My previous post, “Take Back the Tit,” elicited some very interesting, insightful comments. I received the following response as an email, and I am publishing it with the author’s permission because I think it brings up some controversial ideas.
In my post, I suggest that it is sometimes the female voice that tyrannizes other women. This writer responds:
“As a child of the seventies, I never quite “got” the whole women’s movement ethos. I was reared in the deep South in a house full of women, my father having died when I was three, and went to a girls’ school from the 7th to the 12th grade. I never DIDN’T see women in positions of authority and was stunned to learn that our sex was so miserably oppressed. The more I observe and the older I get the more convinced I am that women have always been deeply complicit in their own destinies, and if they’re put-upon doormats, the vast majority of them have no one to blame but themselves. My grandmother, born in 1898, would never have allowed herself to be treated disrespectfully by anyone, man, woman, or child. Most of the disagreeable social and cultural “rules” complained about so vociferously by women, seem to be established by women themselves. What’s up?
I read a funny, accurate novel years ago by Florence King called When Sisterhood Was In Flower. It’s probably out of print now, but I highly recommend it.”... Read more.
I had tea yesterday with a lovely friend who is a novelist and songwriter and a young mother of two. She told me that in a class she attended on breastfeeding, a new mother admitted in a timid, guilty voice that she had to stop breastfeeding after several weeks because her nipples were cracked and bleeding and she could not produce enough milk. The “teacher/expert,” some breast-feeding Brunhilde, callously replied, “Hey, you can’t be a wimp about it.”
Coincidentally, yesterday morning, I’d also struck up a conversation with a bedraggled-looking working mom who said that she wanted to give her six month old baby formula at night so that both she and the child could get some sleep but her breast-feeding friends shamed her into feeling that she would harm the child.... Read more.
I originally wrote this piece for Publisher’s Weekly but it was cut in half for space. Here is the unedited version.
No Sex, Please, We’re Literary!
Sex sells. But what about sexy storylines? When it comes to fiction is sex in one category and literature in another, and never the twain shall meet? In this provocative essay, author Karen Essex takes on the issue and responds to critics of her literary thrillerDracula in Love. So get ready … things are about to heat up.
During an auction for the audio rights to my new novel, Dracula in Love, my editor forwarded me an email that was sent from one of the bidders. “This book is so hot that I can’t wait to get home to my wife!” he proclaimed, and then outbid everyone else and presumably went home and made his wife happy. (Mrs. Audio Rights, you owe me.)... Read more.
I have been having conversations with Egyptian friends and scholars, readers who are revisiting my novel Kleopatra, and book clubs that are reading it for the first time. It’s just amazing how history is repeating itself two thousand years later. “Egyptians have never been passive,” says an Egyptian friend. “We have attracted despots and dictators throughout our history but we have always rebelled against them.”
In Kleopatra, the unruly populace stages multiple demonstrations against King Ptolemy XII, Kleopatra’s father, who has overtaxed them in order to help the Romans finance their wars of conquest. The king had reason to be afraid; the Egyptians had been so aggravated with his predecessor that they slit his throat. The riots escalated, and Ptolemy XII was forced to go to Rome to demand support for his continuance on the throne. In my book – and in the minds of some scholars, owing to epigraphic evidence- the young Kleopatra accompanied her father to Rome, forever changing her attitude toward governance.... Read more.
Greetings from New York, the best place on earth to be for the holidays! I am here with a broken ankle, which many of you know I acquired by falling on the plane on the way to my Italian book tour. It was a sorry way to find out that I am not a vampire after all.
On Sunday, 12/19, I will join 30 fellow fiction writers in a marathon reading of Dickens’ A CHRISTMAS CAROL at the Housing Works Bookshop Cafe in Soho. In the spirit of Tiny Tim Cratchit, I will hobble up to the podium around 3:30. Refreshments after! Here’s our notice in THE NEW YORKER:... Read more.
