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]

But first they read. Danticat picked an excerpt from her story "Ghosts," in which an aspiring radio journalist dreams of starting a program on his violence-wracked Haiti neighborhood. She read,

He would open with a discussion of how many people in Bel Air had lost limbs. Then he would go from limbs to souls, to the number of people who had lost family-siblings, parents, children-and friends. These were the real ghosts, he would say, the phantom limbs, phantom minds, phantom loves that haunt us, because they were used, then abandoned, because they were desolate, because they were violent, because they were merciless, because they were out of choices, because they did not want to be driven away, because they were poor.

Diaz (author of Drown and The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao) read from a personal essay about his dad, and it's a testament to his command of both humor and pain that his father's favorite insult — "when you grow up, I am going to find you in an alley somewhere, and I am going to shoot you" — got a huge laugh. After they finished reading, and after a discussion of their long-standing friendship (which Danticat said was about "more life things than writing things"), a listener asked Diaz about the science fiction references in Oscar Wao. Diaz said he'd been pilloried in the mainstream nerd press (only sort of an oxymoron) in a way that smacked of racism. He then made a point about scifi that doesn't get made often enough:

If it wasn't for people of color's experiences and women's experiences, the genre wouldn't exist.

Scifi frequently gets portrayed as a refuge for socially awkward white boys, but everything from Isaac Asimov to Battlestar Galactica is permeated with issues of otherness, or, as Diaz puts it, "questions of alien contact." Stories of new worlds and interspecies warfare can be a way of representing the experiences of immigrants — or of people whose bodies, for reasons of race or gender or size or shape or ability — don't conform to the established norm. People who write about scifi are starting to accept this — female science fiction and fantasy writers are getting more attention, and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay brought the related issue of sexual orientation in superhero comics to the fore. But the nerd backlash against Oscar Wao shows how eager some marginalized groups are to marginalize others, especially in the literary world, and how jealously (and dumbly) geeks sometimes guard their geek fiefdoms against those who could be allies.

Despite his experience with the nerd police, Diaz also advanced the somewhat debatable point that reading teaches compassion. He said reading a book was "one of the clearest ways to come into communion with another subjectivity," and that, moreover, the process of writing forced him to be a better person. "When I come up short as a writer," he added, "there's always a shortcoming in my character." Danticat responded that becoming a mother (that's her and her daughter above) had changed her as a writer — "when your life is layered in a certain way," she said, "you have more in your soul to go to." She got in a little dig at the Hemingway school of "life experience," in which the way to broaden yourself as a writer is to "go shoot animals," and her words were a powerful response to the idea that women can't both have families and make great art. But does making great art really require you to be a good person? And does it make good people of those who consume it?

Later in the conversation, Diaz said, "this life makes it so difficult to engage in civic- and justice-minded projects." By "this life," I assumed he meant American life, with its relative comfort and its myriad distractions, but it's also true that a life spent writing fiction — or reading it — invites escape into fictional worlds. I'm not a fan of the notion, popular when I was in grad school, that the best writers are assholes and the best fiction speaks to what is most evil in the reader's soul — both because I think it's a limiting view of literature and because, as a writer, I like having friends. And I believe that reading and writing do teach a willingness to explore other kinds of lives. But they also teach absorption in the mind and not in the world, and while this isn't always a bad thing, it doesn't necessarily lead to social change. Of the racist new Dominican Constitution and of injustice the world over, Diaz said, "everybody in every place in every way they can has to find a way to resist." And while reading fiction is many things, it's not (at least in America) active resistance.

New Yorker Festival [Official Site]
Ghosts [New Yorker]

It's not that there's anything inappropriate about the little flirtatious compliments hosts pay to the women — especially actresses — who appear on their shows. And Letterman certainly isn't the only one to talk up his guests' beauty — Stewart's been known to do it too. but it does give the impression that the female guests are there as eye candy, even if they just, say, directed a film or completed a serious role. That's why it's so refreshing when, in the clip above, Jon Stewart jumps in after her hyperarticulate monologue about the history of Rhode Island to say, with obvious admiration, "you're very smart."

Given everything I've written about Letterman in the last couple days, you're probably expecting me to applaud the asexuality of the whole exchange. But it actually made me blush a little, because while all the "you're beautiful" comments are standard boilerplate for a celebrity interview, telling someone she's smart in a way seemed like actual flirting — or least, the kind of flirting I actually respond to. Calling a woman pretty is, while sometimes welcome, pretty much a Standard All-Purpose Compliment, while calling her smart (and meaning it) shows you're actually paying attention. So while I don't think Stewart's really hitting on Vowell here, I did find the whole thing kind of hot.

But that's just me. In a larger sense, it is nice to see a female guest treated like an actual author rather than a sex object. Of course, Vowell's whole persona — her clothes, her bowl haircut, her constant assertions of her own nerdiness — downplays sexuality in favor of intellect, and I wonder if this is a conscious choice. While Billy Parker's recent Gothamist interview with Vowell veers once into the semi-suggestive ("Have you always clicked with jokey fellas?"), Parker largely sticks with serious questions like, "What's the youngest reader that you're aware that you've had?" and, "Was Roger Williams a slight man?" Singers with sexy images, or writers un/fortunate enough to be tarred with the "hot writer" brush often end up getting asked a lot more about their looks and relationships, and a lot less about their work.

Vowell has a pretty funny This American Life piece about dressing as a goth, in part as a response to people assuming she's sweet all the time. So she's clearly aware of the power of appearance and its influence on social interaction. Most likely her personal style is just what makes her comfortable and happy, but her conservative outfits and simple hair also give her a certain freedom — the freedom to talk about what she wants to talk about, without participating in a played-out sexual script. It's a freedom some actresses might well envy.

Sarah Vowell, Author [Gothamist]
Sarah Vowell [Daily Show]

Look, on the scale of apt criticisms, it's probably true that, Susan Estrich aside, not as many women as men are out their pitching their work. Believe me, it's hard! It involves a great deal of rejection but, unlike in dating, you have to turn around and ask the person out again and again. Plus, frankly, a lot of Op-Ed submissions are written by committee, done at an organization and then bylined as its head because the head dude (and, let's face it, most organizations' leaders are men) is more likely to get attention than a VP of either gender — unless, of course, the female VP is writing about girl issues.

The Rutgers Study cited by the Times points out that most editorial pages accept submissions that more or less agree with their editorial viewpoint. If you want to publish a conservative OpEd on economic issues, you don't go to the Washington Post, you go to the Wall Street Journal — any PR guy will tell you that — and it's not because of the readers you want but your likelihood of acceptance. Who runs most editorial pages? Men. It makes it worse that OpEd pages are, like most things in journalism, pretty incestuous. If they know you (or recognize you), your piece is more likely to get published and you're more likely to be published again in that venue.

The final thing, that I have to admit a dude pointed out to me, is that women who write about politics are rarely considered just "political writers" but female political writers, or writers about women's issues. Do I feel like I come at politics from a particular female perspective? I'd have to say no, especially when I'm geeking out in Crappy Hour about economics or something. On the other hand, where is my work featured 90% of the time? Here and on Glamocracy mostly, which says a lot about who likes to read it, or at least who my brilliant editors know likes to read my work. So while I appreciate the efforts by the Washington Post or the LA Times to feature more women writers, I am forced to wonder nonetheless why it's so hard to find women writers in the first place, and what about our voices supposedly appeal more to women or men.

(By the way, I submitted this article to the Gender Genie and it determined that I write like a man. Maybe I should start submitting OpEds with just my initials?)

Study Finds Imbalance on 3 Newspapers’ Op-Ed Pages [NY Times]
An Op-Ed Need for Diverse Voices [Washington Post]
Why Are All The Big Political Bloggers Men [Glamocracy]
A Very Public Opinion Exchange [LA Times]

Just as Gould is infuriated by all those "Scary Sadshaws," wandering around in search of baubles and boys... [I find it] maddening to have to wonder — Carrie Bradshaw-style — if Gould's story would have run had she not been beautiful, and maddening to then hate oneself for having had to wonder that at all.

But perhaps most maddening is the way the buildup of critical attention to a piece like Gould's — or to a cultural phenomenon like "SATC" — only affirms that certain kinds of women, and only those kinds of women, are worth elevating to begin with, in part because of the delight people take in tearing them down.

And this:

No matter how angry you felt about Gould's piece, it was almost impossible to read the comments and not feel terrible: for her, about her, and about yourself for having even peeked. The process is exhausting, and not good for anyone, especially women who get stuck with some lame avatar they feel does not represent them, but whom they do not particularly feel like burning at the stake just for having been clever, lucky or talented enough to wind up drawing a spotlight.

Another Pretty Face Of A Generation [Salon]
Related: The Times Magazine Dapples Sunlight On Its Memoirist [NY Observer]
Exposed [NY Times Magazine]


Earlier: 5 Things About That Times Magazine Piece On Masturbatory Blogging
The Problem With Chick Lit

• Congressional Democrats introduced a bill yesterday that would require all pharmacies to offer emergency contraception, no matter how batshit insane the individual pharmacist. [Feminist]
  
• The Japanese government, however, is offering cash bonuses for families who have kids. [ABCNews]
  
• Maria Sharapova gets a beatdown. [Guardian]
  
• Rising numbers of immigrants are pushing the fertility rate in the U.K. to a 26-year high. [Telegraph
  
• A Nigerian woman wins major UK literary prize; youngest female and first African to do so. [WashingtonPost]