Bookslut came across this hilarious and somewhat brilliant essay by Lynn Barber from last December in which she talks about what it was like to come of age before feminism:
“We had no sex education. We had a lesson on reproduction in the frog – not a very helpful role model – followed by a lesson on periods (when we were 14, so already too late) followed by a lesson on venereal disease. Apparently we were meant to deduce some connection but I certainly never did and was left with a lifelong unease around frogs.”
But she doesn’t stop at pointing out the ridiculousness of pre-feminist ideas about gender. For Barber, feminism was necessary, but she doesn’t shy away from poking fun.
“I was very aware in the Eighties of the ‘having it all’ phase when women were supposed to ‘juggle’ career and motherhood. I was aware of it because I was actually doing it at the time but I never thought juggling babies was a good idea. What it actually involved was permanent exhaustion and permanent guilt.”
In the end, Barber hopes that women can find a way to build their career and have children in a less difficult way, possibly by having children earlier and starting careers later (rather than vice versa). Whether or not you agree with that, this essay is a great reminder of the debt we all owe–men and women–to feminism.
One response
Ähm. I had an agent for 6 weeks back in early 2007. He submitted YNH to 3 editors, who rejected it. I found the agent time-consuming and difficult to work with; I had a Guggenheim Fellowship and wanted to use it for writing, not dealing with this agent, so I terminated our relationship.
The agent had originally planned to send the book to 6 editors. I explained that I wanted to get on with my Guggenheim book; if YNH needed revision, I would prefer the agent and editor to deal with Ilya. The agent found this offensive: he said editors would think I had washed my hands of the book. In other words, for the book to be sent out on submission, it was necessary to guarantee the involvement of the writer with the established track record – which meant that it was unacceptable for the writer with the track record to make use of funds provided by the Guggenheim Foundation to write a work of genius. Sending the book to 3 editors was his idea of a compromise.
If a book has been rejected by 3 publishers, this hardly means that no publisher will publish it. What it means is that it could not find a publisher within the window of time of representation, which was, in this case, 6 weeks.
We have no way of knowing how the other 3 editors would have responded to the book. I have no idea who they were, so I can’t write to them independently. What we certainly can say, though, is that the book has not been rejected by these editors; they never saw it. And the reason the book was not shown to these editors was not some inherent fault in the text, but, um, the desire of the Guggenheim-funded author to use a Guggenheim Fellowship to work on a new book.
At the risk of stating the obvious, a book that has no agent to represent it is unlikely to find a publisher because most publishers accept submissions only from agents. I did not want to take time away from my Guggenheim Fellowship to look for yet another agent. I was under the impression that publishing an extract in n+1, selling copies on my website, and entering into discussions with Jenny Turner of the LRB would give the book some chance of finding a publisher despite agents’ current monopoly on access.
The LRB did not review YNH in part because of its unusual format. Jenny Turner had read and liked my first book, The Last Samurai. She volunteered to review the new book, if the LRB was interested, as a result of this.
Trying out these alternative means of showing work has been taken up a great deal of time and energy; it hasn’t led to inquiries from the very large number of editors who were never approached by the agent. So agents really do have a stranglehold on access, and that’s too bad. It seems odd to me that an agent or editor should be offended by a writer who wants to use a Guggenheim Fellowship to write a book; it seems odd that this should have morphed into a story of failure, a story about a book that couldn’t find a publisher. Given that these odd things turned out to be the case, it seems odd that the thing that actually is the case turns out to have so little purchase on comprehension. Pope, thou shouldst be with us at this hour.
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