The years without women
On bookstore inventory and book shopping
I packed poorly for a recent trip I took, which is to say I did not bring enough books. I did not follow my own method (absurd) and brought only two books with me on a six day journey that involved me flying across the ocean. I read both books quickly into my trip, and then found myself drifting listlessly for a few days with my own thoughts. I’m going to write more about my trip to Portugal and my quiet space on Friday for subscribers, but what’s important to this story is that I ended up in New York, with a three hour train ride ahead of me and no book whatsoever to read.
This would not do. Even if I end up not wanting to read somewhere, I like to have a book with me. Nothing is better for removing yourself from someone else’s public fight than a book. Nothing is better for making you look occupied and happy when alone at a bar than a book. While a stranger can write off a person looking at their phone as lonely or unamused, it is harder to do so with a book.
A dear friend of mine moved into a new apartment in Manhattan recently, and has gotten very lucky. A few doors down from her, a couple has decided to open a small bookstore/coffeeshop/bar. It is a long narrow space with a brick wall in the back. In the bathroom, pages of Harry Potter have been turned into wallpaper. It is the kind of space that panders directly to people like us, and which we accept with open arms. This was lucky because I not only needed a book, I was slightly jet lagged and also needed a coffee. I met her there and began to scan. The fiction section was on the left wall, alphabetized by author, and took up probably six full shelves of space, which is to say it is a curated collection. You cannot find every book in the world in this store.
Being the kind of person who looks at every book in a fiction section in dozens of bookstores in various cities, I could tell that the people who had built this collection had actively tried to reach for a diverse collection. Writings by people of color actually existed, and there were plenty of women on the shelves. But I noticed something that often happens in bookstores (there are a couple near my house like this too) that are trying to make sure they are inclusive; they lost a century of women’s work.
On these shelves, you could find plenty of Charlotte Bronte and Jane Austen of Toni Morrison and Virginia Woolf. You could also find almost every novel by a woman that has been written in the last 4 years to some acclaim. What existed on these shelves was a present in which women write in droves and a past in which only titans exist. I have written somewhat about this phenomenon before, but it really struck me that this lack of historical context is the true failure of women’s literary history.
Because we have no framework for the work that women writer’s have been doing, and no understanding of the novels that have been written (often to great popularity) before us, new work by women feels like it came from nowhere. (Or it came from men’s work.) Most women’s work that is highly reviewed will be compared to mid twentieth century successful men’s fiction, not women’s. This is also how you end up with the One Of a Kind narrative that is often applied to people who write who are not men. They are held up as beacons of a new thing because the history of the group they belong to has been erased. This, of course, is especially true for women of color Sandra Cisneros and Toni Morrison are not the only two women of color who wrote successful novels in the mid-twentieth century, and yet how often do you read a work being compared to a novel by a woman of color who is not them. Perhaps this is just a problem with consumerism, that most people have not read very much and so have to be pointed in the direction of things that already exist. But it’s still sad. I don’t want to live in a world where Paula Fox doesn’t make it onto bookshelves. But here we are.
All of this is to say that I have realized (despite having a both great and very difficult November) that I love the novel as a form and I want to read more of the novels that came before the ones I read now: to know how non-male literature evolved on its own and in conjunction with the books and names everyone else remembers. Basically, I’ve worked myself back to a take I’ve already written (stop reading only new novels), but with a twist. It is the duty of people who read a lot —be they writers or booksellers or reviewers—to read older novels and point others to them. It is our job to pull out books from the past and present them to our friends and say “this is really good, and I want you to read it.” It is our job to promote books, new and old, that are not the hot, every end of the year list pick. It is our job to be honest about what we like and what we don’t. We owe it to each other, but we also owe it to the writers before us who are already being forgotten.
Okay! Enough of that. I am trying more and more to only write about my personal life for subscribers so on Friday I will be sending something about my trip to Portugal. I’ve missed you all, and I hope to be returning to full strength (both as a person and as the writer of this newsletter) soon.
xo
painting is “A Woman Reading” by Henri Matisse (1894)