It’s not until the very end of the night, when the judges are posing with the winners, that I realize how blinding the lights are, and that, from the stage, it’s impossible to see anything of the audience at all. Up there, the potential Miss Americas aren’t seeing friendly faces or loved ones’ smiles, approval or disdain or anything at all—just darkness. While we are judging, they are looking into the abyss.
Twitter, Reconsidered
I love social media. Like Oprah loves bread, like millennials love selfies, like Romeo and Juliet loved each other before their untimely deaths, that’s how much I love it. I love what it gives me—attention, a voice, a community, a chance to do my own publicity and marketing in a low-key, authentic way, a bunch of smart, snarky friends, authors and activists, experts in publishing and politics and even porn, who are constantly gathered ’round the virtual watercooler, ready to talk to me (or talk among themselves and let me eavesdrop). It’s everything I never had as a lonely, nerdy girl, and everything I’ll never get as a female genre writer in a world that still privileges literary men’s voices.
My initial foray into the World Wide Web came via snail mail. Before Good in Bed was published, I had hundreds of postcards made, with the book cover and laudatory quotes on the front, my tour dates and a picture of my dog on the back. I used the baby Internet to build a list of every group or shop or book club or organization that might even be remotely interested in a story about a plus-size reporter who finds her happily-ever-after. I dug up their addresses and wrote them each a note, with the date I’d be in their city highlighted, signed with my name and a little doodle of my face.
My mother’s then girlfriend had built me a website with a funny bio and a link to Amazon and many pictures of my dog. In 2002, my husband had launched his own blog and encouraged me to add one to my website. “That’s fantastic!” my publisher cheered, before asking, “What is a blog, exactly?”
I’d just found out about weblogs myself, but I knew I wanted one. An online diary would be a way to stay in touch with my roots as a journalist, a way to talk about news and pop culture and gossip of the day, a way to talk directly to readers, and remind them of my existence between books—a crucial hustle when you can’t count on the New York Times to do that job. I blogged for years, about my life, my writing, my writing life, my adventures as a new wife and mother. I talked about the time I was signing books at a Borders and a woman shyly approached my table, and how I thought she was going to ask for a signed book but what she really wanted was a token to unlock the bathroom door (I gave it to her). I described the bookstore in Dallas where the manager thought I was asking for copies of When Bad Things Happen to Good People instead of Good in Bed. (I signed them.) When In Her Shoes was made into a movie, I blogged about that process, from my day as an extra to the night of the premiere to the day it became clear it was going to be a flop. All through that awful release week, I posted excerpts from the best reviews I could find and basically promised readers a pint of my blood if they’d buy tickets. It didn’t work, but at least there’d been a place for me to try.
When Twitter came along, I embraced it, too, feeling like it had been tailored for my hand. Tweeting was like blogging in miniature, blogging in real time, from the line at the coffee shop or the carpool pickup lane or the parents’ holding pen at Little Gym. I was thrilled when the medium turned into what it is today: a worldwide soapbox, a democratizing force giving voice to the voiceless, a place where everyday people can find an audience and where their ideas can gain traction. It’s where movements coalesce, where evildoers are exposed, where wrongs are righted and justice prevails.
Twitter, of course, is also a cesspit of crude, hateful misogyny, insults and name-calling and poorly considered tirades, rapid-fire escalations played out in impulsive and regrettable hundred-and-forty-character bursts. It’s a place where, I hope, I’ve done some good, and a place where, for sure, I’ve had some fun, and a place where I’ve been horribly humiliated and made mistakes and said things I wish I hadn’t said.
The problem with Twitter is that there are no take-backs. There’s no way to edit a tweet once it’s been tweeted, and while you can delete something you’ve thought better of, the Internet is forever . . . as many celebrities have learned to their sorrow. I learned the hard way to check the trending topics before tweeting anything, to make sure that there’s no school shooting, no horrible violence, no civil war outbreak or celebrity death before I start gossiping about which author’s been using the same headshot for a decade, or which literary critic’s similarly long-lived cartoon avatar looks absolutely nothing like her. I try my hardest to deprive myself of that little frisson of self-righteousness that comes with joining a group as it points out someone else’s misstep or stupidity. I try not to pile on myself, to jump on the victim of the day just because everyone else is jumping, and to take a deep breath before clapping back at the haters, remembering that even though I might feel like a picked-on nobody, it ain’t necessarily so.
I joined Twitter in 2009 and, according to its helpful counter, I’ve sent just over twenty-seven thousand tweets, which sounds like a lot until you notice the nonstop word-sprayers who’ve topped six figures in less time. Through the years there have been plenty of tweets and posts and updates that I was proud of—ones that were pithy or funny or pointed, or ones that even, in their tiny way, moved the march of progress forward. There are also plenty that I wish I could reconsider, and a few times when I found myself in pitched Twitter battle, being body-slammed across the World Wide Web. Here are some of the tweets that I remember.
“Jason Mesnick is a tool.”
Tweeted March 2009
With these five simple words, a calling—nay, an obsession—was born.
I had been a Bachelor devotee for the first few seasons, and fell away after I had a baby and the silliness of Lorenzo Borghese’s season (remember him? the Italian prince?) became too much. As the years went on, I’d watch sporadically, and I just happened to be channel-surfing when bachelor Jason Mesnick, torn between Melissa Rycroft and Molly Malaney, stood on a balcony and cried. And then, as producers captured each delicious teardrop, he cried and cried and cried and cried and then he cried some more, and it was glorious and hideous and wonderful and awful and exactly what you want in your reality TV. And then, when you thought things couldn’t get any weirder or worse or more embarrassing, Mesnick ditched Rycroft, the woman he’d chosen, on live TV, during the “After the Final Rose” special, and asked for Molly’s hand instead.I
I had my Facebook fan page open at the time and I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, so I posted an update, sharing my feelings about Jason with my Facebook friends. Five minutes later I had three hundred comments. Clearly there were people out there watching, people who wanted to discuss what they were seeing . . . and I was more than happy to talk about it with them. I moved over to Twitter, where I could follow The Bachelor’s many hashtags, tracking the conversation in real time and live-tweeting the show, providing my own running commentary on its foibles, its excesses, its double standards and sexism, its drunken participants (the guy who slurred “Why am I not raping you right now?” at a fellow contestant), its demeaning challenges (a slow-speed race down a Beverly Hills street where women sat on tractors, in bikinis), and the money shots of jilted suitors sobbing in the backseat of a limousine. Live-tweeting was a way to love and hate the show at the same time, to be entertained by its boy-meets-crowd-of-girls, boy-culls-crowd-of-girls, girls-get-dumped-and-cry, while also recognizing and shining a disinfecting light on its narrow beauty standards, its relentless heteronormativity, its frustrating lack of diversity, what it says about desire versus the performance of desire; about true love and, with ever-recurring declarations about “journeys” and “fairy tales,” the propagation of old, punitive myths about how happy endings work and who deserves to get them.
It has also been a way to make friends, to connect with a like-minded community of viewers and mockers, people who
watch it lovingly and people who watch it ironically and people like me, who find a way to do both. As much as I love The Bachelor, I love watching it with Twitter even more.
“Dear Y.A., don’t let the bastards get you down! Your friend, Chick Lit”
Tweeted January 2013
This remains one of my most-retweeted tweets (almost a thousand retweets, which in my world is basically the equivalent of a National Book Award) . . . and I think I know why.
For years, chick lit—breezy books about young women in big cities—was reviled as the infected boil on the body of literature, the books where intelligence and insight went to die on their way to the shoe store. People hated chick lit. Even—especially—feminists, some of whom seem determined to prove that they weren’t hairy-legged man-haters by finding something made by women that they, too, could mock. Female bloggers published posts entitled “Nine Reasons Why Chick-Lit Authors Should Be Kicked in the Head Until They Are Dead.” Literary writers published a collection called This Is Not Chick Lit, billed as Original Stories by America’s Best Women Writers (I joked that my ballot must’ve gotten lost in the mail). Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who’d go on to write the famous, Beyoncé-sampled “We should all be feminists,” contributed a story, and Gloria Steinem’s approving blurb appeared on the cover.
My problem, back in 2000, was that I didn’t realize that I was writing chick lit. When Good in Bed was published, the term was only beginning to be used widely . . . and the first round of stateside single-in-the-city books hadn’t been despised at all. In fact, they’d been celebrated on the cover of New York magazine, praised as smart and poignant takes on how modern women were living. I thought I was writing that kind of novel, a book with humor and heart and something to say, a story about a single girl in search of a happy ending that was not entirely dependent on a guy and that might amuse and comfort the girls and women like me. I did not realize that my book, with its fanciful script title, with its tempting slice of cheesecake, and its curvy naked legs on the cover, was the print equivalent of a flesh-eating virus with the potential to rot the very foundations of literature.
I didn’t know . . . but the world was happy to instruct me. As much as women loved it, and as much as Good in Bed connected, there were critics and bloggers who disdained chick lit, with its pink covers and images of engagement rings, purses, and martinis, as everything that was wrong in publishing, and possibly the world. Female writers of literary fiction tried to lock in their spot as Authors of Quality and high-minded cool girls by insisting that, oh no, their books weren’t chick lit, and by being as critical as they could about books that were. Chick lit, thundered an (anonymous, of course) editor, was “hurting America.” It was driving real literature off the shelf, forcing high-end writers to turn their framed MFA toward the wall and insert gratuitous scenes of giggly brunches and drunken sexcapades into their serious works of fiction. A National Book Award–winning female writer told young female writers to “shoot high” and eschew imitations of “the derivative, banal stuff”—like chick lit. The novelist who wrote so movingly about women’s place on “the second shelf” bemoaned the prevalence of “slumber-party fiction,” easy-reading books where the heroines were crafted to feel like your best friends. Things reached a head when Lena Dunham—millennial feminist icon Lena Dunham!—told the New York Times Book Review that she detested “airport chick lit,” books with sparkly engagement rings and baby carriages on the cover, or, really, any story that was “motored by the search for a husband.”II
It was not a lot of fun, living through that era as one of the genre’s more popular and outspoken writers whose first book did, indeed, end with a proposal. It was hard to be the one on the front lines insisting, over and over, that not only were these books not so bad, but they weren’t always just about shoes and bags and husband-hunting, and they were surely no worse than thrillers and mysteries, genre books that got respectful mentions in the Times and whose authors were hardly ever accused of harming an entire nation.
Want to make the world holler? Be female . . . then stand up and say, This thing that I created, this thing I made as a woman, for other women, is worth something. Oh, the fun you will have! From the online literary critic whose “close reading” will not only pan your books but also you as a human being to the publisher, renowned for his gentlemanly ways, who will tell a reporter that your books don’t deserve any attention and also are not as good as Jonathan Franzen’s—whom he happens to publish—your life will be a carousel of delights. Especially if your last name is Weiner. Turns out, not even the snootiest, most MFA’d critic can resist making the same “WHIN-er” jokes you’ve been hearing since the second grade.
The good news? Nothing lasts forever. By 2012 or 2013, the anti-chick-lit tsunami started to recede as the critics locked in on a new target—young adult books. Suddenly, lighthearted tales of bad dates and happy endings weren’t the problem. Grown-ups reading Twilight in the subway were.
The day I sent the tweet, Slate had published a piece called “Against YA.” Its author, Ruth Graham, had gleefully tweeted the day before that she knew her article would raise hackles, and indeed, it read like a provocation, as it told adults that they “should be embarrassed if what [they’re] reading was written for children.” Put down your Hunger Games and for God’s sake pick up something worthwhile!
Young adult authors were predictably peeved. Plenty of librarians and booksellers and writers joined the chorus of “who are you to judge” and “at least people are reading something.” I think my tweet caught on because it pointed at the cyclical nature of whose turn it is to sit in lit-land’s dunking booth—how it’s always someone, how it’s usually books that are written by women, for the pleasure of other girls and women (the “Against YA” movement was preceded by a brief but violent sortie against Fifty Shades of Grey–style erotica), and how the hatred has as much to do with times and with trends as it does with intrinsic value.
I dream of a day when there’s not a separate category for women’s fiction, when the Times gives chick lit its due and covers it like male-genre books . . . and wouldn’t it be nice if something lowbrow and male ended up in the crosshairs for once? It might never happen, but a girl can dream of the day when the critics decide that YA is A-OK—or that at least they can give it a break—and turn on science fiction or Westerns. Look out, estate of Louis L’Amour! #yourenext
If supporting Planned Parenthood is radical, then I am radical. And so is my mom. And my Nanna. #IStandWithPP
Tweeted July 2015
My support for Planned Parenthood should not have come as a surprise to anyone who knows me. I’ve been a feminist my entire life, and I think that my fiction reflects that—not that my books whomp people over the head with a KEEP ABORTION LEGAL poster, but because I hope that I write about the issue around reproduction with sensitivity and also in a way that makes it clear that if women can’t control their reproductive lives, they can’t control their lives at all.
Of course, if you’re someone with a following and a platform but you didn’t get that following or that platform from politics, stepping into that contested land can get tricky. Basketball star Michael Jordan famously refused to endorse Harvey Gantt in his Senate race against famed racist Jesse Helms, quipping that Republicans also buy sneakers. Not only do they buy sneakers, but they buy books. Before I tweeted, I wondered: Was it worth wading into the fray and potentially alienating readers?
Most novelists don’t. At least, not many of the ones I’d consider my cohort group. They use social media to post recipes for tarte tatins and pictures of their kids; they run jewelry giveaways and offer free movie tickets; they support other writers and talk up the books they’re reading. I do most of that, too (except not the pictures of my kids, because their father and I believe that they deserve their privacy, and should not be used to boost my brand, and also because there are stalkers, and if the two of them want to blast selfies and bikini shots all over the Internet, they can do it
when they’re old enough to understand the consequences, and also the concept of permanence).
But I digress.
In 2015, Planned Parenthood was once again under attack. A right-wing group had cobbled together film footage purporting to show Planned Parenthood doctors selling baby parts for fun and profit. Politicians and presidential candidates and right-wing pundits joined in, demonizing Planned Parenthood, lying about what it did and whom it served, holding chest-thumping contests about how awful Planned Parenthood was and which one of them would defund the organization fastest and most completely. Christian extremists took the rhetoric as marching orders: in Colorado, a man stormed into an abortion clinic and killed three people while shouting “No more baby parts.” Because pro-life.
I have never had an abortion. This is the result of being careful 90 percent of the time and being lucky the other 10. When I was working in State College and my health insurance didn’t cover birth control, I went to the local Planned Parenthood affiliate for my checkups and my birth-control pills. I knew, from personal experience, that Planned Parenthood offered more than abortions . . . and I also knew that sometimes abortion is the absolutely correct choice, and that women—especially the ones who’ve used Planned Parenthood—need to stand up and protect it, to say, “Here’s what Planned Parenthood is all about, and here’s what it’s done for me.” Last but not least, my mom’s partner, Clair, is a Planned Parenthood employee. I see how hard she works and I know whom she’s working for, and it’s not privileged white ladies like me. Her clientele is young, poor, diverse, less likely to have access to the kind of care that money guarantees.
Hungry Heart Page 29