Women Writers

Happy Bookish Monday! Above Anita Brookner's Hotel Du Lac. I have no idea how many times I've read it. Each time it's just as good as the last. Strawberry and peach smoothie with almond milk and coconut oil, equally good.

There are many male writers I like, I think F Scott Fitzgerald is one of my favorite writers altogether, and I love Hemingway. I’m terribly old-fashioned that way. Perhaps decades behind everyone else. But I think I really love women writers. I never thought much about the gender of writers, but now that I do, I realize I love women writers. Virginia Woolf, Alice Munro, Muriel Spark, Iris Murdoch, A. S. Byatt, the Brontës, of course, and Jane Austen. I adore the poetry of Sylvia Plath.

I go through periods when I re-read all of Anita Brookner’s books. It’s like an obsession. I read one after the other, in quick succession. I know some of them, like Hotel Du Lac, almost by heart. I remember sentences; I look for these sentences, like you look for an old-friend in a crowd. Then, when I’ve read three or four, I quit. Content. Replete with whatever magic Brookner gives. Sometimes, when I’ve gone on a binge like this, I have to see a photograph of the author. Anita Brookner looks like her novels. Very thin, but with full, sensual lips, short, bouffant hair, and a prim way of dressing. She looks like her heroines. Actually, most authors look either like their novels or their heroines. Virginia Woolf certainly looks like the heroines in her novels: Refined Victorian beauty, impossibly cultivated, but with an urgent Bohemian streak. The first book I ever read by Woolf was Mrs Dalloway, a paperback I bought at London’s Paddington Station in the summer of 1985.

At first, A(ntonia).S(usan). Byatt’s face confused me. It seemed squat and heavy, like a man’s face. Crude. Now I see it differently: It’s a square face, yes, but with a lush roundness to it also. Byatt is like a glass of red wine. You cannot read her as quickly as you can, for instance, Brookner. She is full of details. She is frightfully intelligent. I adore this intelligence in her. A boy I knew in college gave me my first book by Byatt – The Virgin in the Garden – in the summer of 1990.

A Canadian friend gave me Alice Munro’s Friend of My Youth when we were both students in Paris in the fall of 1990. I no longer have it, it got lost in some move or other. I remember a pastel cover. Strangely, Munro was not an instant love for me. It took time for me to discover her, but when I did it was the greatest thing! Is there anything greater than discovering a good author?

I confess that in an effort to get even closer to these women authors, I sometimes use their food recipes. I have no interest in making Truman Capote’s favorite Italian Summer Pudding nor do I feel like pan-frying my trout à la Hemingway. But I do feel a nearly mysterious connection when I make Sylvia Plath’s tomato soup cake or her “heavenly (six-egg) sponge cake”. I close in on Virginia Woolf in a very intimate way when I cut the chuck roast to her Boeuf en Daube, the same one that Mrs. Ramsay served in To the Lighthouse. And I believe some of Emily Dickinson is revealed to me when I make her Coconut Cake.

Women writers push the limits of what’s permitted for a woman to do. I always feel some sort of restraint, here more so than when we lived in Brooklyn. There is only so much you are allowed to say or think openly, there’s only so many things you are allowed to discuss outside of safe conversation topics like childrearing, cooking, housekeeping, gossip… Women writers give women readers comfort. They help your mind grow. They push you ahead. It’s as if they’re saying “Yes, I have been where you are. Listen to my story.” And you listen and you learn.

Women writers give women readers wings to fly.