Women Can't Write Fiction
Women writers and bias? What bias? But okay, many of my author friends who are female often talk about interviewers always asking about their personal lives, especially if the stories involve anything sexual. This is because people are naturally curious about women and what women do in their bedrooms and who they do it with, and female writers are not exempt from this curiosity. When I published my first book, majority of the reviews remarked on my appearance, one profile described my outfit in great detail and everyone wanted to know about my husband at the time. But that book was a memoir so in a way I was asking for it—especially like in those parts where I described a sexual assault that was later scrutinized and mocked in media (as it should’ve been, I was in a blackout partying with strangers, and that’s a poor excuse to expect not to get violated).
Although writing breathless memoirs is definitely a girl’s past time, some women attempt to write fiction. Emphasis on attempt. A very few women actually manage to write fiction that’s not based on something that really took place (Margaret Atwood is one. And that’s it). There’s nothing wrong with suspecting your favourite novel by a female author is, in fact, a thinly veiled memoir so questions about female author’s personal habits are totally okay. Most female writers are incapable of independent, original thought and when they write about interesting things that happen to their characters you can bet 100 percent that they’re drawing from real life. Take me, for example, writing about fucked up, often unhappy hetero relationships. I think it’s pretty obvious that I’m writing about myself, that, for example, the suburban wife on the autistic spectrum who asks her ex to punch her in the face is completely based on me, or that it is also me who suffered a traumatic miscarriage, which resulted in homicidal feelings toward my then-husband. I know I played a dirty trick on my readers by publishing a book written from a point of view of a male, but as one of my former lovers noted, the book was based on him and I stole his thoughts and parodied them rather unsuccessfully in that novel (true story: Three exes asked me if GUY was based on them, one called me after five years of silence when he heard me talking about the book on the radio). My friend Tory (they, them) has a new novel out today, called Autonomy, and you should all read it because, A, it’s a really good book, but more importantly, B, it’s full of tea since it’s based on their (most likely) real-life experience of falling in love with a robot, and who doesn’t want to read what it’s like for a person to want to do it with intelligent consciousness—one who’s lacking a dick? I’m hoping Tory is prepared to answer all those questions when they do publicity for the book. Chances that Tory’ll be asked about their literary influences or the writing process but what we really need to know is how the hell did they come up with a story like that if they didn’t draw from real life? Did some man gave them the idea? Probably some man did.
I am bracing myself for October when I will be talking about my book Possessed, which, as one male editor summed back to me, is a story about a woman fucking a ghost. Every former lover who had read the draft had found himself in my book; one even ended our friendship because he decided I was too injudicious about our affair and disclosed too much about it in the book; another man complained about a character’s penis being small because I clearly based that character on him and now everyone would know that his penis is small. (He asked me to change the penis size. I did.)
Anyway, imagine someone asking a real author, like a male author, if he had based his serious novel on something that happened to him? Ridiculous. That’s because male authors unlike female authors actually think and create; they’re not bogged down by what happens to them to the point of being incapable composing an original sentence and a unique story. Women are not so lucky but we are lucky people still want to publish us and give us platforms for us to take our little revenges on men who have done us wrong, and complain about our vaginas in public whilst not being accountable for indiscretion because we get to claim it’s all fiction.
Happy pub day, Victoria Hetherington! I think it’s cute that you wrote a book about a robot.