female protagonist

2014: The Year When Science Fiction And Fantasy Woke Up To Diversity

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This post by Damien Walter originally appeared on The Guardian on 1/2/15.

A year of unprecedented success for women writers was matched by a flood of new voices from the self-publishing scene

Looking back at 2014, you can sum it up in one word: diversity. The world of science fiction and fantasy saw diversity not only in the voices that found success, definitively turning the page on 2013’s chainmail binkinigate, but also in the means of production. While the metaphysical themes so vital to SF continued their conquest of the mainstream, it was the year when independent digital publishing changed the genre for good.

One book dominated the awards in 2014: Anne Leckie’s Ancillary Justice. This debut novel evokes a future world in which gender is unimportant, a transformation Leckie renders by exclusively referring to characters with the pronoun “she”. Its unconventional take on gender politics helped Ancillary Justice make a clean sweep of the Hugo, Nebula, Clarke and BSFA awards, a rare and deserved achievement.

 

Read the full post on The Guardian.

 

Literature Still Urgently Needs More Non-White, Non-Male Heroes

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This editorial by Monica Byrne originally appeared on The Atlantic on 5/20/14.

If privileged writers keep “writing what they know,” marginalized people groups will continue to feel—and be—marginalized.

One of the most celebrated pieces of advice to writers is “Write what you know.” Unfortunately, it shows.

The demographics of published writers in the West are largely homogeneous, and as a result, our literature is also largely homogeneous. Growing up, for example, my heroes were Atreju, Frodo, and Paul Atreides. All I ever really wanted to do was go on adventures like them. I readily identified with them, and their trials became my scripture: the loss of Artax, the recovery at Lothlórien, the knife fight with Feyd-Rautha.

Despite a liberal upbringing and an education at a women’s college, it didn’t occur to me that my identification with male heroes had damaged me in any way—that is, until I became a writer, and found myself weirdly reluctant to write a woman hero. This wasn’t an accident.

As Vanessa Veselka wrote in The American Reader, there is a profound relative lack of female road narratives in the Western literary tradition. This absence hurt her in much more concrete ways. When recounting her years as a teenage hitchhiker, Veselka writes, “my survival depended on other people’s ability to envision a possible future for me…[but] there was no cultural narrative for [us] beyond rape and death.” Male hitchhikers had Jack Kerouac, Walt Whitman, and dozens of others. Veselka had bodies in dumpsters on the six o’clock news.

 

Click here to read the full editorial on The Atlantic.

 

Written Off: Jennifer Weiner's Quest For Literary Respect

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This profile by Rebecca Mead originally appeared on The New Yorker on 1/13/14.

Early one morning in November, five hundred clinicians gathered at the Philadelphia Airport Marriott for the twenty-third annual Renfrew Center Foundation conference, devoted to the understanding and treatment of eating disorders. The keynote speaker, Jennifer Weiner, the best-selling novelist, was there to offer a personal perspective on weight issues, with a talk entitled “The F Word: On Growing Up Big, Speaking Out Loud and Raising Betty Friedan Girls in a Britney Spears World.”

The Renfrew foundation’s Web site described Weiner’s 2001 début, “Good in Bed,” now in its fifty-seventh printing, as “the first ‘chick-lit’ novel featuring a large protagonist.” The character, Cannie Shapiro, established the template for a number of Weiner’s subsequent heroines: clever, quippy young women whose dress size tends to be well into the double digits. Her characters navigate the perils presented by lacklustre boyfriends or disappointing husbands, slender mean girls, dysfunctional families, and self-esteem issues. “Nobody’s going to date me looking like this,” Cannie tells the tall, handsome, kindly doctor who interviews her for a weight-loss study. “I’m going to die alone, and my dog’s going to eat my face, and no one will find us until the smell seeps out under the door.” Despite their travails, Weiner’s heroines arrive at happy endings that defy cultural prejudices while upholding the implausible conventions of a Hollywood romantic comedy. (Cannie’s tall, handsome, kindly doctor falls madly in love with her.) Weiner’s second novel, “In Her Shoes,” was actually made into a romantic comedy, in 2005; it starred Toni Collette, as the brainy, full-figured heroine, and Cameron Diaz—featured prominently on movie posters—as her skinny, feckless sister.

Weiner, who is forty-three, was outfitted as if for a cocktail party, in a scarlet sleeveless dress and nude stilettos. Her makeup had been applied, before dawn, by a professional; her long, dark-brown hair was loose and shiny. She looked pretty and polished but approachable, like a co-host on “The View.” Weiner, who has a degree in English literature from Princeton, is cognizant of the expectations that attend a writer of commercial women’s fiction. “Handbags are important signifiers,” she told me. (Lately, she has leaned heavily on an orange Givenchy tote.) Her outfit projected confidence, but it also gave her an opportunity to reveal a winning vulnerability. After ascending the podium, she began, “Good morning, Renfrew Center clinicians and therapists. Or, as I have been affectionately referring to you in my head, the people I don’t need to wear Spanx for.”

 

Click here to read the full profile on The New Yorker.