I love, love, love this recent blog over at A Writer Afoot, Barbara Samuel's blog. Check it out for some food for thought till Macy gets back and provides us with the details of her trip.

What did I like most about the blog? Well, for starters, I loved Weiner's comment. I had read the article by Jong but I hadn't read Weiner's response.

Jong writes--

Critics have trouble taking fiction by women seriously unless they represent some distant political struggle or chic ethnicity (Arundhati Roy, Nadine Gordimer and Kiran Desai come to mind). Of course, there are exceptions, like Annie Proulx and Andrea Barrett. But they tend to write about "male" subjects: ships, cowboys, accordions.....deep down, the same old prejudice prevails. War matters; love does not. Women are destined to be undervalued as long as we write about love. To be generous, let's say the prejudice is unconscious. If Jane Austen were writing today, she'd probably meet the same fate and wind up in the chick lit section. Charlotte Brontë would be in romance, along with her sister Emily.

Weiner replied at her blog--

Jong raises some good points, but I'm not sure she's seeing the whole picture -- or the benefits of what critical legitimacy would bring.

Sure, we could rail against the pink covers strewn with shapely body parts. We could march ourselves into Borders or Barnes & Noble, yank our paperbacks off the "Beach Read" table and park them proudly under "Literature." We could whine about the lack of reviews and respect and how it's always the boys who get taken seriously. Lord knows I've done my share of railing and whining and the rest of it (except for moving books off the beach read table...I'm indignant, not stupid).

But what good is being taken seriously when nobody's reading your stuff?

Does Jong really think that we poor ghetto girls should protest the pink and the legs, the shoes and the purses, to eschew the pretty pastels, to hide our candy and and dress in the publishing equivalent of sackcloth and ashes so that we can be just like the boys -- respected, but not read?

It's more than a little odd to see Jong hoisting this particular banner, given that it's her peers who've been the quickest to use the term chick lit as a perjorative, to put younger writers in their place, to dismiss their work as silly fluff and suggest that their readers should be engaging with more meaningful texts (said texts typically written by them, or their peers)....

Jong faults my peers' diminished expectations. I give them credit for healthy pragmatism. She sees a bunch of meek, weak sisters, too cowed to make a fuss over what our books get called and where they get shelved. I see something sly and subversive -- a genre that's going to profit in the long run by being beneath the notice of the critics, where women's work always seems to land, and where it almost always seems to flourish.

Lots of good food for thought there, no? I love Barbara's explanation--

Jong, who has written for the feminist edge for many years, exploring the life of a woman of her particular generation is an expert (and celebrated) in another world. She has traditionally written a lot about a non-domestic life and the freedom of women to explore sexual and creative choices, and because of her generation, she still aspires for recognition from the Old Boys, even as she has disdained it. Considering the context she was given to work with, an understandable position. Weiner is part of a younger generation of women writers who are less concerned--maybe not at all concerned--with the opinion of the Old Boys, but would like respect from the Old Girls. (Who have been particularly brutal about Chick Lit for reasons I never quite understand. It's a perfectly legitimate subject matter for a novel: the trials and tribulations of a young woman trying on hats until she finds the life path she is meant to follow. Some of it is flawed, of course, but so is a lot of everything else.)

I also love this quote from Barbara, who wants writers to stop bashing each other, more or less (she's a very soulful, compassionate person)---

All I ask of a fellow writer is a passion for getting his or her own truth on the page in a form that most perfectly serves the work.

I'm working on it, Barbara. I'm working on it!

Any thoughts?

Cheers and happy writing,
Alyson