There seems to be a barely-articulated expectation that as a published author I decry all books that can’t be classified as Serious Novels (notwithstanding the fact that lots of women’s fiction is not seen as “serious” in their eyes). Even worse, there seems to be an expectation from both genders that women should be ashamed of their reading. Add a drop of 50 Shades of Gray and a dose of secretive Kindle reading, and I think we’ve got an epidemic on our hands!

Lest you think I’m above knocking my own reading habits, consider this:  The other day, I was looking for a piece of light reading while waiting for an appointment and decided on a popular, made-into-a-movie-perhaps-starring-Meryl-Streep-as-an-Anna-Wintour-esque-harpy-boss bestseller…and found myself shielding the Kindle from passers-by. What, I ask, is up with that?

I’m sure it would be best if we all spent all of our precious reading hours elevating ourselves with amazing prose and brilliant erudition, but sometimes a girl just wants to read…whatever she feels like reading. To me, the choice of a book is as personal as any other choice (and mine alone to make). When we decry our reading in front of others, we teach them to question their own impulses and choices and plant the seeds of shame in our daughters and friends.

I’m bringing this up because it’s coming up in various parts of my reading and writing life. I’m doing some work right now that reminds me how dramatic and incredible the opportunity to freely read truly is (how’s that for grammar?!). Women’s reading and writing were nothing short of revolutionary for a long time, given constraints on subjects considered appropriate for ladies. It makes me feel ornery and a bit mad at myself. And so I ask you to talk to me about shame and reading.

Are you ashamed of your reading habits? If so, why?  Help me figure this out.

The Wind as Literature – Q&A With Melissa Maday

When did you first read GWTW/what were your initial impressions?

I had seen the movie — or parts of it — over and over on TV, but I hadn’t read the book. At Smith, during the first semester of my sophomore year, I took an American lit class with the then-senior member of the English Department. It was 1998, and he’d been at the college for close to 40 years. The students in my class wanted to know if he had known Sylvia Plath as a student or instructor at Smith  but no one wanted to ask him. Finally, they talked me into asking. I raised my hand and asked simply”Professor Murphy, did you know Sylvia Plath when she was here?”

In response, he sighed heavily, shook his head, and leaned on the podium: he said, “We were here at the same time, and I suppose our paths must have crossed,” then he sighed again and added. “I don’t know what the big deal is about Sylvia Plath. The best writer this college ever produced was Margaret Mitchell.”

Let me get this straight...people don't consider Gone With the Wind to be great literature?

I was so surprised by this — both that Mitchell had gone to Smith, and that an editor of the Norton Anthology thought she was a better writer than Plath — that i went to the library after class and checked out Gone With the Wind. I read it over the next few weeks, and I was struck by the careful characterization and sumptuous detail. And, carrying its 1037 pages around campus with me for a few weeks also served as a real conversation piece: I was amazed to find out that many women I met felt connected to the book. I heard lots of stories about people whose moms read it every summer, or who had read it for the first time at the age of 12, then read it again and again … it became clear to me that it was a book that meant something to women of different ages and from different backgrounds. There was an unexpected (for me) universality to Scarlett’s story.

You wrote about GWTW in your senior thesis at Smith College. What was your topic?

I wanted to look at the book as a piece of literature. So much had (and has) been written about the movie, but the book’s popularity tended to remove it from consideration as “serious” literature. My thesis sought to read it as literature and position it in the canon of American literature, and — more specifically — American literature by women.  Fortunately for me, the book about Margaret Mitche”s journalism career came out while i was writing my thesis, and that book really served to put GWTW into perspective for me I saw where MM got her trained eye for detail, her ability to describe and explicate characters, and her clear, precise writing style. 

It was also really rewarding for me to write my thesis about an author who was also an alumna of my college. I’m grateful that i had the chance to spend so much time reading and writing about a book that means so much to so many people. I ended up writing a lot about the differences between the movie and the book to highlight that much of the exaggeration and excess we associate with the film was not in the novel.

What do you find most compelling/upsetting/awesome about Margaret Mitchell as an author?

I love her authorial perspective — GWTW is a novel written by a journalist: someone practiced and expert at observation and description. It is not the weepy, melodramatic, sentimental artifact that the movie has come to be. I think it’s most interesting that Mitchell did not like to be compared to Scarlett (in fact, she was kind of horrified by such comparisons). It’s also important to understand that Mitchell had a keen understanding of historical scope — GWTW wasn’t meant to stand on its own, it was the first of a planned trilogy of novels about the American South. But, of course, her untimely death prevented her from going on.

And, I really enjoyed reading about her utter consternation at the making of the movie — my favorite quotation is when she wrote that they were making the Wilkes’ plantation look like Grand Central Station. She was really worried about what the residents of Jonesboro, Georgia would think when they saw how their town was portrayed.

Can you speak to GWTW as a classic/feminist work/work of “serious” or popular fiction?

Yes! GWTW has been repeatedly misnamed as sentimental fiction, when, in fact, it is an historical novel about the Civil War — but from a woman’s perspective — Mitchell was a 20th-century southern woman giving voice to the women before her. She told their stories beautifully in the novel, and she created an archetypal flawed heroine in Scarlett. It always bothers me when critics or scholars contend that “serious” and “popular’ fiction have to be placed in different categories — I think it takes a truly gifted writer to blur those lines, and Mitchell succeeded at it in this novel. To understand this, it’s important to separate the novel from the film, and I think most who only know the latter are surprised by the intensity and depth of Mitchell’s prose.

I use the novel often in my own classroom — I haven’t taught it in full (yet), but it’s a great example of strong, descriptive narrative, and it holds up well under the scrutiny of close reading.

As literary, educated, even occasionally erudite people, there’s always a competitive urge.  We want to be able to check selections off a list, to be included.  It’s fun to be on the inside of a conversation.  It’s fun to be in the know.

Well, fellow bookworms.  I would like to suggest we call off all this shame around reading.

I don’t care if your favorite book is Flowers in the Attic or War and Peace.  I don’t care if you read the cereal box or The Atlantic.  I don’t care if you inhale books via ereader or ancient tome.  What I do care about is the love of reading and the joy that accompanies the discovery of amazing literary heroines.

If you’re anything like me, your to-read list is a mile long (and, if you’re an author, you may be surprised to find that other people are suddenly interested in your heretofore private reading habits).  If you’re anything like me, there are also days on which you blow off that “must-read” piece of literary fiction for an easy, trashy read.   And that is okay.

In conclusion…I would just hate if The Heroine’s Bookshelf were taken as a criticism of people who had not read the books it contains.  Rather, it’s a very personal exploration of heroines who have touched my life (and the lives of many others).  I bet there is lots of middle ground with most of my readers, but for me the interesting part of the conversation often lies in the places where we diverge.

So…tell me.  Who are you ashamed of not reading?  What author have you been wanting to get to know?  What’s the last book you put down in favor of an easier read?

Then I got up and learned from Beyond Little House that today is Carrie Ingalls (Swanzey) Day and thought, “I’m on to something!”  Who can forget Laura rocking the seat for an exhausted and humiliated Carrie?  I’d call that a literary match made in heaven.

So what better way to celebrate literary duos than with a contest? 

I have two sets of two galleys of The Heroine’s Bookshelf to give away to two lucky winners…one to read, one to pass on to a friend.  To enter, all you have to do is post in the comments here and tell me a literary duo you love, and your email address.

This giveaway is limited to USA only, unfortunately (there have been and will be international ones), and I’ll close entries at 5 p.m. MDT on Friday, August 6…so tell a friend!

• Writing as fun:  Who can forget the image of Jo March scribbling in her attic, cap on head, pillow at the ready, rats scurrying all around?  Though I know that Louisa May Alcott’s experience of the writing “vortex” was a bit more painful, her character’s no-holds-barred approach to writing reminds me to have some fun with the process.  After all, what other profession includes dreaming, crying, even eavesdropping in its description?
• Writing as salvation:  The story of the Brontës is all I need to remember that I am lucky to have the outlet of writing.  I may not pace around a table at Haworth, but like Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, I try to pour my relief and anxiety into my work.  It helps.
• Writing as rebellion:  She may have written a century ago, but I still consider Colette to be the ultimate literary rebel (and writing about her literary declaration of independence was one of the highlights of The Heroine’s Bookshelf).  Sometimes I find myself continuing work just to prove to myself that I can…that I have something to say, after all.  And I usually do.
• Writing as legacy:  I recently treated myself both to Francine Prose’s excellent new Anne Frank book and the Revised Critical Edition of Anne’s timeless diary.  I didn’t get a chance to include Anne in my book, but I am touched by her awareness that her legacy in the world was a written one.  I won’t ever presume to be an Anne, but thoughts of a literary legacy of some kind are a nice reminder when the going gets tough (and a push to revise the hell out of my terrible first drafts so that nobody reads them when I’m gone!).
• Writing as reading:  As an unabashed bookworm, I can say that there’s nothing so tantalizing as the thought of showing my work to others, no matter how painful that process might be.  The wit, spunk, and sass of my favorite heroines reminds me that I can’t have readers unless I write.  Talk about motivation!

When you think about it, the idea of heroism is a bit hard to wrap your mind around.  The definition I prefer goes something like this:

expansive: of behavior that is impressive and ambitious in scale or scope; “an expansive lifestyle”; “in the grand manner”; “collecting on a grand scale”; “heroic undertakings”

It’s hard to live your life in a grand manner, especially in times that aren’t exactly expansive.  So often, I’ve seen ambition rewarded with failure, high hopes with blah realities.  As someone who always seemed a bit off-kilter and out of place in her childhood home, I spent a lot of time looking outside myself for role models, people to emulate or call upon when I felt down.  I found many of my heroines in between the pages of the books I love; I found even more in history and some in my own personal life.

In my travels around the blogosphere I recently ran across this sentence by debut author Sonia Gensler, who writes in this blog post:

To the left of the bulletin board is my framed poster of the Brontë sisters. When I’m feeling whiny and pathetic, I think of the Brontës and how isolated they were, how many loved ones they lost, and what a crazy mess their brother was. So many sorrows and distractions threatened their creativity, and yet they managed to be quite prolific. One glance at that poster and I straighten my spine and get back to work.

I’m like Sonia:  after spending a year plus thinking about heroines, I love to invoke the idea of a heroine when, say, I am crampy and cranky and want to crawl into a cave for a year and cut off all contact with humanity.  I invoke the idea before a business meeting that scares the bejeezus out of me.   And I cut myself a bit more slack because I can see the ways in which my miniscule, pitiful daily struggles really speak to something heroic.  I am, after all, the girl who went to Germany knowing two words in the language and survived for a long exchange year at the tender age of fifteen.  I’m the girl who somehow got herself through college, who played roller derby and sung in an indie rock band and has started two successful businesses thus far.  And I’m the girl who, despite my wildest fears and reservations, keeps returning to the page even when nothing comes out right.

I bet you’re a heroine, too.  So…what personal heroism do you have to celebrate these days?  And who are the heroines you call on when you feel like quitting?

What is it about heroines?  Why do they exert such a seductive pull, calling me away from the dishes and the to-do list?

Here are some ideas:

• They’re not us: Heroines exist in a world outside of ourselves, something to escape into and crawl inside for a while.
• They are us: Heroines possess that which we ourselves have:  personalities, strong wills, the ability to adjust to circumstance.
• Possibilities and warnings: Heroines present another road, one in which we could do the mundane or the spectacular, transcending ourselves or destroying ourselves in the process.

How about you?  Why are heroines important to you?