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Back
when we were innocent young lasses with no first-hand knowledge of
PTO meetings, bulk mailing rate applications, or the dreaded
deadline/snow day whammy, we wrote out a manifesto that would become
Brain, Child's mission statement. "Motherhood," we
declared, "is worthy of literature." It seemed an outrage
to us that there were probably as many literary books on
bull-fighting as there were on the near-universal experience of
raising kids. We used the serious language. Worthy of literature,
people. Put that in your pipe. Now,
five years after our first issue came out, our declaration seems
pretty obvious. These days, anyone can go into a decent bookstore
and find volumes of thought-provoking writing about motherhood. In
addition to the advice books and lite humor (as inevitable, we've
come to believe, as baby-related sleep loss), you can find a
smorgasbord of serious books about motherhood. Even a smorgasbord of
genres within those books. There are the "momoirs," the
grandmama of which is Operating Instructions. There are the serious
examinations of contemporary motherhood, like Ann Crittenden's The
Price of Motherhood and Daphne de Marneffe's Maternal Desire.
Recently, there has been a spate of novels in the chick-lit
tradition (Jennifer Weiner's Little Earthquakes) and quirky little
books of parenthood miscellany (like Amy Maniatis and Elizabeth
Weil's Crib Notes: A Random Reference for the Modern Parent). It's
been pretty cool to watch it happen to first-time authors--and
happen to some of the women whom we call "our" writers
(that is, writers we've published in these pages). Faulkner Fox
scored a book deal with Harmony Books, a division of Random House,
and her book Dispatches From From A Not-So-Perfect Life: Or How I
Learned To Love The House, The Man, The Child was released in
January 2004. Seal Press, an imprint of Avalon Publishing Group,
published Ayun Halliday's The Big Rumpus in 2002, and in 2004
Jennifer Margulis's Toddler and Jennifer Bingham Hull's Beyond
One.
Kristin Kovacic, with Lynne Barrett, edited Birth: A Literary
Companion; it was published by the University of Iowa Press in 2002,
and they're at work on a follow-up about parenting teenagers. At
one point though--say, around 2003--we started getting discouraging
notes from writers we know. How's the book coming? we'd ask. Not
always so good. Agents were saying that they couldn't sell memoirs
about motherhood anymore. Editors were telling agents that the field
was saturated. One writer, whose then-agent shopped her manuscript
around in 2003, told us, "One by one . . .
the ‘pass letters' came rolling in. A couple editors said
that it took them a long time to decide against the book because
they liked it so much, which was some comfort, but a cold
comfort." When
Miriam Peskowitz began shopping her part-memoir, part-feminist
analysis of motherhood book around about eighteen months ago, she
found an agent in a surpisingly short amount of time. A New York
agent, no less, a father of three who said he thought her book would
sell quickly. They took it to the big New York publishing
houses--and prompt-ly got shot down. "While I loved Ms.
Peskowitz's ideas," said one, "I'm afraid the platform
seems a bit too small for us." (Translation: we can't take a
chance on an unknown writer who doesn't already have celebrity or a
built-in readership on her side.) Said another, "I've enjoyed
reading the intelligent and extremely well-written proposal . . .
but our last foray into the field of intelligent, culturally
in-formed, somewhat complex mothering books wasn't a great
success." New
York literary agent Elizabeth Kaplan puts it more bluntly:
"Publishers are done with momoir." Now that's the sort of talk that makes people who assign motherhood-themed book reviews nervous. We started digging.
***
The
contemporary upswing in mother-lit publishing was sparked in the
mid-1990s nearly single-handedly by crazy-haired, Jesus-loving,
ex-alcoholic single mother Anne Lamott. With the publication of
Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year in 1993,
she inaugurated a new era of writing about motherhood--one that's
arguably richer than ever before. The new style is less
self-consciously earnest than the writing of the '70s yet more
serious and less self-effacing than the Erma Bombeck school of the
1950s. Not
that there has ever been a whole lot of writing about motherhood,
really--the personal side of motherhood, we mean. The
nineteen-sixties and -seventies feminist movement--while often
giving the back of its hand to the concerns of mothers--did foster
some classic books on motherhood. Foremost among them: Adrienne
Rich's Of Woman Born (1976) and Jane Lazarre's The Mother Knot
(1976), both of which are still widely read today. But even that
trickle seemed to dry up for about twenty years. And
even before that? Amy Hudock, a professor of English literature at
the University of South Carolina, recently founded the Society for
the Study of Mother Writers. According to her research, there is a
tradition of writing about motherhood in this country, stretching
back into the mid-1800s (when Nathaniel Hawthorne famously remarked
that "America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of
scribbling women"). But you have to know where to find it.
Authors like Fanny Fern and Sarah Josepha Hale wrote novels and
essays with a strong domestic theme, often focusing on the balance
between being a mother and being a writer or artist. While popular
in their time, Hudock says, these books didn't make the grade with
critics and ended up out of print and out of mind. Today, about the
only mother-oriented literature most readers are familiar with from
the nineteenth century is Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story
"The Yellow Wallpaper" and Kate Chopin's novel The
Awakening. By
comparison, the mother-lit publishing trend that began in the
mid-1990s, if not exactly a flood, seems a healthy stream. But
why now? We
tracked down some of the parties responsible for--or at least
contributing to--the mother lit trend and posed the question to
writers, agents, and editors. "I
always think there's something in the air, a cultural
zeitgeist," said Shaye Areheart, the publisher of Harmony
Books, the division of Random House that published Faulkner Fox's Dispatches. "It
was just a matter of time," Faulkner Fox herself offered.
"Everything used to be so advice-y." She pointed out that
when she started her book project in the fall of 2001, a book like
hers didn't exist. "If it had, I would have just read it, not
written it." Jennifer
Mattern, an essayist and playwright, agrees with the writerly
chestnut that you write what you want to read: "[Motherhood
books are] what I want to read all the time." Mattern's agent
is now shopping around a collection of her essays; when we spoke
with her, it had been a nail-biting four weeks and she hadn't yet
heard back from any of the ten editors who had her manuscript.
Although her work, tentatively titled Motherhood and Other Odd
Jobs,
is clearly about life with her kids, she points out, "What I
write is less about motherhood than motherhood as a lens--how
motherhood serves as a context to see the world." Ah,
yes. It's true of Mattern's work, and lots of others. Jane Smiley's
The Age of Grief (her excellent 1987 novella recently adapted into
the 2003 movie The Secret Lives of Dentists) was about accommodating
other people as much as it was about family life. Ann Crittenden's
The Price of Motherhood focused on motherhood--did it ever--but it
was also a cultural critique of hyper-individualism. Ariel Gore's
The Mother Trip: Mama's Guide to Staying Sane in the Chaos of
Motherhood says nearly as much about being a poor, lefty, punk rock
girl as it does about being a mother. Motherhood informs these
books, but it wasn't the only way to crack the authors' thematic
nuts. Still,
even if the motherhood lens is really what's enjoying a new
popularity surge, it doesn't answer the question of why now. We've
taken a stab at answering the question before, like last year when a
daily newspaper reporter called and asked us if we had any thoughts
on why now. The conversation still haunts us (particularly when we
Google ourselves and see the inarticulate quote we gave). Reporter:
So, why do you think that there are so many books about motherhood
out right now? Us:
Hmm. Us:
Um, I think it has something to do with feminism. And
then we pretty much shut up because the next logical thing to say
would be something about This Generation of Mothers, and we cringe
any time that phrase makes its way into print. Such generalizations. But
it's true that This Generation of Mothers is the first to have grown
up with the women's movement of the seventies in progress. At least
some of us were told from the get-go that our opinions matter, that
our experiences are valid. Growing up with the same sense of
entitlement as our brothers has played out in all sorts of
well-documented ways (the phrase they expect to have it all. . .
comes up often). One
less documented way that today's women's sense of entitlement has
played out is in publishing. Really, if football coaches and fishing
enthusiasts could pen books about their experiences, why not
mothers? And if readers could be compelled by the lives of a rich
man and his friends (The Great Gatsby), or a witty, troubled teenage
boy (The Catcher in the Rye), for example, why not a woman who
raises her kids? By
the mid-'90s, the writers within This Generation of Mothers were
hitting their professional strides. The two contemporary seminal
motherhood memoirs hit bookstores: in 1993 Pantheon published
Operating Instructions and in 1995 Harper-Collins published poet and
novelist Louise Erdrich's The Bluejay's Dance: A Birth Year. Also in
1995, a book called The Liar's Club by Mary Karr was wildly
successful, and memoirs became, as one agent told us, hot.
Publishers were eager to find and publish stories that would appeal
to each segment of the market. First-time
book authors were getting a shot, too. While about half of all books
sold are published by the six major publishing houses, there has
been a strong increase in sales from regional (i.e. outside New
York) publishing houses. With lower overhead costs, these presses
can afford to take some chances, says Elisheva Urbas, a freelance
book editor and former editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux in New
York. "They may have less clout with Barnes & Noble,"
she says, "but they can often be better at hand selling books
and launching lesser-known or first-time authors." Seal
Press in Seattle is one of those smaller houses that's been making a
concerted effort to publish motherhood books that aren't all about
the how-to. Starting as a feminist literary press that cut its teeth
on books about abused women, in the 1990s it hired a group of Gen X
editors who kept up the tradition of publishing edgy books by women
like She's a Rebel: The History of Women in Rock and Roll and Cunt:
A Declaration of Indepen-dence. As the decade wore on, says one of
those editors, Ingrid Emerick, the staff got older, got married, had
kids, etc. "What we were thinking and talking about in our
lives started getting reflected in the books we chose," she
says. "At one point, I remember looking around the office and
realizing we were all mothers now. And there was very little out
there in the way of books that spoke to us." They
started with Ariel Gore's Hip Mama's Survival Guide and moved on to
Ayun Halliday's The Big Rumpus. Branching out from the hipster-mom
scene, they took on Andrea Buchanan with Mother Shock: Loving Every
(Other) Minute of It and Jennifer Margulis's anthology Toddler:
Real-Life Stories of Those Fickle, Irrational, Urgent, Tiny People
We Love. Miriam Peskowitz's book found a home with Seal as well, and
they'll publish her The Truth Behind the "Mommy Wars": Who
Decides What Makes a Good Mother? in April. Seal's editors are
clearly still mining their own lives for ideas. This spring, they'll
be putting out I Wanna Be Sedated, a book of essays about raising
teenagers. Seal has found its niche and continues to publish
first-person narratives about motherhood, even since its 2001 buyout
by mid-size conglomerate Avalon Publishing Group. That
niche is potentially huge. Women buy sixty-eight percent of all
books, says publishing industry expert Dan Poynter. Women read
fifty-six percent of all literary works (i.e. novels, plays or
poetry) according to the recent National Endowment for the Arts
report "Reading at Risk." We couldn't find any data on how
long this has been true, although it must have been long enough to
become accepted as common sense in the publishing industry. If
women's book buying power is this strong, it's a wonder the
motherhood book boom hadn't happened already. So
why haven't readers who are mothers been catered to before? Newsweek
wondered the same thing about women television viewers last fall in
a cover story about the TV show Desperate Housewives: Considering
how quickly "Housewives" has become a sensation, you do
have to wonder: what took so long? Why haven't the networks put
together a decent show about women and their real lives? The
audience is there--women make up 56 percent of TV viewers--yet
there's really only one network drama, "Gilmore Girls,"
about women who aren't cops or lawyers. Part of the problem is that
women are easy to take for granted. "People
pay lip service to stay-at-home moms, but it's not really
respected," says [Felicity "Lynette"] Huffman, who,
not coincidentally, is the only cast member who's not often
recognized on the street. "You say you're a stay-at-home mom
and you can see the life force drain out of people. They're already
bored with you." The
assumption has long been that men won't watch shows about women,
while women are happy with a good story regardless of the cast.
"You know you're going to get them anyway, so you don't need to
specialize content for them," says Stacey Lynn Koerner,
director of global research integration for Initiative Media.
"The industry has been very surprised." You're going to get them anyway? Jeesh. ***
There
is a dark side to the new spate of motherhood books: the potential
ghetto-ization of the whole category. If, as the TV executive quoted
in Newsweek says, gearing things toward mothers is
"specializing content," what sort of "special"
are we talking about? Special special? Or "special" as in
the Special Olympics? Does it mean motherhood books can be walled
off and not taken seriously by readers at large? It's
not a new question. Scholars and critics have been debating
so-called women's books for years. When you get down to it, it's a
question of how to categorize the mediocre or merely good books: A
mediocre book by a man is usually called a mediocre book; a mediocre
book by a woman, though, gets lumped in with other books similar in
their mediocrity and--boom--now you have a whole category of work
that's considered sub-par. (Great books, the conventional wisdom
goes, will rise regardless of subject.) We pity the fool who
describes her serious novel about a single woman living in the big
city. Um, isn't that chick lit? Motherhood's
own cutesy category--momoir--is similarly controversial in the
industry, from what we could tell. Shaye Areheart groaned when we
uttered the word. "It's an attempt to pigeonhole subjects and
writers," she said. She thinks that momoir and terms like it
come from the youth-obsessed television industry, where she sees
pressure to make things "hip or cool that aren't necessarily
hip or cool." She adds, "Some stories are just important
and that should be enough." Andi
Buchanan thinks that there's a persistent, underlying prejudice
against stories that take motherhood seriously. Even the word momoir
is tainted, she thinks--a compound of "memoir," with its
air of respectability and literary cachet, and "mommy,"
with its don't-take-her-seriously-she's-just-a-mom overtone.
"The attitude [among publishers] seems to be, ‘What could be
less compelling than the secret life of moms?' " she says. Even
bestselling books get downgraded when the topic is motherhood.
Buchanan points to Allison Pearson's hit novel, I Don't Know How She
Does It. It was well received, but not as mainstream fiction; it
made it big as "mommy lit--the maternal big sister to chick
lit," she says. The
same standards don't seem to apply when the author is a man,
Buchanan contends. When Tom Perrota published Little Children last
summer, it was hailed as "literary suburban fiction," not
"daddy lit." Buchanan remarked, "I couldn't help
thinking that if a mother had written a book called ‘Little
Children' with goldfish crackers on the front cover, inside snarking
about playground politics and playdates, and detailing the
interactions between intensive maternal moms and slacker moms, her
book definitely would have been called mommy lit." Tom
Perrota was able to add Little Children to his roster of published
works with no harm to his standing as a literary author. Meanwhile,
following the publication of A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother,
Rachel Cusk, a respected novelist with a closet full of literary
awards, said, "Writing a book about motherhood was career
suicide." Faulkner
Fox says that Harmony Books was reluctant even to categorize
Dispatches as a motherhood book. Fox herself describes the book as
one about motherhood as well as "marriage, sexism, and life as
a writer." It's shelved in the biography and autobiography
section at most book stores. (Motherhood books tend to be either
stuck in the parenting advice section or sprinkled throughout the
store in biography, women's studies, essays, etc.) "Books about
motherhood tended to be books that aren't all that
well-written--that's how the publisher saw it, in part," Fox
said. She added, "There aren't any more bad books in this genre
than in any other." Author
Adrienne Martini had a similar experience selling her book, a
generational saga of the tendency to postpartum depression that runs
in her family. "My agent [Elizabeth Kaplan]--a wonderful and
kind agent--kept telling me to keep the focus on my family's
Appalachian history," she said. "We were working closely
together on developing the first third. Every time I strayed too
close to my own experience and the crazy-mom stuff, she steered me
back. She told me, ‘It won't sell. Editors just aren't buying
books about moms anymore; the topic has played out.' " Martini
trusted Kaplan, she says, even though she had a hard time buying the
idea that motherhood as a subject was "played out."
"There doesn't seem to be a lack of a market about older
college professors hooking up with students," she said dryly.
"But whatever. It's more important to get the story out there
than to fight about how it's categorized." Kaplan's
instincts proved right in this case. This past summer, Martini's
book sold to The Free Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster,
where it's slated to be published in the summer of 2006. And though
it was sold on its merits as a story of one Appalachian family
through the generations, "it is still at least half about my
experiences as a mom with PPD," Martini says. Marrit
Ingman, who's writing a book about her battle with PPD for Seal,
says she firmly believes that when it comes to mother-writing, the
darker the subject, the harder the sell. She says the first group of
editors to whom she showed her proposal kept advising her to "
‘insert flashes of inspiration' or ‘add a nugget of sunshine to
every chapter.' " "Our
whole culture wants to believe that women are orgasmically happy to
sacrifice themselves to raise the next generation," Ingman
says. "When you bring the idea to publishers that there is
serious depression involved [in raising children] for some women, it
makes them very nervous. They say, ‘Women don't want to hear it.'
No, publishers don't want to hear it. That's fucked up. It's time
for mother-writers to step up and un-fuck the situation."
*** Few
motherhood books have become blockbusters; in fact, the only one we
could think of was I Don't Know How She Does It, a hit in England
and a New York Times bestseller here. But this spread--a precious
few bestsellers, some midlist books with
respectable-but-not-dazzling sales, and some books that really
tank--is true of books in general, not just motherhood books. The
numbers vary, from press to press and from author to author. Some
Seal Press books have sold as many as 150,000 copies, says editor
Ingrid Emerick, but the average is between ten and twenty thousand.
("We feel good about a book if it sells out its first print
run," Emerick says.) Seal starts with small runs, usually 3,000
to 5,000 copies, she says--not so different from midlist books from
large publishing houses. Authors' advances may be lower with a small
press. Seal's advances are generally under $10,000; The larger St.
Martin's Press offered $35,000 to a first-time author of a recent
non-fiction book of the same size initial print run, according to
the Columbia Journalism Review. Even
thirty-five thousand bucks, though, seems like a pittance when you
consider that many authors spend at least two years writing their
books. But publishers are putting their eggs in many baskets.
Despite a widespread perception of a crisis among American
readers--namely, that there are fewer and fewer of them every
year--nearly 175,000 books were published in 2003 alone. That's more
than ever before in history, up nineteen percent from 2002 alone. So
it's not a stretch to say that, theoretically at least, there is
more opportunity for mother books than before. But those miles and
miles of shelves at Barnes & Noble--we can hear them groaning
from here. The
real problem for writers isn't getting published; it's getting noticed. As a recent report from the Author's Guild put it,
"Book publishing and selling seems to be the latest example of
a winner-take-all dynamic. Superstores are muscling out independent
stores, and, concomitantly, bestsellers are muscling out midlist
books . . . The chains
have put a price on every aspect of bookselling and charged it to
publishers. Big publishers, obliged to pay up, have to divide their
lists internally into a few books in which they invest and a lot in
which they don't." That's
why, Elizabeth Kaplan tells us, editors at the big publishing houses
today increasingly look for authors who have a ready-made
"platform"--some sort of expertise, celebrity, or built-in
audience that their marketing department can use as a launch pad for
the book's publicity. Marketing dollars are scarcer than ever, and
the lion's share always goes to the books the editors think have the
best chance of grabbing the brass ring. That means every author who
isn't already a name or whose book doesn't have bestseller branded
on it from birth faces a bleak uphill battle. In
winner-take-all bookselling, a tiny proportion of books are reaping
a larger and larger share of sales. As a result, says Virginia
Barber, an agent in New York, "the rich are getting richer, and
the poor--there are more of them." You've got one season to
make the world sit up and take notice of your baby--usually less.
Says Elisheva Urbas, "In publishing, the flavor of the week
lasts just about that--a week." Midlist
authors are forced to take on more of the marketing burden
themselves. And here's where the cards may truly be stacked against
mother-writers. After all, is there anyone with fewer disposable
hours than mothers, especially those of young children? It's not as
if their advances (which generally run about $6,000 to $15,000,
according to Seal's Emerick) will cover the cost of a nanny while
they're out tracking down publicity. Some, like Daphne de Marneffe,
say they feel unprepared for the job of self-promotion. They take
what their publisher's marketing staff offer and are grateful for
it. Others, like Andi Buchanan, make extensive lists of media
contacts and spend countless hours (and their own money) setting up
"meet the author" displays at Babies R Us and their local
bookseller. "I
wish I'd known six months before my book was published what it would
take," Buchanan says. "When a piece from my book was
excerpted in Parents magazine, I thought my Amazon ranking would get
a bump. But it didn't. I think what really drives sales of mother
literature is viral marketing, word of mouth, being on the Internet
in online forums--things like that. In this market, having your book
passed around from like-minded to like-minded person is what creates
a buzz." If
a writer has the stamina, it can pay off. Buchanan's book is in its
third printing now, has sold over 10,000 copies and is considered by
Seal one of its success stories. Buchanan recently signed a contract
to produce two more books for Seal. *** So
what does the future hold?
Jennifer
Mattern would like to know that, too. "I'm in publishing
purgatory right now," she said. It was a bad week when we
talked with her--no word on her manuscript, an ear infection for her
younger daughter, a pink slip for her husband. "My husband's on
unemployment, and I'm hoping I don't have to work the all-night
shift at the local hotel again, baking croissants at four a.m."
There was good news earlier in the month, though: An actress and a
director had raised money to adapt one of Mattern's plays, recently
produced in Los Angeles, for the screen. They told her they hoped to
take it to Sundance. "But all I want is a book deal," she
laughed. "Somewhere there's a very confused filmmaker who just
got a book deal ." Essays
are a notoriously tough sell unless, as we have been told, you are
David Sedaris. Still, Mattern is hopeful--as is her agent--that an
editor in the New York publishing world will buy it. We are biased,
of course (we've published five of Mattern's essays), but we are
hopeful for her, too. One
good thing about writing is that, unlike gymnastics, you get better
with age. Before you are a great writer, you are a good writer, and
before that a capable writer, and before that a mediocre writer, and
before that a bad writer. No editor has ever been interested in bad
writing, particularly bad writing in the first person. (There are so
many people who can do it well.) But the impulse to record one's
life is strong. Maybe it always has been; years ago, perhaps most
bad writing stayed in diaries or in manuscripts passed between
friends, and better work was approved by editors and found homes in
daily newspapers, magazines, and books. Increasingly,
though, some mother writers--be they great, good, capable, mediocre,
or bad--are not waiting for any editor's approval to get their
first-person stories out there. In late January, the New York Times
quoted one tracker of web logs ("blogs") who said that
parenting blogs number around 8,500--twice as many as last year.
Granted, not all of these bloggers are seeking book deals, or really
anything more than a way to keep the grandparents updated on the
kids. But some actually have gotten book deals. Next year, Harper
Collins will publish a compilation of "Mimi Smarty-
pants" 's blog
entries, about her life pre-motherhood. Other writers, like Marrit
Ingman, have been able to show publishers how many
readers--potential book buyers--visit their sites, as evidence of an
audience for their work. Before
blogs, the old-school way of bypassing editors was taking the
self-publishing route. Some writers still do, of course, but there
is one new twist: Enough mother writers want to self-publish their
tomes that one woman started a self-publishing cooperative, the
Mom-Writers Publishing Co-Op, based in Deadwood, Oregon.
First-person accounts of motherhood and how-to guides make up most
of the book titles, and the company claims that by all flying under
the same banner, these authors can better brand their work. Back
in NYC, meanwhile, the subject of motherhood doesn't seem to be
disappearing, even if first-person narratives about it seem to be on
the wane. Areheart
says that books about motherhood are just getting more refined.
"There's not so much a glut, but books like I Don't Know How
She Does It or Faulkner's book raise the bar," she says.
"[Writers have to ask themselves] what do you have to say
that's new and interesting? There's a lot of chest-thumping by
writers, but if a proposal comes across your desk that's ho-hum and
it's been done before, you're not going to be interested. If a
really great book comes across your desk, you don't care what it's
about, you want to publish it." In
the coming years, we readers can expect to see more of certain
genres, less of others. Leslie Falk, an agent with Collins McCormick
Literary Agency, told us that political or topical nonfiction,
commercial fiction, and lifestyle books are easier to sell right now
while literary fiction is "perennially difficult." And,
she says, the nature of publishing is cyclical. "Five years ago
Nathan Englander and Melissa Bank made short stories ‘hot'--now
they're hard to sell," she e-mailed us. "Mary Karr made
memoirs ‘hot'--now they're harder. Harry Potter has made fantasy
hot for kids and adults." (Note
to selves: Work on motherhood vampire book. It's Interview with a
Vampire meets A Life's Work! Being undead on one's feet! An
afterlife-changing story! Hmm? Maybe not.) The
general consensus among the people we interviewed is that it's a
very bad idea--for writers, anyway--to write to the trends. "Books
are always written to changing circumstances," says Daphne de
Marneffe. "Anybody writing now isn't competing with what's
getting published today, but what's going to be published three or
five years from now. Worrying about the market is unproductive; you
have to write what's true to you." We
spoke with a writer whom we'll call Anna Hollins. (She asked us not
to use her real name in the interest of future book proposals she
might send out.) We've always liked her work an awful lot and have
published it in Brain, Child's pages. In early 2003, she sent eight
of her essays to a few agents. Most were unwilling to represent a
collection of essays, but one agent--"a very big-name agent who
represents many writers I like and respect," Hollins
says--asked her to turn the essays into a memoir. Hollins jumped at
the chance. "I
spent the next few agonizing months tearing apart my essays that
defied chronology and were organized around the principle of
thematic pressure rather than the causal set of events readers
normally associate with plot and a juicy memoir, " she says.
"It was a difficult process because my story is not that
compelling--I'm a middle-aged, middle-class woman who pretty much
left her underpaid career for motherhood--and the part of my work
that rivets me to it and seems to draw readers is the essayistic
struggle with thorny issues . . .
When I went to turn my essays into chapters organized around
periods of my life, I found much of the vitality of the writing was
lost." Encouraged
by her agent, though, Hollins forged on, and in September of that
year, the manuscript was ready. The agent sent the book out to ten
editors. "I Googled each of the names on the list, and my heart
would race as I would read the titles of the books they had edited.
These were big-name editors at the big houses who'd edited books
that were household names even among non-readers," Hollins
said. "Like I could say a title to members of my family and
they would gasp! Like I could go see movies that were once novels
these editors had bought." However, each of them passed on
Hollins's manuscript. The agent sent the manuscript to seven more
editors. They, too, passed on it. Hollins
continued, "One day my agent's assistant called and said,
‘This is a sad day for all of us here. We've decided not to send
your manuscript out anymore. There just doesn't seem to be a market
for it. But if you have another project, please contact us.' "A
sad day for all of us?" Hollins says. "I had a little
trouble with that phrase as I sunk my teary face into my pillow. But
I had even more trouble with ‘if you have another project.' That
last one took three years to produce as I wrote it while my youngest
was in her one- to three-hour preschool sessions." A few days
later, a friend's agent read Hollins's work and suggested that she
turn it into a novel. Hollins had been there already. She declined. "After
the second round of rejections, I just said to myself, ‘To hell
with trying to write what I hope will sell, I'm just going back to
writing whatever comes out of me and whatever happens, happens,'
" she says. "So I wrote a piece that had in my mind
absolutely no commercial value and would probably not find
publication anywhere because it was so eccentric in its form. I was
proud of the piece, even when it just existed on my own computer
screen. I knew I had said what I wanted to say, the way I wanted to
say it. A few months later, it was published in one of the country's
largest publications, where it was read by the large audience I'd
always dreamed of." *** As
readers, we don't think the motherhood memoir is done. As Andi
Buchanan told us, "A dozen books does not a crowded field
make." Sure, unless you have a unique voice and a compelling
style of writing, you will have to find your niche with your topic.
The "I'm a frustrated former career woman unhinged by the
demands of new motherhood" story has been done, more than once.
Ditto the "I'm a hip urban mother determined not to be mistaken
for a minivan mom" story. The "I'm not like all you
over-involved parents; I'm a slacker mom" theme has gotten a
lot of airplay recently. Almost
all of it, though, the whole motherhood enchilada, has been done
before, albeit in works smaller than books. In 1962, after her son
was born, Sylvia Plath wrote in her diary, "We had a son. I
felt no surge of love. I wasn't sure I liked him." There is a
sort of generational amnesia about motherhood writing. Some people
might say it's because the old stuff wasn't inducted into the canon
of Great American Literature; others would say that readers just
like contemporary writing better. Or it could be that motherhood
writing is like motherhood itself: Look, everybody, we have a great
new invention called the wheel! With
the sea change in American culture, though, we think that our
generation might be the one that has a lasting literary impact. Who
knows. Maybe our wheel will keep on rolling.
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