What is that supposed to mean?

Hello, Mr. Heartache, by Jincy Willett, New York Times via Jennifer Weiner´s blog.

Holly Frick, the writer at the heart of Sarah Dunn’s new novel, hates the term “chick lit.” Since we never actually get to read her own novel, “Hello, Mr. Heartache” — whose horrible title was imposed by her publisher’s marketing department — we can’t be certain that she hasn’t actually written “fiction by and for women,” the generally agreed-­upon definition of that loathsome term. But the novel in which Holly herself appears was definitely not written just for women, no matter how it’s packaged. True, the protagonist is female, the setting is Manhattan, and the focus is on relationships — and there’s a big shopping scene. True, mostly women will read it. But then women are the ones mostly reading every­thing. Besides, it’s not about shoes. And the shopping is for books, at the Strand. Also, unlike chick lit, chick TV and chick movies, “Secrets to Happiness” is actually funny.

Way to self-hate, Ms. Willett.

bt-dubs, New York Times: aren´t you up for sale?

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I concur, ladies.

ShePop: Time to feed our longtime girl crush on 'Target Women' host Sarah Haskins!, by Jennifer Armstrong, Entertainment Weekly. Emphases mine.

EW: [Your Target Women videos on Current TV] have gotten you enough attention to sell a script.

Sarah Haskins: I’m supposed to technically say it’s been "optioned." It’s called Book Smart. I wrote it with my writing partner Emily Halpern, who’s written for The Unit and Private Practice. I know her from college. It’s about two girls who have been perfect their whole life and they decide senior year they’re going to devote their perfection to the getting of boyfriends. We wanted to do a female take on a typical teen movie. I think just complexity of character is a little bit lacking [in many female-focused films], and I think you’re also missing a broader spectrum of women. There are all these beautiful ladies who can’t get a boyfriend, and it’s like, Really?

Jennifer Weiner, A Moment of Jen. Emphases mine.

Last week, home sick, I read HAPPENS EVERY DAY: AN ALL-TOO-TRUE STORY by Isabel Gillies, the story of a young mother’s marriage falling apart. Probably you’ve seen it – they’re selling it at Starbucks. More importantly, probably you’ve seen Ms. Gillies, who was an actress with a recurring role on Law & Order before she chucked it all to follow her feckless husband to the hinterlands of Ohio, in the name of love.

Gillies is, in a word, gorgeous: a statuesque blue-eyed blond with killer bone structure. But I didn’t know that when I downloaded her memoir, and the Kindle didn’t provide me with either a book cover or an author photo.

In a weird way, the omission made the book a lot more suspenseful than it would have been if I’d had Ms. Gillies’ visage staring me in the face every time I glanced at the back flap. A happy ending would have been a foregone conclusion. Of course she was going to meet “the love of (her) life,” as she wrote on the very last page. Probably on the way back from the post office where she mailed in her manuscript! And she probably got proposed to twice on the way there!

Instead, I read without knowing what the author looked like…although, to be fair, I figured that if she was a working actress she probably did not have the kind of face and figure that would cause observers to run away, screaming…and Gillies notes, more than once, that she considers herself pretty, is considered pretty by others, and often slid by on her good looks.

But a picture is, as they say, worth a thousand words. Being told someone is a looker is not the same as having the evidence right there in your hand. And so I read, thumbing that “NEXT PAGE” button with the dread you feel watching a horror movie, when the pretty girl whose car breaks down hikes to the creepy mansion on the hill to ask for help, and decides to take her top off beforehand. No! I thought, upon learning that Gillies’ intended had ditched his first wife while she was pregnant. Don’t marry him! It’s not going to end well!

I was charmed by Gillies’ description of arranging wildflowers in Ball jars on the organic farm outside of Oberlin; engrossed as I read about the wallpaper she and her husband chose for their big, brick house, the sweet nicknames they used for one another; enchanted with descriptions of her morning routine and her afternoon tea and the tomato-and-gruyere tart she cooked. My heart was in my throat when the gamine brunette who would eventually steal her husband’s heart showed up on campus. When Gillies, clad in a puffy down parka that probably had Cheerios in its pockets, falls to her knees in front of her husband’s mistress to beg for her marriage, I was right there in the snow with her.

Would I have felt that level of identification, that empathy, that edge-of-my-seat, thrill if I’d known that the author probably hadn’t lacked for male attention since age twelve and wouldn’t be lacking for it long, even with two kids, in the wake of a broken marriage?

I’m not sure. I suspect the truth is that I would have looked at the picture more than once, and read the book rolling my eyes. Those charming descriptions of wildflowers and nicknames and tomato tarts and summers with her still-married parents in Maine would have sounded precious. The drama of the kneeling-in-the-snow scene would have read as melodrama. And the ending would have had me cynically shaking my head: babe lands boyfriend. Stop the presses!

C'est tout.

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Book Reviews and Nannies

From Jennifer Weiner's blog, Snark Spot:

So I’m having my own little Kanye West “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” moment over on the New York Times’ book blog...

...Things started on Tuesday TBR senior editor Dwight Garner posted a roundup of what other newspapers were reviewing: Michael Chabon, Woody Allen, your typical assortment of Living Dead White Men who the Times routinely covers to death and beyond, leavened with a review of Tina Brown’s take on the ten-years-dead Diana.

I posted a comment pointing out that it was interesting that the Times itself has reviewed all of those titles (in Chabon and Brown’s cases, twice), and wondered whether book review editors the world over got some kind of top-secret list as to which books to write about each week...

To find out what happened next, follow the thread here. You can read my comments on Jennifer's MySpace blog here. I was incensed, yet humorous. It sounds like something catherine would be interested in, since she "of course [she writes] romance novels."

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Next. From Salon via Racialicious: The other mothers, by Lynn Harris.

Separation anxiety, race and class, our very identities as women and parents: This is precisely the bumpy terrain that Lucy Kaylin explores in her new book, "The Perfect Stranger: The Truth About Mothers and Nannies." Said "truth" -- refreshingly -- is not, say, research twisted to assert that mothers who employ nannies have higher rates of self-hate, or that their children tend to grow up to be sociopaths. Kaylin's book -- her own nanny story, woven into interviews with other mothers and nannies, too -- shows that, actually, it's messier than that.

Kaylin's responses to the interview questions said more about her than I think she intended:

"I see what a cliché I've become, you know, when I come in the house with my hard shoes and dark clothes and I'm hugging my kid with one hand and working the BlackBerry with the other. You see yourself like that and it's awful; you're exactly the person you have long decried or felt superior to. A nanny can give you a really clear perspective on what it looks like to them...

...[My nanny Hy] is very frank, and if she thinks something's wrong she'll say it. And there was this one day when my husband and I were being so harried, doing that "two ships passing in the morning" thing, and she literally gave me a command: She said, "Kiss your husband." I was about to run out the door without doing so. And I thought it was great because she has a really macro sense of our operation. It's not just "I've got to make the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches this afternoon and make sure they have their bath by 6." She really cares about the health of the whole family. She cares about people getting kissed before they go out the door. She knows that it matters. And God bless her, it does matter."

Thank goodness Kaylin's nanny can function as her therapist and personal assistant, in addition to taking care of her kids. I wonder how her husband fits into the "operation." I'm not sure. In response to the question, "How do fathers feel about nannies?", Kaylin stated:

You'd think in this day and age that fathers would be as affected by the presence of a nanny as we are, that they would be as involved as we are in child rearing -- since we do have these great, well-adjusted feminist dads these days, wearing Snuglis and going to play dates -- but the reality is, the brunt of the childcare still falls to the mother. If something goes wrong with the kid, [people] are going to look to the choices the mother made to see what went wrong. And there's just no sense in which a father is hiring someone to be his proxy when he brings a nanny into the home. The nanny is a mother figure. So as a result, it's the mother who's overseeing the relationship and managing it.

Did Kaylin consult any fathers who may actually be the primary caregivers in their homes? Did she even ask her own husband how he felt about the nanny in their own home? Nope, she made a sweeping generalization without referring to any research at all.


My favorite part of the article was the comments. Some people were ticked off. An excerpt:

Add me to the "Who Fucking Cares?" Camp

I can't believe that there is an entire book industry dedicated to the minutia of motherhood. Every little aspect of being a mother/working mother/stay at home mother has been fetishized to a point beyond ridiculous. So now there is a book that dedicates at least 100 pages to dissecting how upper-middle class mothers FEEL about their nannies?

I don't care how these women, who have all the choices in the world, feel. What interests me more is how the illegal Mexican nanny who has had to leave her own children behind feels about being paid subsistence wages? Or how the working-poor mother feels about not being able to work at all because of the lack of daycare, period. Or how another working-poor mother feels about having to work nights at a corner store while her husband works days, and then having to haul yourself around all day after not sleeping. So to complain that you feel JEALOUS of your Nanny is whiny and self-indulgent.

Incidentally, I am working-mother who has more choices available to her than almost 90% of working Moms. I pay 45% of my take-home for childcare costs. I pay my childcare provider 25% more than the going rate to insure that she'll stick around, and because I really believe that my commitment to feminism and social and economic equality starts with me and my bank account. The endless navel gazing of upper-class women does little to alert our consciousness to the class implications of hiring other women to mind your children for subsistence wages.

Your thoughts?

Stuff that I Can't Stop Talking About: The Prep Edition.

Last weekend, during my trip to Albuquerque to visit my mother at one of her many nursing conferences, I read Prep, a novel by Curtis Sittenfeld. I certainly had a lot to say when I got to the end of the book, especially after perusing the "Reader's Guide," which included "A Conversation with Curtis Sittenfeld" and a list of ten "Reading Group Questions and Topics for Discussion." I'm guessing the Guide was less an insult to the reader's intelligence and more a opportunity for Ms. Sittenfeld to avoid invitations to speak at someone's book club.

I don't have the energy to repeat the caustic prose about Prep that I launched at any of my friends and associates who would listen to me this week. I like to call my interpretation of the book the Studio 60 effect. No, Aaron Sorkin was not involved. I mean that I was affected by the hype surrounding the book and the author before I actually read the material. I had owned the book for over a year, but I never had time to read it. But during that period, I did have time to read other shorter writings in the challenging world of Fiction Written by Women Authors. And, oh, what I learned about Curtis Sittenfeld.

Cutting to the chase, here is "Sophie's Choices", Ms. Sittenfeld's review of Melissa Bank's book The Wonder Spot:

"To suggest that another woman's ostensibly literary novel is chick lit feels catty, not unlike calling another woman a slut -- doesn't the term basically bring down all of us? And yet, with ''The Wonder Spot,'' it's hard to resist. A chronicle of the search for personal equilibrium and Mr. Right, Melissa Bank's novel is highly readable, sometimes funny and entirely unchallenging; you're not one iota smarter after finishing it. I'm as resistant as anyone else to the assumption that because a book's author is female and because that book's protagonist is a woman who actually cares about her own romantic future, the book must fall into the chick-lit genre. So it's not that I find Bank's topic lightweight; it's that Bank writes about it in a lightweight way."

The rest of the review only gets better from there. (Is better the right word?)

Here is how Jennifer Weiner, a prolific writer of "chick lit" (I hate that moniker even more than "chick flick") responded on her blog:

"...Curtis Sittenfeld’s quote-unquote review of THE WONDER SPOT – a nastier-than-it-needed-to-be takedown in which the book is dismissed as lightweight, inconsequential fluff -- is less about the book, or its author, than it is about Sittenfeld’s anxiety about how her own work has been perceived.

"Think about it. Sittenfeld's young, she’s educated (Stanford and that obligatory Iowa MFA), she taught English at St. Albans, published in all the right places (Salon, The New York Times) and was reviewed and profiled, or both, in all of them as well.

"But when her book went out into the world, was it perceived as high-minded literature, a la the Jonathans (Franzen, Safran Foer), or sparkling satire a la the Toms (Perrotta, Wolfe?)

"It was not."

Now that one definitely only gets better from there. I LOLed repeatedly.

My condensed take on the book? It was really long. The main character complained in her head a lot, but never did anything to change what she didn't like about her world. I like the It-Girl series better, even with its insidious brand-name dropping.

Additional stuff I can't stop talking about:

The Pajiba review of Black Snake Moan, by Dustin Rowles. What happened to the Christina of The Ice Storm and Now and Then? I miss her.

But White Possum Scream looks like a can't miss!

The last two episodes of 30 Rock: Capturing Obama before he strikes again? Osama in 2008? Oh, Jenna. And then came "The Source Awards." Wait till I tell Tupac about this.

I'd never had any interest in CSI:Miami until I spotted this series of clips on Defamer in which David Caruso displays his acting ability by repeated putting on a pair of sunglasses. I then watched the original seven-minute clip show of David Caruso's ridiculous cold open one-liners. Wow. Mr. Caruso is something. He actually made Jim Carrey look funny.

I tried to watch an episode of the show when I was in Albuquerque, beleaguered by the dearth of programming called hotel cable. But I couldn't get through more than 20 minutes of bad dialogue. So I won't be doing that again. Sorry, Rory Cochrane.

I have found yet another show on Logo that I enjoy: First Comes Love. From the website:

"Hosted by stand-up comedian Elvira Kurt and wedding planner extraordinaire, Fern Cohen, this series challenges about-to-be-married gay and lesbian couples to fulfill a long-held wish to have the wedding of their dreams. How will they express their love for each other? Will it be old-fashioned wedding bells or a brand new sense of style and tradition? Find out on First Comes Love."

Elvira Kurt makes me laugh. I saw her Comedy Central Presents special, and I was so thankful that my Mummy didn't raise me like hers did. My mother never crocheted me a back-to-school outfit. I would have pitched a fit if she had tried.

Note to readers of my blog (all three of you): Feel free to leave comments; I like discussion. Also, if you notice any typos, or have any questions about my grammar or syntax, please let me know. Thank you!