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The Wonderful Preface to Henry Sugar (One More)
I wrote a brief intro to my Jezebel essay on The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More about boys and Shelf Discovery that I meant to go on for three sentences and of course went on for 65. (That’s what happens when you drink three coffees and get on the Acela w/computer.) It is mainly an excercise in un-peeving myself so I can turn to one of my FAVORITE BOOKS in the world without feeling like I’m handing over the Sudetenlands. I’ve posted all 19 paragraphs here. To get back to the far less militant Jezebel essay, click on link at bottom.
A brief – in true Dahlian fashion – note on the text:
Since the publication of Shelf Discovery, I have been cheered and amazed by the lovely and wide-ranging response to the book. Slightly surprising, however, has been the mild rebuke I have received from various quarters for not including books quote unquote for boys. (If I do not mistake myself, I lost a whole actual star for it here!) When I started Fine Lines, I did not conceive of it as a column quote unquote for girls, though it a) appears on a women’s web site and b) does, in fact, involve books mostly read by girls.
But, excuse me – so what if I had? While I am not inordinately bothered when I am asked if I also have book recommendations for boys – that is, after all, a natural enough question, though does ANYONE ask Chuck Klosterman if he has music recommendations for women? – I am quietly outraged at how apparently it is against the law to not talk specifically about boys and what they might need/enjoy/prosper from for five seconds.
Because I would like to point out – pointing! Pointing! — that the YA and midlist markets are dominated by women because that is, in the main, where the publishing industry has slotted women. In the corner of worthy literature, you found what I was made to read grade school to high school: Of Mice and Men, The Great Gatsby, The Red Pony, The Old Man and the Sea, The Pearl, A Light in the Forest, Black Boy, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Ethan Frome, Native Son, Moby Dick, and Hamlet. Worthy books all – but, you know, most of the women in them wind up dead.
Shelf Discovery is a memoir of my particular history but it is also a memoir of an actual history, one in which when I read Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, The Bluest Eye, Jacob Have I Loved, or Me Me Me Me Me, I found them on my own, whether from my mother’s shelves or the teeny bookstore that thank God stocked most of the works found in SD. As I know from your letters, many of you also read all the books we can, if we must, consider books for boys as well as the summer reading list canon you find above, but no one has forgotten about I, Robot or Dandelion Wine or The Outsiders, and that’s why you don’t find them in SD. My general mission is to write about books no one (allegedly) remembers, or that never receive (in my view) enough credit. Any perceived discrimination is not a reflection of my bias, but a bias visited on me.
Or you could just put it like Nomie did.
Well-said, Lizzie!
I’m not a big fan of playing the “you’re so privileged, shut up” card, but honestly, that’s what’s appropriate here. I went to an all-girls high school, and literature classes always felt vaguely absurd — we were reading and discussing books that generally had to do with young men, not young women, and the few books in the syllabus that did deal with young women were of the Bronte/Austen variety. In short, romance stories.
‘Any perceived discrimination is not a reflection of my bias, but a bias visited on me.’ — ain’t that the truth.
Lizzie, thank you thank you for standing up for the YA literature that you write about. As you so eloquently pointed out, almost all the books we read in school are about boys and men growing up. That, of course, isn’t true of every book in the syllabus, but neither is it true that you only covered books about girls – it seems to me that Bridge to Terabithia (a book I had to read in elementary school and totally fell in love with) is as much, if not more, about a boy as it is about a girl.
Demanding that you change your reading history to include more books young boys might read is not only ridiculous, but unfair. We read what we read and often we read those books because they covered issues not discussed in the classroom (like rape, lesbianism, crushes, whatever).
Beyond all that, the idea of gendering books is total nonsense. Target audiences are one thing, but to say a boy couldn’t enjoy any of the books in SD is to say that no woman could ever enjoy Hemingway or Faulkner, which is pure and utter nonsense.
Lizzie and I got into this subject at length — with civil disagreement and exuberance! — during her recent appearance at The Bat Segundo Show, with Lizzie believing that these prejudgments had to do with patriarchy and me believing that the lack of inclusiveness had to do with elitism. (Lizzie kindly referred to me as “not a patriarchy, but an individual.”)
Either way, I reject the angle of the Double X article and I maintain that the presumed self-doubt has more to do with one’s own inherent (and needless) reading prejudices, which should try and cover as many perspectives as possible. (And if Chuck Klosterman is now the apparent litmus test for music picks, please don’t have me bust out the shotgun.) I was a young boy who read boy and girl titles, and never really kept score on the gender front (although girls would sometimes give me suspicious looks when they saw the occasional pink cover). Then again, I also played with Barbies. So what do I know?
[...] Recently, I once again shared airspace with the lively and fun Ed Champion of the Bat Segundo show, who, amidst much chatter about redheadedness, was one of the many men who have challenged, in RANK FINGER-POINTING outrage, my alleged needless gender focus, to the tune of half a show. (Over coffee I had brewed for him, I might add.) Ed’s objection to my book was along the lines that he a) once had long hair and b) was not a violent mill-worker, and had thus somehow become the object of discrimination. I will simply direct all further inquiries here. [...]
I’m in the process of getting my Master’s in library science, and I paid a large tuition bill to be told almost exactly the same thing in my children’s literature class:
We must have books for BOYS! Boys will feel LEFT OUT if we have books about FEELINGS! Girls will read books about boys but boys won’t read books about girls so you should mostly buy books about boys for children’s libraries.
I asked them what a pre-op transgender gay teen would read and nearly flunked. And I have the same professor again this semester.
Very well said!
This is a soapbox I am very familiar with. The UK’s Carnegie medal shortlist this year contains entirely boy-protagonists. A teacher wrote an article recently that said there weren’t enough books out there for boys – and so many of the books with girl protagonists could JUST HAVE EASILY changed the protag to a boy so boys would read it. What kind of boys are we raising if we’re telling them that girls’ stories aren’t important?
I visited an all-girls high school recently where every single class text from year 7 to year 12 had a male protagonist.
In Australia, our biggest literary award is the Miles Franklin. It’s named for a woman who had to pretend to be a man in order to get published. And this year there were no female protagonists on the shortlist.
So hurrah for Fine Lines and people reading Good Books, regardless of who the protagonist is!