase "in God we trust" from the front of the new dollar coin to the edge. But this bit of heinous God-marginalizing was actually enacted by Republicans in Congress. And on the healthcare bill, she told her Facebook friends, "Look closely at the provisions mandating bureaucratic panels that will be calling the shots regarding who will receive government health care. Look closely at provisions addressing illegal aliens' health care coverage too" — sinister yet meaningless recommendations.

The population of Palin-world may be dwindling — Time's Mark Halperin says "the smart money [is] betting that Palin won't be a contender for 2012" — but Palin remains this strange land's defiant queen. In her Oprah appearance, slated to air Nov. 16, she claims the McCain camp totally approved of her performance in the Couric interview: "The campaign said, right on. Good. You're showing your independence." In a statement that pretty much sums up how Sarah Palin views the world, a former senior campaign official says, "No sentient person would look at that and say that."

Palin's Book Tells Of Trouble On GOP Ticket [AP, via NPR]
Leaks Launch Palin's 'Going Rogue' With That Ol' Campaign Fervor [Washington Post]
AP: Palin Book Goes After McCain Camp But Not Levi [AP]
The Rogue Returns: On The Road With Sarah Palin [Time]

In her review of Alison Piepmeier's book Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism, The American Prospect's Jessica Clark does some fan-girl reminiscing of her own. Like Piepmeier, Clark recalls her first encounter with feminism, which was facilitated in part by the proliferation of grrrl zines. While zines are closely related to the punk movement and its hardcore, tough-guy posturing, riot grrrls and DIY-feminists turned to the photocopied pages as a way of ripping apart pop culture and pasting it together again in collages and text that was at once both rebellious and celebratory. Piepmeier zeroes in on the physical process of creation as a way in which zines can be connected to earlier gendered forms of media:

[Piepmeier] connects them with what she identifies as earlier forms of feminist "participatory media": the scrapbooks kept by suffragettes to document and respond to sexist characterizations of their work; the pamphlets that transmitted contraband information about contraception and sexual health to women in the early 1900s; the mimeographed flyers that called women's libbers to consciousness and revolt. "Participatory media represent a way of engaging with unfriendly mass culture and transforming it — if not always on a broad scale, at least at the level of the local," she notes.

Zines are perhaps one of the most democratic forums for disseminating ideas and concepts. In contrast to glossy fashion mags, zines provide a rough-edged place in which to cut and paste, tear and build. The almost Dada-ist aesthetic of haphazard construction plays with and speaks to "feminine" arts and crafts while also partaking in the angry sneers of the punk/grunge/riot movements. While the material inside is fascinating, Clark rightly focuses on the unique form. She writes,

It's not just the content of these zines but their form, their look and feel, their "girl style," that make them noteworthy. Early-'90s grrrl zines made liberal use (and fun) of both contemporary and retro sexist images — apron-wearing housewives with vacuums, tattooed pinup girls, bikini models torn angrily from ads, ironically juxtaposed with princess and Hello Kitty cartoons — developing a distinctive visual vocabulary that set them apart from both earlier feminist newspapers and zines about other topics. Piepmeier describes them as "sculptural media," notable for the pleasure that their makers experience in constructing them and for the small thrill the recipient gets in opening up a hand-decorated envelope or finding a tiny, raging, perfect zine in a crammed independent bookstore.

But like print media in general, zines have been threatened by the rise of new media. Clark cites feminist blogs including Feministing and the women's writing community She Writes as progenitors of the energetic third-wave feminism found in zines. In a way, there's a certain sense to this: Zines evolved as a way to quickly and easily spread a message. Like blogs, they give anyone an opportunity to be the writer/editor of their own stories. And blogs make it even easier to borrow and steal material, taking images from one source, throwing them casually into another. They also provide the opportunity to reach a much larger, almost unlimited, audience.

Both Piepmeier and Clark are quick to point out that they don't believe zines are going away anytime soon. Despite the fact that the muddling and mixing of pop culture, retro reappropriation and punk symbolism has "mutated in the toxic sludge of commercial culture" and become as commercialized as anything else, Clark argues that there is hope for the zine yet. This debate is somewhat reminiscent of the whole Kindle vs. Book crisis that has been popping up in op-eds on and off for the past few years. Yet like books, zines have the something that blogs don't: Presence. Blogs may offer a large audience, but they're still somewhat distancing and intangible. And this may be purely anecdotal, but it seems that the prevailing trend in blogging is a kind of twee girlishness that bares little resemblance to the anger and energy of riot grrrl culture. Perhaps most importantly, blogs provide a certain polish that zines purposefully lack. Both forums may give an outlet for confessional outpourings, but there is a strange intimacy to be found in an object so carefully constructed and stapled, delivered from hand to hand. As much as I love blogs (and Kindles, and iPods) there is something to Piepmeier's argument for the fragility of the real thing. So if you'll excuse me, I have to go buy some glue sticks and glitter.

Girl Talk [The American Prospect]

Image via Steve Rhodes Flickr

PW reviews director Louisa Ermelino wrote that the publication "ignored gender and genre and who had the buzz" when composing its list, and that "it disturbed us when we were done that our list was all male." But Cate Marvin, founder of Women in Letters and Literary Arts (and also a pretty great poet) says,

The absence made me nearly speechless. [...] It continues to surprise me that literary editors are so comfortable with their bias toward male writing, despite the great and obvious contributions that women authors make to our contemporary literary culture.

Salon's Laura Miller sees both sides of the issue. She points out that "what's at issue isn't sales or even access to readers," and it's worth remembering that women buy more books than men these days, and that many of the most commercially successful writers in English are women. But "prestige and critical recognition" still matter, and Miller acknowledges that Publishers' Weekly may be unknowingly buying into prejudices about what deserves to be prestigious. Ermelino seemed to brush off the concerns of Marvin and others by saying the PW list wasn't "the most politically correct," but Miller writes,

[R]eal, long-standing cultural biases [...] live in the heart of every critic to one degree or another, and we'd be shirking our duty if we didn't try to account for them. Writing off such qualms as mere "political correctness" is, in its own way, just as dishonest as exaggerating your admiration for a book simply because its author is female, or dark-skinned, or from a far-off nation. I don't doubt that P.W.'s editors are entirely sincere when they say their list reflects their unvarnished preferences. Still, the fact that those preferences can't encompass one woman author among 10 books (fiction or nonfiction) picked from the 50,000-plus titles they claim to have sifted through suggests that their horizons might need a bit of deliberate widening.

This is a smart point. When a list like this one draws criticism — and they have in the past — the compilers usually defend it with the argument that "this is just what we like." But what we like is subject to deeply held and unconscious biases, and when we think we're being objective, we are often praising what we're most comfortable with, or what we think is most deserving of praise based on whatever stereotypes we grew up with. Miller gets this, but she also understands how difficult it is to make a list that's both wide-ranging and true to a critic's particular tastes:

If you insist on a list that's ideally representative of gender, race, class, nationality (i.e., including at least one translation), publisher size (small as well as large), fame, length (short story collections as well as novels), region, genre and so on, you can easily wind up with, say, a list of nine books you kinda like and maybe one you truly love. That's a tepid dish to serve up to readers, and not likely to inspire much enthusiasm, either.

I'm not completely comfortable with the idea that jettisoning your preconceived notions lead to "tepid" criticism, just as I don't like the argument that approaching literature from a multicultural perspective leads to the canonization of bad literature. I think that the "deliberate widening of horizons" that Miller talks about might actually lead critics to love books they might not even have picked up otherwise, and to examine the ways in which their privilege influences their taste. But I also think that compiling, by committee, a list of the ten best books in any year is a great way to piss people off, and not a particularly great way to inform them.

I've been reviewing books for a long time, and I'm a big fan of the book review as a literary form in itself and a way of introducing readers to new and exciting work. I know that, when I review a book, I bring my own prejudices to it — I can and should try to fight against them, but I'll never completely eliminate them all. The thing is, my reviews run under my byline, and are clearly my opinion and mine alone. I'm also just making judgments about an individual book, not about what constitutes the cream of the crop of an entire year's literature. Getting a bunch of people together to pick a "best-of" list, no matter how open-minded those people are, screws up the process of criticism because it obscures it from view. We don't know who fought for what, who insisted on what inclusion or exclusion, and what those people's reasons and biases were. All we see is a collective entity that calls itself an authority and delivers a verdict not just on one book, but on all the books of an entire year (or, sometimes, decade or century). Even if we got the names of everybody on the PW panel (the entire staff? a select group?), it would be pretty hard to tease out all the different influences that lead to an all-male winner's circle.

So while I think the WILLA Wiki of great 2009 books by women is a good response to PW's dude-fest, I also know that every list excludes somebody. And I'd rather go on judging every book on its own merits than compare it to a whole bunch of other books. But of course, that's just the opinion of Anna North, a young-ish white woman from Los Angeles who's tired because it's Friday and skeptical because it's November and a little embarrassed because she hasn't read any of the books on the PW list — and who, like all critics, could easily be wrong.

No. 1 Omission From Top 10 Book List: Women [NYT ArtsBeat Blog]
A 10-Best Books List Without Women? [Salon]
Best Books Of 2009 [Publishers Weekly]
The WILLA List Wiki [Official Site]

Onetime Jezebel editor Jessica Grose writes that Karr keeps a warning above her desk: letters that spell out "HUBRIS." She might still need it. When Grose asks Karr about her conversion to Catholicism, she says,

Somebody said to me, "So, you think you've had all this success because God likes you better than other writers?" And I said, "Absolutely!" Because of my faith, I do have a sense that I'm supposed to be alive on the planet. Which, given the way I was brought up, I didn't exactly have going in.

On the one hand, Karr has struggled with alcoholism and depression (the subjects of her new book, Lit), and it's hard to begrudge or anything that has given her a sense of place in the world. On the other, it's more than a little obnoxious for a writer who has benefited from the capricious whims of the literary market to claim that her success comes from God's favor. If she's right, God must be really into Dan Brown.

Of course, Karr is right that secular people will always have some difficulty with talk about religion. She says, "Talking about spiritual matters to a secular audience is like doing card tricks on the radio. It's like, 'This is really cool, everybody,' and they're like, 'Yeah, OK!' So I know that it sounds a little nutty." As a nonbeliever, I guess I'm listening to Karr's card tricks over the radio, and perhaps I've missed some nuance in her claim about God's love. In any case, the interview is more interesting when it deals with women and memoir. Grose asks,

I've read a lot of interviews recently with young female memoirists who say things like, "I'm writing this memoir to help other people," and I always find that to be disingenuous. And I wonder if you had any insight into why female memoirists, specifically, have this need to claim altruism, why they feel that something being a good story isn't enough of a reason to tell it.

And Karr responds:

You know, I think it actually has to do with what it means to be feminine in this culture. If you betray a family confidence, it's not seen as appropriately feminine. It's one reason, maybe, that men's memoirs, especially about adolescence, are so much easier to write. Because for a man to say, "And then I pushed my father down on the ground and stormed out of the house and stole the car," is, in a way, what a man does to come of age. For a woman to betray family secrets or intimacies is seen as particularly grotesque or masculinizing.

I didn't [write] it to help anybody. I did it for the money. I did it because I'm greedy and I like living in New York.

Karr's claim that she "did it for the money" is its own kind of bravado, but interestingly, it's a kind more common for male writers, who sometimes feel the need to counteract the supposedly effete nature of artistic endeavor by making it all about cold hard cash. Karr does happen to be in the (perhaps) enviable position of being able to write for money, but there are more lucrative careers, and Karr dances around one primary motive for memoir: narcissism.

The term has taken a big beating in the media lately, but Karr is right — it's something we've always tolerated in male writers. What else but narcissism could motivate someone to write his autobiography, not to help anyone, but simply because he considers his own life a good story? Such impulses have given us some great books, and without the narcissism of artists, society would be a lot less interesting. Still, we tend to forget this when women speak up to tell their stories — we call them out for oversharing or airing the family's dirty laundry, unless of course their books are good for us in some way. Men are allowed to be entertainers, but too often, we expect women to be teachers or nurses.

So maybe Karr's hubris is actually kind of refreshing. I don't think we all need to be swaggering around like Norman Mailer, but I do think arrogance in women is so demonized that it's nice to see it flare up from time to time. Writing is a pretty useless act, on the face of it, and also very self-centered. You can justify it to yourself by pretending you're helping people, but I'm not at all sure that books written with the intent to help actually do so. The other option is just to be convinced that your bullshit is intrinsically worth reading. And in order to do this, you may have to believe something crazy, like that God actually likes you best.

God's Favorite Writer [Double X]