These days, not only must the literary purist make posterity believe he did indeed live, but if he wants to find an agent, receive a decent advance, get published by a name house, and endear himself to a marketing and publicity team that will ensure a prime spot on the front table at Barnes & Noble, positioning his book to climb the sales ranks and thus securing a contract for his next book, he needs to make posterity believe -- by writing it in his latest memoir -- that he lived more dysfunctionally, more tragically, more multiculturally, more exotically than anyone else. [Emphasis mine -- Ed.]
It's a pressure I've experienced firsthand (and the irony of leaning on personal experience to bolster my argument does not escape me.) ... When we got around to chatting about our latest writing projects, she asked me, without mincing words, why my novel wasn't an autobiographically inspired story of a young Iranian-American woman.
"That's so big right now. You could get published -- like that!" she said with a snap of her fingers.
Sunday, October 01, 2006
Justify my text
After I posted in September about the predominance of "exotic Asian" subject matter in first-novel book deals, Anna sent me a link to a Poets and Writers article, Imperative: the pressure to be exotic:
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4 comments:
It seems to me that the author is putting more weight on her long-long-MFA friend's words than they actually deserve.
Granted -- the words would sound more authoritative coming from an editor who was actually in a position to buy, or not buy, "exotic" subjects. But they do reinforce the sense that there is a consensus among writers that in order to be published you have to be at some cultural or behavioral extreme.
Hi,
I was struck by your post (dated September 11th) on the sale of my novel, _Evening is the Whole Day_. First of all, I'm curious about the statistical methodology you use to draw your pie charts, because I'm not sure that even in today's multicultural world, more novels about or by Asian women are sold than novels about anything else. Of course, if one were specifically *looking out* for mentions of novels by young Asian women, because of a prejudice of one's own, that's all one would see, because prejudice has a tendency to skew one's perceptions. But I won't assume that that's what's going on with you -- I will only encourage you to take a look at the big picture (which is easily available) of all books published in, say, the last ten years. You will quickly see that most books published (fiction or nonfiction, literary or genre) are not, in fact, by Asian women.
But what if they were? Let's give that claim the benefit of the doubt for a minute: a disproportionate number of the books published these days are by young Asian women. By "these days," let's say we mean the last five, ten, even twenty years.
Who wrote most of the books published before that? African men? Latin American women? Transgendered Micronesians? Not really, eh? Just white men, and occasionally -- only in exceptional cases until fairly recently -- white women. But nobody made pie charts to point this out, because it seemed right. To some people, it *still* seems right, which is why books by Asian women or other minorities appear to be deviations from the "norm," worthy of being pointed out. If you ask me (and you didn't exactly, it's true, but you do allow comments on this blog), this in itself is a problem -- that white people and their numerous successes should seem normative/neutral/barely worthy of mention, but the successes of others always seem unfairly or dishonestly earned.
I'm also astonished by a question you seem to be asking earnestly in another post: why are people *interested* in books by Asian women, when they're not even billed as chick lit, but as literary novels? I should say that I'm astonished by this question for two reasons:
1) Because it implies that you believe would be better for American readers *not* to be interested in books by Asian women. As it is, the average American already knows and cares woefully little about the rest of the world -- shouldn't we be glad that at least, at the very least, there's a section of the population interested in something other than navel-gazing? America's interest in only itself has so far had disastrous results -- shouldn't we encourage other interests?
2) Because you seem to find it odd that books by and about women should be billed as literary novels. Would you classify Madame Bovary or Mrs. Dalloway or Jane Eyre as chick lit? If not, are those novels different because they were written a long time ago, or because they were written by white women, or both?
I eagerly await your response.
Sincerely,
Preeta Samarasan
I do appreciate your comments. Because they deserve to be dealt with at length, I will reply in a separate post.
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