Interview from The Arizona Republic
March 14, 2004
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"Storied Women: Authors explore gender expectations "
-- by Richard Nilsen
You would think having a major publisher and a healthy advance would make life easier for a novelist.
For Melissa Pritchard, whose third novel, Late Bloomer, comes out Tuesday from Doubleday, it was a problem.
"This initially paralyzed me," she says. "For the first time in my life, I experienced the dread 'writer's block.' I would sit down to work and feel as if the entire staff of Doubleday was in the room with me, peering with unbearable critical scrutiny over my shoulder. It took months to unsnarl the mental knot I had tied myself into."
Pritchard's entry into big-time publishing is one thing she has in common with another Arizona author, Aurelie Sheehan, whose debut novel, The Anxiety of Everyday Objects, came out Feb. 24 from Penguin. Sheehan teaches creative writing at the University of Arizona; Pritchard does the same at Arizona State University.
As academics writing for major publishers, they may have the advantage of money and professional marketing, but they face many of the problems other writers face.
That includes a publishing industry increasingly fragmented, with major publishers run more and more like corporations and less like bibliophile charities, and with smaller presses and university presses taking up the slack, publishing "literary fiction" that often has a readership solely of other literary fiction authors.
There also are political concerns for authors: issues of identity and gender. All make it harder to tell a good story.
Then there's the issue of "chick lit," or books written by women for a female audience, books often bound in time and place to the biases of our particular zeitgeist - Bridget Jones's Diary, I Don't Know How She Does It, et al.
Pritchard's Late Bloomer is about "a strapped divorcee with a teenage daughter, who stumbles into ghostwriting Native American romance novels, only to find her life imitating art," she says.
Everyday Objects is "the story of a secretary who really wants to be a filmmaker but is a little too nice for her own good, and what happens when she starts to pursue her dreams," Sheehan says.
Each book features a female protagonist ambiguously autobiographical: Pritchard does live with a Native American man and two daughters; Sheehan was a secretary with greater ambitions.
"It took me five years to write The Anxiety of Everyday Objects," Sheehan says. "Since the book features a secretary, for whom the lunch hour is a sacred but oddly nebulous perk, I should mention that I wrote the first draft during a year's worth of lunch hours when I was working a 9-to-5 job in Washington, D.C."
Sheehan, 40, was born in France and moved around with her Army father. She joined UA in 2000. Pritchard, 55, grew up near San Francisco and moved to New Mexico before coming to ASU 12 years ago.
When The Republic began a conversation with the two writers, one of the first questions was about chick lit.
SHEEHAN: I'm a woman and it's a book, so is it chick lit? There's something derisive about the term, at the same time as it apparently sells books to a certain audience. I hope to be taken seriously as a writer first, with my gender coming second. I would imagine most women feel that way.
PRITCHARD: It isn't a competition. I am often asked to assign a category to my writing. By industry standards of readership, I write literary fiction. Interestingly, my new novel, Late Bloomer, which plays with the genre of the romance novel, was just given a four-star review in Romantic Times magazine. . . . Admittedly, reading about my novel alongside other reviewed books such as Hot Nights in Killarney and Wedded Bliss gave me pause, yet I was also strangely delighted. Here was an entire audience of readers I had never before communicated with or reached.
REPUBLIC: Beyond the difference in genre preference, is there something special a woman brings to the literature?
PRITCHARD: Biology, first of all. We are "wired" differently. Then centuries of social conditioning, the constraints, legal and otherwise, of living female in a patriarchal, power-and-violence-based culture. Still, I have written from male points of view and have thoroughly enjoyed doing so.
SHEEHAN: I write about the female experience because it's the one I'm most familiar with, and about which I have something to say. For instance, in Anxiety of Everyday Objects, I track the life of a secretary. Being a good secretary is a lot like being a "good girl" in a more traditional sense, and I found that relationship between work, culture and personality fascinating and disconcerting.
PRITCHARD: In Late Bloomer, I was exploring answers to my own question of what is romance, and how does it differ from love? I needed to answer this for myself, so it made sense my protagonist would be female. My own experiences in romance, always initially exhilarating, had usually turned disastrous or otherwise ephemeral, yet I believed (and still believe) deeply in love.
SHEEHAN: I can think of so many men who write in profoundly different ways from each other, and the same goes for women. There's probably a whole set of sensibilities that is more likely to be male, and another set that is more likely to be female, but I don't feel particularly driven to make the distinctions.
REPUBLIC: With the art - and literary - world so caught up in identity politics, does this mean that women write, as an interest group, primarily for women? Is Toni Morrison only for Black women? Are the big Russian novels only for Russians?
PRITCHARD: I've heard it said that every writer must write at least one book that is, in essence, his or her autobiography. In the same way, I believe it is essential for cultures and ethnicities to define and understand themselves through the arts.
SHEEHAN: Reading is about entering new worlds, for me, and so I like to read books about all kinds of things, by all kinds of people. Just because I write about a female protagonist doesn't mean men won't adore - simply adore, mind you - my writing.
REPUBLIC: So you don't have to be a woman to write a convincing female character?
PRITCHARD: Tolstoy wrote Anna Karenina. That is my best answer. At one point in my life, re-reading the novel for the umpteenth time, I wept, awed that a man could so brilliantly understand and convey the complexities and subtleties of a woman's (my) heart and psyche.
REPUBLIC: You both sound like you have a great deal of faith in fiction.
SHEEHAN: Telling stories is a part of who we are as humans. I just have to observe my daughter and her made-up worlds to know that. I think stories are in our souls, and we crave them, both as a way to make sense of our own lives and to discover other people and theirs.
PRITCHARD: Stories are our essential instructions for survival, teaching us not only how to survive as a species, as individuals, but perhaps more importantly, how to thrive as human beings, how to connect more deeply, through empathy and compassion, to one another, and how to become more humane.
Reach the reporter at (602) 444-8823