{"id":4699,"date":"2015-08-06T08:55:41","date_gmt":"2015-08-06T12:55:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=4699"},"modified":"2017-06-22T08:14:23","modified_gmt":"2017-06-22T12:14:23","slug":"why-i-cried-last-night","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=4699","title":{"rendered":"Why I Cried Last Night"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"woman

(photo: Mike Licht, Creative Commons License)<\/p><\/div>\n

Earlier this summer, my heart sank. I was reading about yet another manifestation of the gender divide in agenting, publishing, marketing, and reviewing women-written fiction, which, even if unconscious, leads to and promotes a gender divide in the books readers choose, an issue I wrote about in my post, \u201cWill Men Read my Book<\/a>?\u201d A vicious circle if ever there was one.<\/p>\n

Subject Matter Matters<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

The essay was Nicola Griffith\u2019s \u201c.\u201d She compiled data showing that not only have men won most of the major literary awards over the last 15 years, when women have won them, they\u2019ve mostly won them for books about male<\/em> characters. Think Hilary Mantel, the only woman to have won two Man Booker prizes, both for books about Thomas Cromwell, or Donna Tartt\u2019s Pulitzer-winner The Goldfinch<\/em> and its protagonist Theo Decker. (Rufi Thorpe has written an amusing, but pointed essay<\/a> on what it\u2019s like to have her first novel published and the tone-deaf reactions she received. Male at pool: \u201cI mean, yours was just a novel about girls.\u201d Author: \u201cYeah, I know that.\u201d Male at pool: \u201cI just don\u2019t see how anyone could compare it to actual literature.\u201d)<\/p>\n

\u201cEverybody kind of knows it\u2019s true, but they don\u2019t want to see it,\u201d Griffith said in the Seattle Review of Books<\/a><\/em>. Later in that essay, she says, \u201cThe way we\u2019re brought up is that stories about men are important and stories about women are fluffy and domestic and kind of boring.\u201d This page from a publisher<\/a> of predominantly women-written mysteries is a revealing display of that preconception in action. It sends a clear marketing message: These are lightweight books. Not that there isn\u2019t a place for such books and the readers who enjoy them. This publisher is just up-front about what they do and, inadvertently I hope, perpetuating a stereotype.<\/p>\n

The Evidence Piles Up<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

In June, I groaned reading Kamila Shamsie\u2019s essay in The Bookseller<\/a> on another aspect of the gender divide. She, too, turned to statistics, analyzing The Guardian\u2019s<\/em> end-of-year book recommendations by some 252 cultural figures, mostly writers. The data showed that more men than women get asked to recommend; of those who are asked, more men than women agree to do so; and those men are more likely to recommend yet more men. Says Shamsie:<\/p>\n

I\u2019m going to assume that the only people who really doubt that there\u2019s a gender bias going on are those who stick with the idea that men are better writers and better critics, and that when men recommend books by men that\u2019s fair literary judgement, while when women recommend books by women that\u2019s either a political position or woolly feminine judgement. To these people I have nothing to say, except: go read some Toni Morrison.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Desperate Responses<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

I pulled my hair and rolled my eyes as, over the summer, the reaction to this situation became increasingly creative, if quixotic. Shamsie has proposed that in 2018 UK publishers bring out only new titles by women. US writer Amanda Filipacchi<\/a> tried to \u201cpose like a man\u201d for her book jacket photo when she discovered that in these pictures \u201cThe men looked simpler, more straightforward. The women looked dreamy, often gazing off into the distance. Their limbs were sometimes entwined, like vines.\u201d<\/p>\n

And white male writers have been urged to acknowledge<\/a> that \u201cthe white male experience has been overexposed, at the expense of other experiences, for centuries.\u201d Or, as American fiction writer John Scalzi<\/a> has said, in the massive role-playing game of life, \u201c\u2018Straight White Male\u2019 is the lowest difficulty setting there is.\u201d<\/p>\n

Submissions (A Too-Apt Word?)<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Right now, I\u2019m in the middle of preparing submission packets for small publishers. It took two days to prepare three packets. I\u2019ve been working on the current packet since Sunday, off and mostly on. Each publisher has different requirements, some puzzling. My novel, three years in the works, has been professionally edited by an award-winning mystery writer, professionally proofread, and the police-related parts reviewed by a former NYPD detective and terrorism expert. It\u2019s in its, oh, eighth? draft.<\/p>\n

Then yesterday, I read this the story<\/a> by Catherine Nichols. Discouraged by the lackluster response (usually a one-line rejection or, commonly, no reply at all) to her agent query letters\u2014you need an agent in order to approach most publishers\u2014she began sending her materials out using a male pseudonym. Over a weekend, she sent six agents the same<\/em> letter and same<\/em> book synopsis and sample chapters she\u2019d been sending and received five responses, with three requests for a manuscript. Ultimately, under her own name, 50 queries received two manuscript requests, whereas \u201cGeorge\u2019s\u201d 50 queries generated 17 manuscript requests. George is, she says, \u201ceight and a half times better than me at writing the same book.\u201d<\/p>\n

The agents\u2019 comments to Catherine (similar to those I have received myself) consistently cited \u201cbeautiful writing,\u201d which Nichols points out \u201cis the paint job on top but not the engine of the book,\u201d whereas they said George\u2019s work was \u201c\u2018clever,\u2019 it\u2019s \u2018well-constructed\u2019 and \u2018exciting.\u2019\u201d It received lengthy critiques, not the typical form-letter brush-offs.<\/p>\n

She points out that the agents she approached were both men and women, \u201cwhich is not surprising because bias would hardly have a chance to damage people if it weren\u2019t pervasive. It\u2019s not something a few people do to everyone else. It goes through all the ways we think of ourselves and each other.\u201d<\/p>\n

I wept.<\/p>\n

Resources<\/strong><\/span>
\nVIDA<\/a>, an organization dedicated to Women in Literary Arts
\nSisters in Crime<\/a>, helping women who write, review, buy, or sell crime fiction
\nThe other side of the coin: Male writers who write as women<\/a>
\nHistorical Underpinnings of Continual Sexism in Publishing<\/a>, Emerson College<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Earlier this summer, my heart sank. I was reading about yet another manifestation of the gender divide in agenting, publishing, marketing, and reviewing women-written fiction, which, even if unconscious, leads to and promotes a gender divide in the books readers … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Why I Cried Last Night - The persistent gender gap in agenting, publishing, and promoting women-written fiction","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[40,174,68,29],"tags":[416],"class_list":["post-4699","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction","category-first-draft-blog","category-publishing","category-writing","tag-real-life"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-1dN","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4699","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4699"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4699\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9116,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4699\/revisions\/9116"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4699"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4699"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4699"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}