Maeve Binchy, who had no children upon whom to lavish her affections, and thus could know nothing about human emotions.
Well, this is a lovely and moving tribute to a much-loved writer who’s passed away.
Among the obituaries for the much-loved Irish novelist Maeve Binchy, few omitted to mention that she was childless. Once, that was the norm for successful women writers. These days, when even lesbian authors such as the Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy and Emma Donoghue, writer of the Booker-nominated Room, have children, it is sufficiently rare to be remarked upon.
Yet the debate about whether motherhood and writing are compatible is still an issue discussed by magazines such as Mslexia, a specialist publication for female authors, and at almost any gathering of women writers. Do you miss out on something essential about the human condition if you eschew childbearing? Or is the pram in the hall, as Cyril Connolly said, the enemy of promise?
As STFU, Parents said on Facebook, Amanda Craig has mommy-jacked Maeve Binchy’s obituary.
Is the effect of having children on one’s time for creativity a legitimate topic for discussion? Certainly. But Craig is not advancing that discussion. Instead, she’s using the occasion of Binchy’s death to take digs at writers who are women without children. Not only do such writers luxuriate in free time (as much time as men, she notes, which raises the question of why men with children have as much time as men without), but their writing betrays a lack of understanding of human emotion. Because — say it with me now — you just can’t really understand what it is to love until you become a mother.
I have often wondered whether the Orange Prize should be renamed the Navel Orange Prize, given the difference in time and energy available to women writers before and after motherhood. If any lingering prejudice against the female sex can be assumed to have vanished, which is debatable, there is no practical difference between a man and a woman writer when the latter has not had children.
All novelists who have had children are acutely aware that the very best of our sex — Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontës, Virginia Woolf — were childless. We all worry about doing two things badly rather than one thing well. Some novelist mothers, such as Antonia White, have been denounced as monsters of indifference by their children. I myself have a stern rule about not being interrupted when writing unless a child has broken a leg — but it isn’t, of course, obeyed. Even if you wanted to, you can’t ignore screams of pain, rage and misery.
Yet that same pain, rage and misery is also hugely enriching. It starts with your own, for even with pain relief, the shock of giving birth changes you for ever. The feelings of intense vulnerability (your own and, more importantly, your child’s), passionate love, joy, bewilderment and exhaustion are unlike anything else.
Maeve Binchy’s warmth and interest in other people included their families, but I can’t help but feel that her detailed portraits of ordinary life might not have been so predicated on the relationships between men and women had she had a child. “We’re nothing if we’re not loved,” she said in an interview. “When you meet somebody who is more important to you than yourself, that has to be the most important thing in life, really.”
No matter what your experience of adult love, there is nothing as strong as the bond between a mother and a child. One reason why so many contemporary women writers have focused on this is that it is new territory, precisely because the great female writers of the past had not experienced it.
As someone in the comments to this story noted, there are two people involved in the mother-child bond, and some of them grow up to be childless female writers. So to say that childless female writers have never experienced this bond is overstating things.
There is a reason that the great female writers of the past had not experienced motherhood: because they really, truly did have to choose between writing and being a mother. Women had little autonomy unless they had their own money.
Of course, the idea that women aren’t full human beings unless they’re mothers is not a new one. Woolf, Austen, et al.? They all experienced being viewed as less-than-fully human. Let’s look at the example that Craig gives for Austen’s shallow understanding of the human condition:
Had Austen, for instance, had a child I wonder whether her focus on romantic love would have survived; childless Anne Elliot’s saintliness as an aunt in Persuasion would certainly have been mitigated by very different feelings.
Austen had the opportunity to observe families up close as a dependent single woman, and indeed wrote about them. But given that marriage and family were central to a woman’s societal acceptance and security in her milieu, and that making a bad choice in partner could be disastrous, was it really so unusual that she would focus on the process of finding that partner? Craig glosses over the sharpness of Austen’s observations about the pursuit of marriage and the stakes involved for women of little means. Her writing is not all hearts and flowers, after all. Her characters make mistakes, judge poorly, but eventually figure out that character is important, as well as money.
Also, she seems to be oblivious to the fact that the whole point of Anne Elliot’s saintliness as an aunt was that she had no other role in society, haven given up on finding a husband, so she was at the family’s disposal (and, though Craig does not credit this, she loved her nephews). She also found acceptance within her in-laws’ family that her own family refused to provide her because as an unmarried daughter who was not needed to serve as the lady of the house, she was unwanted. Even among the Uppercross family, she was surplus, and was acutely aware of that fact. Sort of like Austen herself. Had Austen been a married woman with children, would she have been able to present Anne’s dilemma so sympathetically?
Women without children can see and feel human life just as acutely and can imagine the feelings of parents convincingly.
How very generous of you. Craig goes on to compare Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall with A.S. Byatt’s Possession on the subject of writing about the loss of a child. Mantel can not have children due to endometriosis; Byatt’s child was killed in an accident at the age of 11. Byatt, says Craig, “goes much deeper into the emotions of it all, the tigerish nature of maternal love, presumably because she could draw on her own life.” Leaving aside the fact that Mantel was focusing on a father’s love rather than a mother’s, it is no guarantee that feeling deeply or having experienced something necessarily provides a writer with the ability to convey those emotions on the page. Moreover, Mantel writes historical fiction. Why no criticism of her ability to write about Tudor England, not having experienced it directly?
Binchy, whose first novel was about a 20-year friendship between two women, didn’t need the experience of motherhood to write about love and friendship in a way that charmed millions. But she might have dug deeper, charming less but enlightening more, had she done so.
Remember, gals: you are unable to feel unless you’ve birthed a child.
Boom.
Ugh. I had a feeling there’d be something about Hilary Mantel in there, because she’s one of my favorite writers these days (I loved both Wolf Hall and the sequel, Bringing Up the Bodies), and because I know that she’s gotten flack before for being a female novelist without children.
And I happen to think that the way she portrays Thomas Cromwell’s grief at the death of his two daughters — something that continually resonates with him over the years as he’s reminded of them — was every bit as “deep” as one could possibly want.
Of course, I’m sure she would have done better at portraying Cromwell’s feelings if only she were a man! Or, as you say, had lived in Tudor England.
By Christ’s bloody shroud (to quote one of Mantel’s characters), what arrant nonsense.
Remember, gals: you are unable to feel unless you’ve birthed a child.
Well damn. There goes my chance at having fulfilling human interactions!
My favorite Maeve Binchy novel, The Glass Lake, is primarily about the relationship between a mother and a daughter, and how that relationship evolves despite/ because of their respective romantic involvements. Clearly, Binchy was able to comprehend (and beautifully illustrate) this mysterious and mystical bond that she *sob* never experienced. Except, you know, with her own mother.
Also, as zuzu points out, Craig apparently missed the point of Persuasion. Which is an awesome and surprisingly subversive book.
This Amanda Craig person can go fuck herself in the ear with a spork, said the childfree writer.
hopefully she’ll find that rage enriching
What a fucked up article. She said, insightfully.
It’s also perpetuating my least favorite idea about writers, one that is condescending and utterly dismissive of the whole idea of fiction, that one writes best about the experiences one has lived through. Um…the point of fiction? Is that it’s, well, fiction. Angela Carter never really performed in a nineteenth-century circus as a winged lady. Pat Barker is not, I’m quite sure, a gay English man who fought in WWI. And yet their books are awesomely moving. Fiction is not a diary; it’s not supposed to be.
Yuck.
Maeve Binchy was a wonderful author with a real talent for character development that was realistic and wonderfully insightful. Sounds like Craig has got a bad case of making up stupid crap in the hopes that more people will read my useless article.
I mean, I was once assured by a bunch of high school students that Lewis Carroll just had to have taken hallucinogenics (no; an opium derivative, I think laudanum, for headaches, and that rarely, but that’s all) because how else could he have thought up the Alice books? I suggested imagination; they pooh-poohed the idea–who would think up growing and shrinking? I gestured to the history of fairy tales about very small and very large people. They remained convinced that not only was he a druggie, but that because the protagonist in my story had a couple of tabs of acid in a baggie in her jacket pocket, I too tripped frequently as a teenager. Nothing I said shook this erroneous belief.
Urh, and then there’s this myth about a female artist being lost to the arts once she gives birth to a sprout. With the pseudo-psychoanalytic explanation that once she’s given birth, she has no intrinsict drive to produce art.
Some times ago, I heard on the radio Mâkhi Xenakis telling about how her “fellow” artists mourned her having a child, because her art was so good, and now it would necessarily suck.
Magic thought seems to be hard to defeat.
What in the frilly heck is this fuckery? And what’s with all the “female sex” and “the best of our sex” verbiage? Is the word “women” insufficient now? Are we in a Victorian drawing room?
So, to use an example of a male author who is (deservedly) beloved by critics, David Mitchell can write about a 16th century Japanese midwife, a future clone, a member of a doomsday cult, an 1800s explorer, a Japanese teenager, an elderly Chinese tea shop owner, a noncorpum entity, a physicist, an elderly publisher, a Dutch East India Company clerk, and many more, without having these experiences, and everyone is going to go on and on about his understanding of the human condition, etc. And no one will ever speculate about ways in which his fatherhood might have shaped his writing. But a woman is incapable of a deeper understanding of a wide range of emotions and experiences unless she’s been a mother? That’s some bullshit.
Man, if all these sanctimonious parents were incapable of experiencing the full range of human emotions before they had a baby, you’ve gotta wonder what that says about them.
As an aside, sometimes feeling too much gooey emotion about a subject is a liability that can lead good writers to produce the most maudlin crap.
Did she really use Jane freaking Austin to point out the FAILINGS of childless women writers? Did that just happen? (flips a table)
I think every experience we lived through changes us and perhaps makes us better people and writers.
Hijacking an obituary is tacky.
@Michelle,
Yeah. She did. (Flips another table. And an armoire.)
How did William Shakespeare, a person of no particular lineage, figure out the inner workings of princes and kings? He even seemed to relate to some of his female characters, like Rosalind and Portia.
Maeve Binchy was an incomplete writer because she didn’t bear children; mothers are incomplete writers because even if they have time to write, baby-making hormones mess with their heads. To be any good, a writer needs that key credential south of his belt buckle. /snark
This post and the comments have done the absolutely unthinkable — restored my faith in the goodness of humanity.
Best. Friday. Present. Ever.
(And I have never run a post-apocalyptic cafe with an AI program, but I’m still writing about it).
dunno like. me mum was always on about how she felt really protective of us and stuff. maybe there is something about the mother/chikd bond that is stronger than the others? i mean from what i’ve herd talking to mothers and even fathers, they look at the world in a whole new light after having kids and are much more affected by it emotionally. for example my mum was totally crying when whatstheirnames won that won that rowing thing earlier today.
having said that tho you hardly see male writers evaluated based on their parenthood or lack thereof so obviously this is bs. but still there’s something to be said about having the experience of having children. I dont have children myself dont really plan to but there must be something pretty special about it, since it’s what keeps the species going
So Jane Austen was one of womankind’s greatest authors because she didn’t have kids, but she was a lousy author because she… didn’t have kids.
Got it.
What an incredibly tacky thing to bring up in an obituary.
Obviously, both women with and without children are missing essential life experiences that make them complete human beings. We’re all so half-baked, we should really stop reproducing. (Snark.)
That is a terrible thing to say for all the reasons listed above, but also because Maeve Binchy was quite open about the fact that her and her husband had very much wanted children, but they were never able to conceive.
Also, generally crap to demean such a phenomenally successful author. Her characters actually felt like real flesh and blood people, which is a great literary gift that functions independently of the workings of your uterus.
I’ve read many Maeve Binchy books ever since being hooked on Light a Penny Candle as an 11 year old (although I hated the ending and slung it across the room) and they used to be passed around three generations of my family. RIP Maeve.
Funny, I’m childless as well as a writer but I’ve never conflated the two. Indeed, I’ve always thought having children sounded like a lot of work, but if you love children or want them dearly, then the work is something you also want to do. This is just something that was missing in me – no maternal instinct. We all know women – or people in general – who juggle several responsibilities and still manage to achieve in one field or the other.
As for the idea of the mother-daughter bond giving a special insight: my mother hated every minute of her parental status. She had four of us. She drank herself into oblivion and told me in no uncertain terms not to ever get married or have any kids, since she found the experience to be miserable. I just don’t feel very bonded. She’s deceased, but I didn’t feel much of a bond before she died, either. This was reciprocal. If you don’t feel the warmth, if you don’t have that maternal urge, the bond will not happen and you will create at least two miserable people, perhaps more.
They remained convinced that not only was he a druggie, but that because the protagonist in my story had a couple of tabs of acid in a baggie in her jacket pocket, I too tripped frequently as a teenager. Nothing I said shook this erroneous belief.
[content note: mention of sexual assault] As an undergrad, I had a creative writing professor who had, as a teenager, worked in an older relative’s factory in Brooklyn. It was a doll factory, and he used some very striking imagery involving machinery using a plastic extrusion process to make doll’s heads in the exposition of a short story. The story involved a teenage boy working there who was sexually assaulted by an older worker. When my professor’s relatives read the story, it took him days to convince them that he had not been raped at work in his relative’s doll factory. He told this story to us as an illustration of the very point that what we were learning to write was fiction.
“Of all great writers, Jane Austen is the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness.” (Virginia Woolf)
From Anne being claimed as a good (though in an improper way) being better than her being rejected as no good at all to her immediately being thrust into the position of mediator to Anne’s being left in solitary possession when the family all rush to Louisa in Lyme, the Uppercross section is superb and adds a lot to the point of the societal change in progress.
I’ll probably flip this and lose sleep wondering how having borne a child was so essential to anything Muriel Spark ever wrote. The author of Ms Binchy’s obituary reminds me a good deal of the self-proclaimed “English Rose” type in Dame Muriel’s Loitering with Intent.
If women who don’t have children can’t do art because they don’t understand love
And women who do have children can’t do art because they’re mothers
Then women can’t do art.
Good to know.
(Persuasion is my favorite Jane Austen novel.)
I really can’t believe that article was allowed to be published. Insulting to women without children, to men with and without children and just a horrible comment on Maeve Binchy. Yuck!
Wow. Fuck this noise. What a petty, horrible and confused piece of writing Craig has managed to present as an “obituary.”
From now on, I demand that all obituaries for male authors are turned into a referendum on fatherhood, and whether children adversely effect their ability to write or provide them with a greater understanding of the human condition.
I have to ask, how exactly is Craig defining “female writer” here? I’m 24. I’m not a mother. I am most definitely a female writer. If I decided tomorrow that I wanted to be a mother, I would get a lot of backlash from family and friends, because I’d be essentially abandoning my career for children. What does Craig suggest I do? I guess I’ll continue writing “charming but unenlightened” prose until I am of socially-acceptable child-bearing age, and then I can abandon my career in order to experience the Deep Magical Spiritual Mother-Daughter bond that my silly “adult love” experiences can never approach? And then, after I have pop one out, I guess all my work prior to motherhood is rendered invalid? Is that how it works?
*sigh*
Someday, I will tell someone I don’t want to have kids, and the conversation won’t go like this:
Me: I don’t want to have kids.
Person: When you’re older…
Me: No.
Person: Just wait until…
Me: NO.
Do we need to trot out Joanna Russ’s “How to Suppress Women’s Writing” AGAIN? Or is this so-called obituary writer THAT stupid?
*bangs head repeatedly against desk*
So, women should all be writing about having kids, and we fail at being writers and women and women writers if we’re not doing that because we don’t have kids? And here I thought women, like men, were allowed to write about whatever we chose, regardless of our life experiences.
Silly me.
“you just can’t really understand what it is to love until you become a mother. ”
What utter nonsense. The Maternity Mafia is at it again.
I’m a mother and having a child essentally ruined my life. I can’t be the only one. My daughter was born a year before the contraceptive pill became available. I would never have had a child if I’d had a choice in the matter.
I love my daughter but not in any way I’ve ever seen described. None of that “the moment I saw her, I knew what it was to love someone more than I loved myself.”
If that’s you, great.
Studies consistently show that women with children are somewhat less happy than women without children. Reactions to these studies are always from people trying to justify their choices as “best.” Only people with kids make such a fuss about how you must have children to understand whatever.
Maeve Binchy was a very talented writer. Her descriptions of the various forms of love ring true to me. When you look at great writers, male and female, their backgrounds and experiences are all over the map — they have damn little in common.
I’ve never read anything by Maeve Binchy; any suggestions what to start with?
Nimue – A Circle of Friends is a good place to start.
cool, thanks! This discussion made me want to check her out. I’d avoided her previously because I thought she was some sort of Nora Roberts-ish writer, seems I’ve been missing out!
Of course having or not having children changes a person’s thoughts and feelings about some things. The same could be said about having pets or a specific make of car or numerous other personal experiences. Our personal experiences tend to have great impacts on our feelings and opinions. But, seriously? To go so far as to say that she in any way lacking simple because she did not reproduce? What a load of crap!
Also, in case noone has said this already, was she childless or childfree? There is a BIG difference. If she had wanted and tried to have children, but was unable to for whatever reason, that would make her “childless”. However, if she chose not to have children for whatever reason, that would make her childfree. Being childless would be a sad/unfortunate thing that many many people have and will endure. Being childfree is personal decision that isn’t even remotely sad and is most likely a very happy one for the person who made it. Julia Child was childfree, and at least from an outside perspective, seemed to be quite happy in that choice. The movie “Julie and Julia” portrayed her as being childless, but that was not accurate.
@Nimue,
Circle of Friends and The Glass Lake are both excellent. I’d also recommend her short story collection The Copper Beech.
Jade – I did mention it above, but as far as I’m aware, she was childless, which makes this so called “obituary” especially cruel.
It seems Craig never got the “autobiographical fallacy” talk in English class.
If I were a terrible person, I would attempt to argue–with as much validity as the person who wrote the original detestable article–that parenthood actually lessens your ability to experience the range of human emotions because in order to survive the experience of parenthood, parents must forget what it was to be a child.
But I won’t, because I have no evidence and it’s a preposterous generalization. Craig should have held her prejudiced tongue too.
Craig seems totally self-absorbed, hence making an OBITUARY all about herself and how she’s a superior writer to the putative subject of the obituary. I was talking with a friend about this article, and she said that apparently back in the 90′s Craig’s ex-boyfriend sued her for libel. She’d written a very thinly-fictionalized version of him into a roman a clef. I think it’s safe to say her sense of personal boundaries is blurry.
It seems grossly inappropriate, though, especially for a respectable paper like the Telegraph (yes, it’s nicknamed the Torygraph, but it doesn’t usually go in for cheap muckraking like the tabloids do). Craig seems to have no sense of personal boundaries, but surely her editor would’ve had to approve the piece. I wouldn’t be particularly surprised if her editor knew damn well it would be controversial, and approved it to drive up their page views. Which, if so, mission accomplished. Yay them.
The only good thing about the obit is that at least Binchy isn’t around to read it and be hurt by it. I would think that her surviving family and friends are probably furious, particularly since they would know damn well what kind of pain she and her husband went through with infertility.
Not that it would be a MORE appropriate obit if Binchy were child free rather than childless (I like that wording, Jade). It would still be inappropriate, but there wouldn’t be that added soupçon of cruelty. I suppose it’s entirely possible Craig simply didn’t realize that Binchy was childless. But it’s still inappropriate.
And Amanda Craig has gone from a novelist I’d never heard of to a novelist whose books I will actively avoid. Not just because she seems so self-absorbed and boundary-free, but because I don’t think I could possibly read the work of someone who so fundamentally misses the whole POINT of Persuasion and the rest of Jane Austen’s body of work. My friend quoted a poem about Austen from W.H. Auden:
*flips the internet over*
Hey! I felt feelingses! And me, a soulless automaton too.
Not to mention that her “Hah hah rename it the Navel Orange prize!” falls flatter than a flat thing, because the Orange prize does not exist anymore. It went poof, because they’ve dropped sponsorship. In your face sanctimummy!
Sleep tight Maeve. You touched hearts and minds.
The impression that I got from the book she wrote with her nephew is that she wanted children but was not devastated when no children appeared.
Julia Child wrote about her infertility (repeat miscarriage) in her biography written with her nephew. She was rather matter of fact about it, and was definitely disappointed, but didn’t let it devastate her permanently. She and her husband were definitely not CFBC.
Good to know there is NO WAY women can produce great art. Thanks a lot. Also thanks for demeaning the memory of a great writer.
Jesus gay, did it not occur that richness of the human condition is perhaps produced by varied life experiences, and that those need not be the same across all novelists with the same bits?
You know what I failed to notice during all the Gore Vidal obituaries lately? Any hand-wringing about his childlessness and the effects it must have had on his abilities as an artist and an intellectual.
I am a mother, and I certify that this person is completely nuts. Jane Austen knew more about the pure love an adult has for the child or children in their care than my mother and me put together (a low bar, admittedly). Unlike this idiot, I have read Persuasion. Reading e.g. Mansfield Park taught me that she also knew that this love isn’t always there.
[...] a much better writer if only she had followed nature’s calling and popped out a kid or two. Feministe criticises this piece of post-mortem guilt-tripping as a shameful attempt to denounce the value of art by women who never [...]
Great post, zuzu. I am very interested in the subject (I can’t imagining even starting a blog with a child still in the house), but certainly not at the expense of such a talented writer’s obit. Just plain rude!
Gore Vidal has just passed and nobody is suggesting he missed out on something indescribable by not being a parent. But then for men, as you know, its a whole different thang. Right.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. (sigh)
Daisy and Alexandra – that’s because Vidal was a person, not a woman!
Funny, I’m childless as well as a writer but I’ve never conflated the two. Indeed, I’ve always thought having children sounded like a lot of work, but if you love children or want them dearly, then the work is something you also want to do. This is just something that was missing in me – no maternal instinct. We all know women – or people in general – who juggle several responsibilities and still manage to achieve in one field or the other.
As for the idea of the mother-daughter bond giving a special insight: my mother hated every minute of her parental status. She had four of us. She drank herself into oblivion and told me in no uncertain terms not to ever get married or have any kids, since she found the experience to be miserable. I just don’t feel very bonded. She’s deceased, but I didn’t feel much of a bond before she died, either. This was reciprocal. If you don’t feel the warmth, if you don’t have that maternal urge, the bond will not happen and you will create at least two miserable people, perhaps more.
Do you emphasize in fiction, non-fiction, poetry?
I’ve been writing since I was 4. I have four kids now. So obviously, I have a significant body of work from before I was a mother and from after.
The only thing that changed is my interest in writing about parents and their experiences. I may have improved as a writer since I was 29 and childless, but only because age and practice should hopefully improve everyone’s skills, not because I suddenly became aware of an entire new dimension of emotion.
To be fair… I *did* become aware of an entire new dimension of emotion, when I had infants (my first two were technically stepkids, so I never had the whole infancy thing with them.) But I’m not a particularly maudlin person and I write a lot about emotions I’ve never experienced (the grief of a close loved one’s death, enraged jealousy, romantic love so overwhelming you feel it defines you, Stockholm syndrome), so it’s not like you could tell from reading my work that I discovered these feelings. I also became aware of the range of emotions caused by depression; does it make a person a worse writer if they have never suffered suicidal despair, or if they’ve never had a brain malfunction where the concept of love disappeared from the universe for several awful hours? One could just as easily make the case that a person who’s never wanted desperately to kill themselves is as lacking in the full range of human emotion as a person who’s never had a child, and it would honestly be just as fair (which is to say not at all), given that depression tends to destroy your ability to actually get any writing done while you’re in the middle of it.
Amanda Craig is full of crap. Maybe she was a crap writer who couldn’t empathize fully with people before she had kids, but that does not describe most of us. Having kids changed my writing only in the ways that any new experience can change you, a difference more akin to a quantitative difference than a qualitative one… the range of what you can write about from personal experience expands. Which would also happen if you traveled the world by boat.
In the acknowledgements section in one of the Twilight books, Stephanie Meyers apologizes to her young sons, saying that she was sorry for all the take out dinners they had to eat while she was finishing up the books.
I think that about sums up my feelings on this discussion about kids/no kids/great writing/not great writing. This is a redundant “can women have it all” discussion.
Also, I’m sure there were plenty of dude writers who were hated by their kids.
“you are unable to feel unless you’ve birthed a child.”
And that is why there has NEVER been a truly great male author… oh, wait…
@Athenia, it also really says something to me that she felt the need to apologize at all, like she wasn’t doing her properly motherly duties. There is such a strange stigma around the idea of parents (typically moms) feeding their kids fast food of frozen dinners instead of proper, real, home-cooked food! Never mind that most days I would rather eat pizza or chinese food than anything homemade, and never mind that the kids are still eating, which seems to be the most important thing. I also wonder how old her sons are, if they are old enough to make their own food? If not, the other points still stand.
So, what she’s saying is, men should never be fiction writers? ‘Cause that’s what I’m hearing!
Yeah, that and she has a husband!
My response to this article?
http://hungoverowls.tumblr.com/post/27405884932/do-you-smell-that-thats-the-smell-of-serious
Seriously, if you really feel the world needs more uterus-gazing novels by women with an obviously raging need for validation of their pedestal mommy-status (as opposed to writers who happen to be women and parents), Amanda Whatsis, fucking write them yourself instead of spending the time desecrating dead women’s graves. Fucking fuck.
You know who is a mother and doesn’t tend to focus on motherhood in many of her works? Anne Rice. Her son’s a writer, too, and a good one at that.
I’ve never written much about parenthood outside of facebook status updates regarding hilarious things my kid does (totally one of those moms). But then I prefer to write stories and poetry about love, lust, sex, betrayal, depression, substance abuse, suicide… I prefer tragedies, but I don’t really like to insert children into them. (No idea what this says about me as a mother, or as a writer.)
This made me so sad. The first book of hers that I read was Quentins. Firefly Summer and Tara Road are my favourite books by her.. especially Tara Road.
Rest easy, Maeve. :(
The only book I’ve read by Maeve Binchy is Echoes, which has a wonderful depiction of a young mother who might have post-natal depression or might simply be feeling trapped now she’s not expected to be doing anything but caring for the baby. Can’t describe what you haven’t experienced my arse.