In Summer Light, Zibby Oneal’s 1985 book about a seventeen-year-old girl’s season of self-discovery, is one of the last young adult novels that I read as a young adult.
In it, Kate Brewer, daughter of renowned painter Marcus, has been recovering from mononucleosis and writing a paper on The Tempest. Kate has a fractious relationship with her father because she sees the way the household is ordered around Marcus’s moods and because of how he treats the work of the women who surround him—his wife, his daughters.
Marcus is the kind of man who says things at dinner like, “Painting is like making love.”
He’s your basic old white man artist nightmare, and Kate is now mature enough to dislike the way he dismisses Kate’s mother, Floss—herself a former painter who now devotes herself to her garden and her husband’s moods. Marcus says of one of Floss’s canvasses:
“There were artists all over New York doing that those years. In fact, when I met Floss she was doing one. Remember that big thing, Floss? What did you call it? ‘Coney Island’?”
Kate’s mother paused, serving a spoonful of peas. “‘Jones Beach,’” she said.
“Oh, right. Well, I knew it had the name of some swimming place.”
In a few casually brutal sentences, Marcus dismisses the only painting that Floss has ever seen fit to keep.
Kate herself has tried to paint and encountered a similar reaction from her father, resulting in her giving up her artistic ambitions. But when graduate student Ian Jackson arrives to catalog Marcus’s paintings for a retrospective, Kate begins to reconsider how her choices are dictated by her father, and decides to explore where her talents lie.
At another point in the book, Oneal notes:
It was the sort of conversation that she and her mother sometimes had, not so much for the sake of what they said, but because their voices moving back and forth were a kind of touching.
Marcus is the kind of man who says things at dinner like, “Painting is like making love.” He’s your basic old white man artist nightmare.
In Summer Light is beautifully written. Sections from this book might seem at home in the pages of TheNew Yorker. Indeed, with its spare, evocative prose and the restrained feelings of its characters, In Summer Light is also for me associated with a certain kind of story about privileged white people. This level of spareness and restraint can only happen in the absence of having to explain the world in which the book takes place. The implication is that if the reader doesn’t understand the nuances and modulations, she should learn.
This is a setting in which the loudest noises come from the clink of wine glasses above the strained silence of a dinner party. The two “lower class” characters—housekeeper Mrs. Hilmer and her daughter Frances—are treated with disdain by Kate because they ask openly for what they want—they are too direct.
In the same way, the reader of In Summer Light is schooled to value what is unsaid and read between lines—sometimes, the relationship of text to reader is like the way Kate and her mother communicate, “not so much for the sake of what [is] said, but … voices moving back and forth.”
Indeed, with its spare, evocative prose and the restrained feelings of its characters, In Summer Light is also for me associated with a certain kind of story about privileged white people.
The reader builds meaning into the silence. She works to keep up with the prose—not the other way around.
This is not to say that I dislike In Summer Light. I loved it as a fifteen (or sixteen) year old, knowing that I didn’t understand all the currents and nuances swirling in its pages. I wanted to master this way of looking at and being in the world. And part of the answer, for me, was to stop borrowing books that were supposedly aimed at me.
On rereading, I still love In Summer Light because it is so insightful about the practical and emotional work that women do, because it captures so well that feeling of straining toward adulthood, of learning one’s worth and power. And yes, I love it now because it has kind of beautiful writing that I trained to appreciate after first having read it. But of course, part of that training is learning to look down on what In Summer Light is—a novel for teens, a book written by a woman for young women.
I’m going in circles, aren’t I?
At least, that’s how I’ve felt trying to write this. But this is what I got from all of my reading and fancy degrees: that there are hierarchies. That epic poetry—by Homer, by Virgil—is more important than lyric poetry—Sappho. That literary fiction is better than genre fiction. That the genres most looked down on are mostly written for and about women and girls—romance and young adult fiction. And here is Oneal, who has written a book about young women and their work in a style that can be approved by men, in a genre that is not.
What I’m trying to say—what In Summer Light shows—is that a lot of the work of women is quiet or dismissed. And that women’s artistic output ends up being hushed or lost, too. It’s almost, almost as that work doesn’t exist:
“There were artists all over New York doing that those years. In fact, when I met Floss she was doing one. Remember that big thing, Floss? What did you call it? ‘Coney Island’?”
Kate’s mother paused, serving a spoonful of peas. “‘Jones Beach,’” she said.
“Oh, right. Well, I knew it had the name of some swimming place.”
In Summer Light met with acclaim after its 1985 publication. Oneal also had also written two earlier YA novels, The Language of Goldfish (1980) and A Formal Feeling (1982, nominated for a National Book Award for Children’s Fiction). She penned children’s books and non-fiction. A Google search revealed that she was still teaching writing as recently as last year. But despite praise for Oneal’s work, all of her young adult novels appear to be out of print.
top photo: “Mixing the perfect colour,” flickr / Jill
In E. L. Konigsburg’s From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, twelve-year-old Claudia Kincaid hatches a plan to run away from her home in Connecticut to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, taking along her money-grubbing younger brother, Jamie.
The children roam the galleries during the day, blending in with crowds. They sleep in the antique beds on display and bathe in the fountain, supplementing their money with the coins they find in it. When an angel sculpture recently acquired by the Met from a Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler begins to attract crowds, Claudia and Jamie become fascinated with the piece. They use their access to the museum to try to prove that it was indeed crafted by Michelangelo. And in their attempt to discover its provenance, they travel to visit Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler herself. (For some reason, I can never think of her as a mere Mrs. Frankweiler—so I’m just going to keep typing out her whole, grand name.)
The story is prefaced by a letter from Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler to her attorney, Saxonberg, and is narrated by Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, complete with trenchant and sometimes cryptic asides.
From the Mixed-up Files was published in 1967. It took the Newberry Award, and Konigsburg became the only writer to have both won and been runner up for the prize in the same year (for her first book, Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth). She also illustrated From the Mixed-up Files, modeling Claudia and Jamie on her children.
I’d forgotten Claudia’s deep and fundamental dissatisfaction with her life. I’d forgotten about Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler’s files—the entire meaning behind the title, the heart of the book—probably because I didn’t understand what I was reading.
I read From the Mixed-up Files when I was in fifth or sixth grade. I picked up my copy from the paperback carousel in the library of my suburban Canadian school.
But memory had softened the story into a soulless romp. Over the years, my mind fashioned it into a dreamy urban version of those children’s survival novels that I also liked to read as a kid; instead of weaving reeds and baiting fish hooks, Claudia and Jamie hid in bathrooms and ate at the Automat. I’d forgotten the opening letter from Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler to her attorney. I’d forgotten about Jamie’s cheerful, avaricious practicality, and about how the children wander not just in the Met but over Manhattan. I’d forgotten Claudia’s deep and fundamental dissatisfaction with her life. I’d forgotten about Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler’s files—the entire meaning behind the title, the heart of the book—probably because I didn’t understand what I was reading.
Claudia is a self-assured and earnest twelve-year-old. She has a sense of mission and tries to make her museum stay educational rather than an anarchic escape. Mrs. Frankweiler notes:
Claudia informed Jamie that they should take advantage of the wonderful opportunity they had to learn and study… her ambitions were as enormous and as multidirectional as the museum itself.
Jamie says he prefers an adventure untainted by grown-up regulations—but he lives in thrall to the rule of dollars and cents. When Claudia suggests trying to find the origins of the angel, brother and sister end up researching. In libraries.
Yes, two school-age children at loose in New York City willingly and deliberately go to the library.*
(*Sorry NYPL, I love you.)
Claudia makes increasingly poignant and quixotic attempts to give their trip a shape and a mission without being quite sure what will change it. She wants the difference she feels in herself borne out. She wants to be a heroine but has a muddled sense of how to go about accomplishing it. At one point, she sees a guide at the United Nations dressed in a sari:
When she was grown she could stay the way she was and move to some place like India where no one dressed as she did, or she could dress like someone else—the Indian guide even and still live in an ordinary place like Greenwich.
(Frankly, I see a lot of grown-up white people who are as misguided as young Claudia.)
She wants to be different. She wants this trip to have significance and change the way people see her—or change how she sees herself.
She wants to be different. She wants this trip to have significance and change the way people see her—or change how she sees herself. She tells Jamie brokenly that she wanted to prove the provenance of the angel because then she would be a heroine—others would see her as heroic, and she wants to herself: “I feel as if I jumped into a lake to rescue a boy, and what I thought was a boy turned out to be a wet, fat log. Some heroine that makes. All wet for nothing.”
But it is in her conversation with Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler that she learns to think of herself as one. Those secret files record her as a heroine.
I re-read this book while watching my daughter’s swim lesson on the Upper West Side of Manhattan—across the park from the Met, across the park from where Claudia and Jamie hid.
Because I now live in New York, the fantastical landscape of my childhood imagination has supposedly become a part of my day-to-day reality. Judy Blume’s Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, Mary Rodgers’ Freaky Friday, and Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy, among others, all take place on streets I’ve walked.
Twelve is often the age when girls lose what self-assurance they had. And I wish I’d understood this book better at twelve. I wish I’d carried more away from it.
I think of these books sometimes—I think of Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing when I’m in posh doorman buildings with mirrored elevators, like the one Peter and Fudge lived in. But most of the time I don’t remember the fact that I share a setting with favorite childhood books. I don’t feel like a heroine.
I first read From the Mixed-up Files when I was around Claudia’s age. I left for New York when I was ten years older than that. At both those times in my life, I was earnest, like Claudia, but more anxious than she was. Much less confident.
To read—and understand—From the Mixed-up Filesof Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler can be vastly and secretly affirming: Claudia learns as long as she knows she’s a heroine, she is the heroine of her life.
Twelve is often the age when girls lose what self-assurance they had. And I wish I’d understood this book better at twelve. I wish I’d carried more away from it. To read—and understand—From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler can be vastly and secretly affirming: Claudia learns as long as she knows she’s a heroine, she is the heroine of her life. “Now she wouldn’t have to be a heroine when she returned home… except to herself.”
I re-read that last fierce and tender section of From the Mixed-up Files while watching my kid’s swim lesson, and I tried not to cry. I still don’t know what I felt: grief? mourning? a sense of losing something I wasn’t sure I had? My daughter was learning to float and blow bubbles—she was learning to save herself in the water. I hope these skills last her for a long, long time.
In Ellen Conford’s 1976 young adult novel, Dear Lovey Hart, I Am Desperate, freshman Carrie Wasserman finds herself writing an anonymous advice column for her high school newspaper.
The column becomes wildly popular to the dismay of Carrie’s father, the school’s head guidance counselor. But Carrie finds her position difficult: she is falling for her intense and driven co-conspirator, the paper’s editor, Chip. Her advice to her friends ends up going against her alter-ego’s words. She’s trying to juggle homework and writing. Most of all, she is out of her depth fielding all-too-serious questions that come up. Her answers become more flippant—sometimes a little mean—and the tide of opinion turns against Lovey Hart.
And, oh, how worn out I was from trying to find new gimmicks for the Eternal Number One question: “How do I get him to notice me?” I began turning from sensible, cute suggestions, to downright sarcastic answers. “Drop an anvil on his foot.” “Put Jell-O down his shirt.” “Fall off his roof.”
Lovey Hart was probably one of my favorite books from junior high and high school. The book was made into an Afterschool Special and spawned a sequel, We Interrupt This Semester for An Important Bulletin, in which Carrie contends with a Southern belle and imagines herself in scenes from a romance novel in which her sleeves keep getting ripped off, leaving her creamy shoulders exposed.
Conford, who died a year ago, was one of those authors whose books were always on the paperback carousel at both the school library and the city branch library. A few of her novels were recently reissued with Lizzie Skurnick’s imprint at Ig Publishing.
Re-reading, I realized that Conford’s wisecracking but empathetic voice was one I tried—and keep trying—to channel with varying degrees of success.
Lovey Hart was funny—Carrie was funny. That was important to me as a young woman, and it is maybe why I read the book over and over.
I needed to hear the wry voice of a girl who herself is allowed and encouraged to be funny, who explores how wit can sometimes be mean, or wise, or kind. For example, here are Carrie’s thoughts as she contemplates her crush, Chip:
But while a brooding, intense boy makes the heart beat faster, he also puts a simultaneous strain on the brain, because you are frantically trying to think of something to say to make him stop brooding, which is an outright contradiction, but true, nevertheless.
Carrie is self-aware enough to know she’s falling for Chip’s act, but she can see her own absurdity in trying to console him. There is a buoyancy to Carrie’s voice—to this book’s realism. It was such a relief to encounter it at an age when life often felt confusing and intense and hard to bear.
I suspect that my teachers mistrusted humor. Trying to corral a roomful of teens making boner jokes can maybe do that to a person.
There was a preponderance of Earnest Literature About Issues in our curriculum. Moreover, among the “realistic” contemporary young adult selections pushed by my teachers and librarians were cautionary tales about young women who got pregnant, who got lost in drugs, who fought the system and lost. The Chocolate War. The Language of the Goldfish. The Pigman. Go Ask Alice.
I am oversimplifying the novels I was recommended. But in my memory, so many of the characters in those books seemed so tragic and so—well—white. And if they were non-white, well, that alone was often written as a calamity. In the world of true-life, contemporary young adult books of the 80s and 90s, my mere non-white existence was an Issue.
My reality is not grim. I don’t think others should get to frame it that way either.
Don’t get me wrong, I gladly read—and still read—Issues books: I spend many an evening sitting in the dark, sobbing into my duvet, my tearstained face illuminated by the impassive light of my Kindle. It is one of the most luxurious things one can do.
But often so much of the narrative of these books is about giving an audience—giving other people, the culture—the opportunity for catharsis and absolution.
How nice for other people.
As an aside, maybe that’s why I consumed teen series featuring non-white protagonists who, you know, lived their lives.
Teen series were not considered good reading by my teachers. But, as I noted in a previous column, the novels sometimes featured characters who led rich and varied existences—characters such as Faith from The Girls of Canby Hall, or Claudia Kishi from The Babysitter’s Club. And avoiding that narrative of a life crystallized by tragedy is why I’ve given my young child funny middle-grade series like Lenore Look’s Alvin Ho books, or Andrea Cheng’s Anna Wang books.
“Sometimes—no, most of the time—popular and worthwhile are not synonymous at all,” Carrie’s guidance counselor father—an educator—tells her in a rant against Lovey Hart’s column.
Carrie answers, “But everything doesn’t have to be worthwhile . . . Some things can be just for fun.”
In a way, Lovey Hart is in conversation with those Issues books. Lovey Hart may be “for fun,” but it is also worthwhile.
Conford depicts people with problems—girls with problems—who are not tragic even though their lives could easily turn that way. Maybe that’s why I identified with Carrie, although her universe seemed pretty white. It’s maybe why I wanted, however imperfectly, to identify with her.
There are seeds of tragedy in Lovey Hart. Carrie receives letters from girls wanting the attention of boys, sure, but she also gets them from students who’ve lost all their friends after quitting drugs, kids whose parents are getting divorced—many of the scenarios of the Issues books are alluded to in Dear Lovey Hart, I Am Desperate. And then there is also Carrie’s buddy, Terry, who is in love with her French teacher:
“Lovey Hart says,” Terry began abruptly, her voice distant and dreamy, “that you should let someone know if you like them, because they might be liking you all the time, and if you’re too shy to ever tell each other, you’ll never know what Might Have Been.”
“Terry,” I said nervously, “I think she was talking about a sophomore and a junior, not a student and a teacher.”
Terry believes herself emotionally ripe enough to handle a love affair. One night, Terry impulsively shows up at Mr. Stokes’s apartment to declare her feelings.
This is an Issue.
In a different book, it could have easily taken a terrible turn. Even as I write this, I am reading a discussion which shows how very easily student-teacher relations take terrible turns.
Conford goes with what I think is the best-case scenario, which is also somehow a reasonable ending to Terry’s drama. Terry ends up spurned and alive—unharmed despite sustaining some embarrassment. And . . . well, that is probably the most optimistic-while-plausible scenario in life, isn’t it? Being alive and unharmed except for minor embarrassment is the best for which we can realistically hope.
Sweet Valley High and The Girls of Canby Hall were the two teen novel series I read and re-read from grimly and determinedly in my 80s and early 90s adolescence.
Sweet Valley High, the storied Random House series, featured blonde twins, Elizabeth (the “good” one) and Jessica (the “not-so-good” one) Wakefield, living in the small Southern California town of Sweet Valley. The concept was created by the mysterious Francine Pascal, whose name graced the covers. Beginning in 1983, Pascal oversaw a team of ghostwriters through over 152 books, through prequel and sequel series, and even a television sitcom. But although the franchise has gone through revivals and updates, the original stays in the popular memory. The great Roxane Gay has written about her love for the series, and Pascal herself has occasionally emerged from the south of France LIKE THE GLAMORPUSS WE ALL SUSPECTED SHE WAS to offer new books, such as Sweet Valley Confidential, which chronicles the adult lives of Elizabeth, Jessica, and the Sweet Valley gang.
The Girls of Canby Hall series, published by Scholastic, was less popular and less ubiquitous. (I could find and could read an entire Sweet Valley High while standing in the supermarket while my parents shopped.) Nevertheless, Canby Hall had a healthy run of 35 books starting in 1984, all bearing the author name of the fictional Emily Chase.
Canby Hall followed the lives of three girls attending an exclusive New England boarding school. Roommates (#1) opens with Dana, the big-city girl, enjoying a last run through the through the streets of New York. She zooms past Goldman’s Dry Cleaners, “which was really owned by a Pakistani family,” and asks herself how she’ll survive without the “Mandarin Chinese take-out place.” (I’ve . . . never actually heard the term “Mandarin Chinese” applied to food, but I guess it’s the cuisine of Beijing?) We then meet Faith, who is from a black neighborhood in DC and worries that she’ll be among only white peers. And we finally encounter farm girl Shelley, who has been sent to Canby Hall to expand her horizons—ostensibly beyond her boyfriend Paul. On arrival, however, Shelley finds not just her horizon but her entire world rocked when she discovers she will be rooming with an African American student.
Faith picks up quickly on Shelley’s discomfort and asks what’s wrong, resulting in this:
“Oh no. I don’t know many black people, but” —Shelley thought for a second about how to finish the sentence— “but I’m sure they can be as nice as anyone else.”
She knew the words had come out all wrong as soon as she said them, but it was too late to take them back.
The moment is interesting and familiar, and moreover highlights the fact that race is an important issue in the series. After Shelley, Faith, and Dana graduate, they’re succeeded by Toby and Jane—two white characters—and Andy, an African American student—in Making Friends (#18).
In Sweet Valley, race is the major problem in the books that deal with characters of color. After it’s treated, it goes away. At Canby Hall, awareness of race is something the girls live with, but race is not the only event of their lives.
This insistence on centering race is the most significant difference between these two contemporaneous series. Canby Hall deliberately makes an African American girl one of the main characters in a setting—an upper-crust private girls’ boarding school in Massachusetts—that sounds pretty gosh-darn white. The original Sweet Valley High novels, on the other hand, center on white characters in a setting and at a time that could very easily and realistically include, say, characters of Latino or Asian descent—a Southern California public school.
And yes, Sweet Valley does have drop-in characters of color. In Rosa’s Lie (#81), Rose Jameson/Rosa Jimenez attempts to pass as white to pledge a sorority, while in Out of Reach (#50), Jade Wu just wants to dance! But her father is strict! Her father is a doctor and her grandparents run a laundry! Jade will bring dishonor! I’d call it Asian American character bingo, but is it really bingo when you cover all possible spaces? In Sweet Valley, race is the major problem in the books that deal with characters of color. After it’s treated, it goes away. At Canby Hall, awareness of race is something the girls live with, but race is not the only event of their lives.
Often these novels are written by ghostwriters. More precisely, it falls to teams of invisible—often young—women the task of series maintenance, because, I guess, anonymous maintenance is what women do.
Let’s take a moment to talk about novel series aimed at girls.
Francine Pascal is a person, but Carolyn Keene, the name on the Nancy Drew books, and Emily Chase are not. Still, whether or not the author credited on the cover is real, often these novels are written by ghostwriters. More precisely, it falls to teams of invisible—often young—women the task of series maintenance, because, I guess, anonymous maintenance is what women do. (One notable writer for Canby Hall was romance legend Julie Garwood, who penned What’s a Girl to Do? [#14].)
Books in these kinds of series can be uneven and sloppy, with terrible, implausible plots. Some are written with flair. Most of them can be very comforting in their familiarity. I can still recite the stock epithets applied to Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield through every book—their blue-green eyes the color of the Pacific, their matching lavalier necklaces, their perfect size-six figures. And because so many books keep coming out, they gave the illusion of letting the characters grow with readers over time. For readers of Canby Hall, that meant growing up with at least one African American character.
Of course, just because Canby Hall acknowledged race didn’t mean it was perfect—far from it.
Of course, just because Canby Hall acknowledged race didn’t mean it was perfect—far from it.
Tension over Shelley’s racist remark fuels the conflict for the first half of the first Canby Hall book. Dana ends up mad at both parties for making her feel so uncomfortable, to the point where the roommates make that classic move of dividing up their room with masking tape. But the fact that this is a three-way conflict is where Roommates really breaks down for me.
I remember as a kid wondering why Dana didn’t take Faith’s side. After all, big-city Dana has supposedly lived in harmony with all of her fellow creatures across the melanin spectrum. But although she’s annoyed with Shelley, she blames Faith for making things unpleasant—unpleasant for her.
In the book, Dana frames Shelley’s remark as a faux pas. Shelley’s shock, her discomfort, and her actual words really don’t come off that way to me. But let’s go with it as a social misstep: maybe it is a minor blunder—and if so, why doesn’t Shelley apologize? Why doesn’t Dana even attempt to step in with her? It’s pretty easily rectified. But it’s Faith who is taken aside by Dana. Faith is faulted for being Too Angry.
As a kid, I was irritated by Dana’s giving Faith the cold shoulder. But now I realize the doubleness of my reaction, because I’d never have done what Faith did to begin with—I would never have called Shelley out because I knew—I already knew at age twelve—that that would have social consequences. I would have never dared make Dana feel awkward.
The onus seems to be on the person of color—the person who’s just been insulted!—to smooth things over, to make it right.
Let me emphasize that African American experiences of racism are vastly different from my own experiences as a girl of Asian descent growing up in Canada, but this one moment in Roommates bore similarities to my experiences at that time, and later in life.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, especially because my re-reading of the first Canby Hall novel took place at about the same time that this excellent piece by my editor, Nicole Chung at The Toast, came out. In “What Goes Through Your Mind: On Nice Parties and Casual Racism,” Chung describes her reactions at a dinner she attended where a woman remarked that Chung, who is of Korean descent, looked like the entire cast—the entire Asian American, male and female, child and adult, cast—of the sitcom Fresh Off the Boat.
Chung describes her indecision—her desire to issue a crushing retort warring with her fear of making the rest of the people at the dinner uncomfortable, and her sadness that no one else says anything. In this, as in the fictional incident described in Roommates, the onus seems to be on the person of color—the person who’s just been insulted!—to smooth things over, to make it right. Faith doesn’t smooth things over—not at for a long time. In fact, in the first half of Roommates, she gets in some good zingers.
For instance, in a getting-to-know-you chat, the new roommates end up talking about Norman Rockwell. Shelley starts raving about his work, saying, “His paintings are so true.”
“Not my truth,” Faith retorts.
As a kid, I barely knew who this Rockwell guy was. (I’m Canadian, okay?) Reading this exchange as an adult, I am simultaneously delighted by Faith’s answer—It’s just like Twitter!—and dismayed by the fact that Shelley’s love of Norman Rockwell seems implausible for a fifteen-year-old girl.
Re-reading as an adult is a funny thing. Sweet Valley High #1, Double Love, really is terrible. Roommates has great lines.
I’m glad that young me got to grow up with Faith, but I wish she’d had a more sympathetic writer—nowadays, these books would not be enough.
As an adult, I also can finally figure out that writer Emily Chase of the Canby Hall series is not real. I know that the books were conceived in a New York publishing house and kept up by a troop of young New York women. That most likely, the character they had the most in common with—the character that comes off best in the series—is Dana, the white New Yorker running through the streets of Manhattan, past the Pakistani dry cleaners and a Chinese takeout place. That the writer was probably someone who told herself that because she shared a city with people who were not white, she was cool with the whole race thing.
Reading this with mature eyes, I enjoy having it confirmed that Shelley is indeed, the very worst.
And I recognize now that Faith gets a slapped with an Angry Black Woman label, but that my opinion still stands: her moment of anger is entirely justified. I don’t like what happens to her in the first half of this book, but there will be other novels. Because this is a series, we get to see Faith as far more: she gets to be practical, cool, and funny. She becomes a photographer for the school newspaper. She gets a boyfriend who she worries about because he wants to be a cop. She goes to college. She has a story.
I’m glad that young me got to grow up with Faith, but I wish she’d had a more sympathetic writer—nowadays, these books would not be enough. Even if I don’t like the outcome of this particular episode—even if I don’t like the frame—I can acknowledge that much of it is true to life.
I read Margaret Atwood’s 1976 novel Lady Oracle first as a seventeen-year-old, then as an earnest literature undergraduate.
In this feminist satire, acclaimed Canadian poetess Joan Foster fakes her own death and flees to Italy in disguise when her multiple identities collide. Not only is Joan a sort of red-headed Enya of the literary world, she’s also the writer of numerous Gothic governess romances and (in her mind this is the worst crime) a former fat kid.
The book is told in first person, interspersing flashbacks to an unhappy youth and marriage with excerpts of the “Costume Gothics” that Joan writes. Joan grows up with an angrily controlling mother who tries to get her obese teenage daughter to lose weight. A legacy from a beloved aunt allows her to flee to London, where she first meets a Polish count who churns out Betty Neels-type nurse-doctor romances and introduces her to a career as a romance novelist. She has a chance meeting with Arthur, a drippy young Socialist, who becomes her husband. The pair end up back in Canada, where Arthur adjuncts, agitates, and doles out contempt for his wife while she supports him with her secret writing.
The Royal Porcupine wears spats and a cape and hooks Joan by negging her.
Then, while hashing out a paranormal storyline, Joan tries Automatic Writing. (This involves staring into a candle and letting the spirit take her pen.) After several sessions, she finds that she has written a strange manuscript which Joan’s new literary publishers gleefully sell. Correction: they sell Joan as a tragic-feminist-spiritualist-redheaded poetess.
Joan’s husband becomes unhappy with her success (and the fact that the book seems to be about a stifling marriage). She stumbles into an affair with a performance artist who styles himself as “The Royal Porcupine.” The Royal Porcupine wears spats and a cape and hooks Joan by negging her. (The dystopian fantasy A Handmaid’s Tale is regarded as Atwood’s most prescient novel, but props to Lady Oracle for identifying proto-pickup artists.) But the pressure from juggling her secret lives comes to a head when a hanger-on of the arts scene threatens to blackmail her, threatening to spill about her affair, her secret life as a romance novelist, and her former heft.
It didn’t have anything to do with my life, I thought. And yet, shortly after reading Lady Oracle as a seventeen-year-old, I sent a self-addressed stamped envelope to Harlequin for their guidelines on writing romance novels.
I am having a hard time piecing together what I felt about Lady Oracle as a youth under the weight of what I think of it now.
I should note that, like Joan, I have at least two names: I’ve had one literary novel and two romance novels published, but I’m open about my identities (and—erm—am not successful under either of them). There is no danger that I’ll flee North America only to turn up at an Italian pensione with my luxuriant tresses chopped off.
When I was younger, though, and still struggling with one identity, I think I found Lady Oracle funny? Zany? I especially enjoyed the parody of Joan’s so-called Costume Gothics. It didn’t have anything to do with my life, I thought. And yet, shortly after reading Lady Oracle as a seventeen-year-old, I sent a self-addressed stamped envelope to Harlequin for their guidelines on writing romance novels.
I told people that I was writing a romance novel for money, although why I told people anything at all, I don’t know. Like Joan, I was secretive.
My working title was “Worlds Apart.” The heroine, Lancie, was a food critic who was planning to attend cooking school in Italy. The hero—I don’t remember his name, so we’ll call him Jim—was an architect who was moving to China. They met, in the first chapter, at the travel agency run by Lancie’s sister.
Lancie had black hair and brown eyes. I never said explicitly that she was of Asian descent—probably because I didn’t admit it in my mind, either. The novel ended with Jim rushing to Tuscany, having sacrificed his plans to create a Beijing subdivision—having sacrificed for love. I suppose this was my version of a feminist ending.
I told people that I was writing a romance novel for money, although why I told people anything at all, I don’t know. Like Joan, I was secretive. I got maybe 20,000 words in before my dad sold our secondhand Mac (honestly, the real love story was between me and that cheery little computer) and switched us to PC.
“Worlds Apart” wasn’t the first book I’d tried to write. The idea of money attracted me, but that wasn’t really why I needed to do it. But it was the first attempt where my real motives for writing seemed hidden even from me.
At every turn, Joan thinks she’s a fraud. But that’s also partly because at every turn there is someone dismissing her accomplishments, telling her she doesn’t deserve love, thoughts, success, her life.
Lady Oracle is not kind. It is not kind to people, to genre fiction. Nor is it kind to high literary work.
It skewers romance, of course, trotting out the usual stuff: the audience is made up of sexually unsatisfied (white) women. Joan reads romance novels but calls them “trashy books.” The writers and publishers feel contempt for their readers. Joan says, “I made the necessary revisions and received my first hundred pounds, with a request for more material. Material, they called it, as if it came by the yard.”
In Joan’s (or Atwood’s) vision, writers of romance novels are prized for the quantity of work they can produce rather than the quality. (There has been speculation that Atwood herself has written romance novels.) At the same time, however, the quality of literary publishing seems to be a myth. When Joan meets with her imprint, Colin Harper, a beleaguered editor, seems less than impressed with the book. Doug Sturgess, the publisher, has dollar signs in his eyes.
“We thought it was—ah—reminiscent—of a mixture of Kahlil Gibran and Rod McKuen,” said Colin Harper unhappily.
“Oh, I said. “It’s that bad, is it?”
“Bad?” said Sturgess. “Is she saying bad? You know how many copies those guys sell?”
Harper thinks the book is cheesy. Sturgess, with book covers and TV appearances in mind, wants to know if Joan plays the guitar. To her romance publishers, words are material. To her literary publishers, Joan is the material.
Throughout the book, it’s clear that the products of women aren’t valued.
“I have read your [poetry] book,” Count Paul, failed literary writer/author of nurse-doctor romances, tells Joan. “It is promising, I think, for a first book, by a woman.”
The qualifications Count Paul appends to his compliment water down any admiration he might have professed. At every turn, Joan thinks she’s a fraud. But that’s also partly because at every turn there is someone dismissing her accomplishments, telling her she doesn’t deserve love, thoughts, success, her life.
By twenty-two, the second time I read Lady Oracle, I’d told myself I didn’t want to write at all. This was my version of managing expectations—by getting rid of them. I’m not going to say that Lady Oracle made me despair. Life did that—it keeps doing that.
I said I wasn’t honest with myself or with others about why I wanted to write a romance novel at seventeen. By twenty-two, the second time I read Lady Oracle, I’d told myself I didn’t want to write at all.
This was my version of managing expectations—by getting rid of them. I’m not going to say that Lady Oracle made me despair. Life did that—it keeps doing that. Besides, I still apparently wanted to try something new after having read it. And well, obviously, I still write.
But the prevailing feeling I’ve had reading it this time around has been one of recognition. I’ll be honest: rereading Lady Oracle was a mind-fuck, partly because I saw myself in it and partly because I wasn’t even in it at all. If the message for women is that their work can be discounted because it is done by women, then what do we say to women who are not white?
In 2016, forty years after the publication of Lady Oracle, there is a lot more talk—in the world, in publishing—about the need for writers, editors, agents, reviewers, who are not heterosexual cis white men.
I’ll be honest: rereading Lady Oracle was a mind-fuck, partly because I saw myself in it and partly because I wasn’t even in it at all.
I am grateful for the work I’m getting this year. (Seriously BMP, thank you!) But while I am delighted that I get to write, there is always someone—from within, from without—trying to keep me in a confined space.
Writing about diversity—God, how I’ve come to hate this term!—in Kirkus last month, romance reviewer Bobbi Dumas exhorted, “I hope you’ll consider reading outside of your own comfort zone.”
Your own comfort zone.
A lot has already been made across the Internet about this piece and Tweets by a prominent white literary agent about getting that diversity in—as if it’s an onerous duty, as if all audiences are white, as if diverse stories are bitter, medicinal, and fundamentally unappealing to white sensibilities. (For one rebuttal, check Courtney Milan’s response in the comments to Ms. Dumas’s piece.)
I prefer not to think that my writing—or the writing of any WOC—is a pill for anyone to choke on. But so often the writing of WOC is framed this way. Even the praise is qualified. It’s as if Count Paul is there saying,You are promising, I think, for a new writer, who’s a minority hire.
Women’s writing is already seen as insubstantial because it’s by women—but work by POC will also taste bad going down? I don’t want to be a nonwhite writer who is given a berth so that white audiences may absolve their guilt and then move on to the “real” reading. I prefer not to think that my writing—or the writing of any WOC—is a pill for anyone to choke on. But so often the writing of WOC is framed this way. Even the praise is qualified. It’s as if Count Paul is there saying, You are promising, I think, for a new writer, who’s a minority hire.
Enough.
Rather than wallow, this is how finally I have chosen to see Lady Oracle, a satire that veers close to and diverges from my life in many ways.
The thing she’s most eager to hide is the fact that she was once big. She still has heft—she is substantial. The thing she wants to hide is that she is bigger than all who surround her.
Joan thinks she’s a fraud. But while Joan says she’s an impostor, she’s an unreliable narrator in another completely different way: while she’s busy telling us that she deserves nothing—that she is so buffeted by circumstance that her own poetry book was penned by invisible spirits—she discounts what she has accomplished. Despite her apparent powerlessness, she’s a woman who escapes her terrible family, invents and reinvents herself, writes seventeen books, supports her husband and his hangers-on, and—even after life starts falling down around her—harbors hope for the future.
What does it say that in the end, the thing that she’s most frantic to hide is not that she’s a successful writer of Costume Gothics? She’s not most intent on preserving her literary reputation or her marriage. The thing she’s most eager to hide is the fact that she was once big. She still has heft—she is substantial. The thing she wants to hide is that she is bigger than all who surround her.
Subversions. I like the way the word tastes on my tongue.
Subversions. As in, ways to act subversively. As in, small erosions of The Way Things Are. In the Online Etymology Dictionary, a “subversion” is a “physical destruction, demolition, ruination; [an] overthrow of a system or law.” The word comes from the Old French for “downfall.” As in, after these subversions, the world will never be the same.
Subversions. As in, after these subversions, the world will never be the same.
I don’t look like a subversive person. Walk into my classroom where I teach English in a large city high school in Colorado, and observe me: I’m tall and big-boned like my German ancestors, I dress in too much brown, I’ve neglected to buy myself new shoes for years, and I need a haircut. I look like just another earnest English teacher trying in vain to cajole teenagers into caring about punctuation and literature.
Except, like most of us, I’m not all I appear to be. Some of my more observant students notice the photograph on my desk of me smiling beside a woman and a little African girl. Is that your sister, Miss? some of them ask. No, I tell them, still practicing bravery, she’s my fiance, and that’s our daughter. And all the assumptions about how I seemed to fit neatly into the acceptable system fly out the tall historic classroom windows.You’re gay, Miss?
Yes.
Like Eve, I often stood on tiptoe and tried to peer outside the Garden into which I’d been born. But I walked straight down an aisle. I behaved.
I didn’t set out to be subversive. For the first twenty-eight years of my life, I worked hard to follow the rules of the system into which I’d been born, though I never felt comfortable. The rules for being good: grow up on a quiet, orderly farm in eastern Iowa, learn to be a good girl, attend a good Lutheran college, marry a nice Lutheran man. I was very good, if that was the rubric. It’s true that I squirmed in the church pew and asked too many questions in confirmation class. It’s true that, like Eve, I often stood on tiptoe and tried to peer outside the Garden into which I’d been born. But I walked straight down an aisle. I behaved.
And then, in a sort of storm at age twenty-eight, I shattered all the expected patterns for my life (or life shattered them for me): I fell in love with my best friend, who was a woman. Another friend asked me on the phone, “Do you think you’ve realized you’re lesbian?” and I gasped. “Lesbian? But I have long hair!” Nothing in my life had prepared me to be subversive. I didn’t want to be. I wanted to have children and nest into a cozy home like my gram’s; I wanted a secure life. Suddenly, all I could hear was wild wind.
Suddenly, I was twenty-eight and divorced. And a lesbian. Same brown sweater, same bad haircut, but I stood hip-deep in the shards of What Had Been Expected.
It’s terrifying to become subversive.
It requires courage.
You’re gay, Miss?
It’s terrifying to become subversive.It requires courage.
Yes. And here is what I won’t tell you, Student, because it’s too much in this small moment in a classroom: I’m gay, and that means that when I still wanted to be a mother, I had to travel halfway across the world to Ethiopia to adopt my child. I’m gay, and that means that when my former partner died five years ago in Alaska, her ashes were mailed to her ex-husband, and the obituary failed to mention me. I’m gay, and that means that every day I teach, I have to decide whether it’s safe to be out. I’m gay, and that means that my fiancé, Meredith, and I don’t hold hands or kiss in public unless we’re certain we’re surrounded by accepting people. I’m gay, and that means Meredith and I only won the right to marry each other legally last June.
I’m gay, which means my life itself is a subversion. The System was not constructed for me, and so every act of mine threatens to overthrow it. Meredith and I walk hand in hand into the elementary school Open House picnic with our African daughter’s hands in ours, and the law of “this is a normal family” shudders. We send out wedding invitations with graphics of two brides holding hands, and the ancient system of marriage trembles. We snuggle into bed at night, our arms around each other, and we rewrite the old rules about who protects and who is protected and who is nurtured and who nurtures. As a writer, I write about women who love women, forcing the old narratives, which never contained our names, to shift aside. Here are all the little subversions. The demolition of an old system.
Evidently, I wasn’t supposed to live a safe life as a straight wife in a small Midwestern town. I was meant to learn about discomfort and grief, fear and discrimination.
Evidently, I wasn’t supposed to live a safe life as a straight wife in a small Midwestern town. I was meant to learn about discomfort and grief, fear and discrimination. I was meant to learn about the surprising joy of being different, of the certain slant of beauty in stories the system never imagined.
I’m still afraid. The systems hate to be shaken, and they do not wish to be destroyed. But the few of us who have glimpsed other narratives, other avenues, other worlds — we are speaking. We have always been speaking, though sometimes we have been required to whisper. Listen. Listen, and maybe you’ll become a little bit subversive, too.
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