skygiants

My feelings about Margaret Atwood are complicated and go something like this:

FIRST HAND: Well, you thought The Handmaid's Tale was awesome when you read it in your high school library, right?
SECOND HAND: But it makes you kind of unhappy that she is all "ewwww, don't call my books science fiction." Seriously, what is with that attitude about sff?
OTHER HAND: Okay yes, but that aside, she does write in interesting ways about feminist issues!
OTHER OTHER HAND: But for a book written by a feminist author, man were you disappointed with the whole exotic orientalism thing going on in Oryx and Crake.
BACK TO THE FIRST HAND: But otherwise Oryx and Crake was pretty interesting, wasn't it?
SECOND HAND: Interesting, yes. But very difficult to connect to! Likewise, Cat's Eye (which you cannot now remember anything about.) Basically there seems to be kind of a disconnect between the way you see the world and the way Margaret Atwood does, which may mean that you are not the ideal audience for her.
FIRST HAND: Possibly you are sort of unfair to judge that off of three books.
CONCLUDING HAND: And yet, do you really have a strong wish to read a fourth? No? Thought not.

But then schiarire recommended me Negotiating With the Dead: A Writer On Writing, so I ended up reading a fourth after all.

My thoughts: the author of these essays is someone I like a lot better than I usually like the author of Atwood's fiction. I could have a good time hanging out with the author of the essays! They're clever and funny and grounded, and at times very incisive; overall they're a lot of fun to read, and I'm glad I did. But there's still a fundamental difference between the way I see things - in this case, the idea of being a writer - and the way Margaret Atwood does. Much of this book is about the writer-identity, the myths and mystique that surrounds that. Atwood spends a lot of time deflating the mystique, but - well, areyoumymemmy put it really well in an email conversation we were having last week, so I'm just going to quote her: she doesn't buy into the usual glamorization myths but she's sort of created her own (funnier and more realistic!) myths to replace them and they're actually pretty important to her, despite all the self-deprecation.

And it's not that I don't understand the impulse, because goodness only knows I get all shiny-eyed sometimes at the idea of being a Writer, a Real Writer, With Capital Letters Involved. But by this point in my life I find it hard to think of writing as some grand business of negotiating with the process of death, or descending into the underworld and coming out with a story; it's hard to think so self-importantly about something you do every day. I mean, if you want to write literary theory and argue that that is what writing is, then sure, fine, it's an interesting theory. But on a day-to-day basis - well, almost all of you guys are writers to some degree or another (just keeping a journal like this makes you a writer to some degre or another, I would say), so you can tell me if you disagree. But I don't think Writer-ness is a solid identity that you inhabit, like putting on a cloak: "now I am a Writer, and however petty my everyday identity may be, when I am wearing my Writer Cloak I perform the grand business of negotiating with the dead." I don't think it works that way. And if I don't have an alternate interpretation to provide, that is mostly because I'm sort of dubious about the concept of defining The Writer and The Writing Process at all.