When I read Deborah Copaken Kogan’s article titled “My So-Called ‘Post-Feminist’ Life in Arts and Letters“, I felt really bad for the author. Copaken Kogan shares her frustration with the patriarchal literary establishment that ignores and trivializes her work because she is a woman and a feminist. I decided to show solidarity for the author and bought her novel Between Here and April.
And this is what I have to say after reading it: if your books don’t get reviewed, if your articles don’t get published, if your CV always ends up in the trash can, if you are always passed by for a promotion, if you are denied tenure, etc., there is a possibility – just a possibility – that this doesn’t happen because you are a woman, a Muslim, an atheist, a religious person, a Jew, a Ukrainian, an autistic, a parent, a childless person, a man, an immigrant, etc., but simply because your books are no good, your articles suck, your CV is bad, and your tenure dossier is unconvincing.
Between Here and April tells a story of Lizzie, a very immature, inept woman who, at the age of 41, speaks and acts like an 11-year-old, and who makes a half-hearted attempt to jump-start her dying career by investigating the suicide of another immature and inept woman. Lizzie is incapable of making any decisions of her own and always needs some man to tell her in detail what to do. A former employer tells her that she needs to drop everything and go on a journalistic mission to Iraq, and she starts to prepare for the trip. A former lover lectures her on why it will benefit her not to go to Iraq but to investigate the suicide of a woman who killed herself and her children, and Lizzie forgets all about Iraq and starts to investigate. Another man tells her to stop investigating, and she does.
Lizzie’s life is a mess. Her marriage is a disaster and she feels extremely resentful that she has to invest any energy or time into bringing up her two daughters. Yet instead of letting these daughters develop normally, she stunts their growth to render them completely dependent on her. This gives her a fresh round of excuses for her miserable life and crumbling career.
Lizzie’s explanation for her ineptitude is that, as a woman, she is the victim of her female physiology to the degree that makes her practically incapable of functioning. This is where the “feminist” part of the novel resides: in the belief that all women are subject to “hormonal fluctuations” that never happen to men and that render women completely incapacitated.
The novel ends in a manner typical to Harlequin romance fiction: the protagonist solves all of her problems by having another baby. The message of a novel that tried to demonstrate that many women hate being mothers is that all these women who hate their children to the point of planning their murder should make everything right by. . . having another baby.
“Women, keep having babies and that will solve all your problems!” seems to be the novel’s conclusion. Yes, I’m sure that the patriarchal literary establishment was extremely scandalized by the powerful feminist thrust of this ultra-subversive message.
“It’s career suicide, colleagues tell me, to speak out against the literary establishment; they’ll smear you,” Copaken Kogan writes in her article. I’m sure that it is a lot more flattering to think of oneself as a brave, solitary feminist who is persecuted for her views by an all-powerful sexist establishment than to recognize that you are a very bad writer whose literary talents stand somewhere a little below Jodi Picoult’s and a little above E.L. James’s.
Clarissa's Blog 
She seems to have a great carreer even if she wrote bad novels like this.
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career
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Yes, trash sells really well. I have no idea why she sees herself as such a victim. I guess she thinks that victimhood sells even better.
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She seems to behave like Valery Fabrikant, but she’s not as violent. 😉
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valery_Fabrikant
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Minus the violence, there is an obvious parallel, yes.
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Michael O. Church sez:
Probably speaks for many men and women. People have reason to want to stay on the sidelines.
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This meaning is contaminated by many MRA activists who believe that feminism is machism for women.
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If you read the article you linked to, it shows a pop-up saying, “Don’t let the Republicans rig the next presidential election!” The only proper response is to roll your eyes and click the X in the corner.
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Ha! I just noticed it. Yeah, you are right.
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So she was following the pattern of eat, love, pray, or whatever the book was called. In general, the books that become dominant in the mainstream have to do with relationships and family, as Mike recently noticed. They’re ideally warm and not too threatening. Female hysteria ought not to be threatening, as it is enshrined in patriarchal systems as being indicative of a a reassuring essential nature in women, as well as biologically determined deference.
It ought to have produced for her a winning formula. What went wrong?
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Maybe an oversaturated market? I’m sure a lot more of these sentimental stories are written than are published, and many more are published than sell well.
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That’s likely. The average level of maturity of the masses is very low indeed. I’m sure they can absorb a great deal of stuff that makes them feel thrillingly normal in their weaknesses. Perhaps the writer’s failure was in not offering a redemption narrative at the end of the book, so that people can also feel that although they are weak, they are bound to succeed, given time.
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These books apparently sell well. The reason why the author feels she is a victim is that she gets no literary awards. But the quality of writing is simply not there. She doesn’t produce art, that’s all. There are millions of such books and she is simply trying to get noticed by claiming to be a victim and pushing people’s ideological buttons.
See the comments to her article. People buy her story of persecution. I did, too, but I wasn’t too lazy to read the book and judge for myself.
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You know. when I went to stay with my fundamentalist cousin in Zimbabwe, I perused her bookshelf and found a lot of Christian books from USA, with titles concerning a woman’s lot and how to emotionally survive conservative womanhood. I was at a stage where I was suddenly realizing that these ideas and values are no longer peripheral but becoming mainstream. There are two main streams and they flow into each other. One is conservative womanhood and one is identity politics. If you try to flow with either of these and you do it effectively, you will sell your rubbish. There is a lot of rubbish to be sold and a lot of rubbishy people ready to snap it up. At the base of all of this is insecurity about identity and emotions. “Is my identity a nice and good one?” “Are my emotions okay, or should I lament them?” These are the philosophical issues that you have to face….if you are a piece of rubbish.
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Yes, there are tons! And even Jodi Picoult has realized that “the bored housewife” genre has been exhausted and now writes novels in defense of gay marriage.
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Anyone who brags that they are “longlisted” is pretty funny. I never knew there was such as thing as being longlisted. You only brag if you are “shortlisted.”
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This novel got me really scared yesterday. This is what gets very publicly and loudly defended as ultra-feminist, and it’s the same old issue of how to castrate a woman’s sexuality, personality and intellect in order to make her serve the needs of a patriarchal family and enjoy it.
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Yes, yes, and it also makes it hard to be ironic about these things, because people think you are speaking seriously. I once had a blog called “New heartfelt stuff”, because I thought that was very funny name to give a blog. I put hearts on it and stuff that just amused me.
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While I was reading this summary, I thought there was still the potential for an interesting story in there. I like heroines who are strong, who have well-developed selves and who can make choices that go against the norms of their time and place (like Jane Eyre) or who have abilities or ambitions that aren’t encouraged, but that they still try to cultivate in whatever way occurs to them (like Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch), but you can also tell a good story about a very weak heroine (I know you like The House of Mirth, and Lily Bart is definitely a weak, childish character!).
This could be a very subtle, interesting portrait of internalized sexism in the right author’s hands.
Then I got to this part of the post —
— and realized that it was probably not going to be that kind of a story. Unless it’s told very strictly from a first-person point of view, and it is made clear that Lizzie is an unreliable narrator, and only thinks her problems are fixed, but she is really just undermining herself further.
If that ending was in earnest, though, I’d be hugely frustrated! How can you *be* an author, and call yourself a feminist, and be that clueless?!
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I also spent the entire novel hoping that the character would arrive at some insight. But then she arrives at another pregnancy and somehow everything is solved. There was this whole plot line with the husband forcing her into S&M and her hating it. And then the pregnancy somehow mysteriously “cures” the husband’s S&M. It’s all simply bizarre.
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In the natural sciences, we have the Galileo Principle; it holds that “Just because your ideas are ridiculed by an unsympathetic establishment, it doesn’t neccessarily mean that you are the next Galileo.”
It sounds like there should be a corollary to this rule for literature.
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“She doesn’t produce art, that’s all. There are millions of such books and she is simply trying to get noticed by claiming to be a victim and pushing people’s ideological buttons.”
If she’s selling books it sounds like she’s a competent mid-list writer with delusions of grandeur and not above trying to parlay any victim status she can latch onto in order to intimidate her critics.
I’m strongly reminded of the conversation between Don Draper and his mother-in-law (about his wife) from Mad Men: “This is what happens when you have the artistic temperament, but you are not an artist”
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Yes, I have no idea why she complains so much. The books are selling, what is the problem? Nor everybody is a Toni Morrison or Margaret Atwood.
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