Is 2024 the year the #LitBro reads more women?

a book is a book is a book

About a month ago, I was at a place called Skylight books, which is this trendy bookstore in LA. They have red brick walls and a tree beneath a skylight (hence the name). But on the day I went in, you couldn’t see the tree or the skylight — the store was remodeling.

Instead, they only had a little side room open and two women taking orders at the counter. Beside the counter was a cart full of books with tickets tucked between the pages — you couldn’t browse for books under the big skylight, but you could call in a book and then come in and pick it up.

And well, I hated the no-browsing; but I loved the temporary set-up. Because you could actually see what books people were buying. They were right there on the stack.

Three people bought the memoir How to Say Babylon, one person bought Septology. Two people bought the Britney Spears memoir. Somebody bought Farewell to Arms, somebody (perhaps the same somebody) bought East of Eden. There was also something by Kafka on the cart. The Trial, I think.

And I can’t walk into an indie bookstore and not buy a book — it’s a guilt thing. So I came out with two: Drag Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk and Death Valley by Melissa Broder.¹ Both were books I wanted to read. I didn’t think about it until I set them on the table at lunch and my friend said “look at you, reading women.”

And I noticed that weird-cringy surge of woke satisfaction at my own literary diversity; I brushed it away — you don’t want to engage with that guy. But now, two weeks into the year, I’ve finished both those books (they were both great and brief) and I begin to wonder: should I make it a thing? Is this the year I’m going to read all the women? I don’t mean the women I’ve already read, not Woolf and Didion and Tartt and Rooney and Gertrude Stein and Patricia Highsmith. I mean new books by women. It’s not that I only read new books by men, I just don’t really read new books at all. A new book is like 27 dollars. I can’t afford them … and so I only buy like one new book a month.²

I remember reading that interview where the British novelist Bernardine Evaristo said that “[female] literature is one of the ways in which we explore narrative, we explore our ideas, we develop our intellect, our imagination. If we’re writing women’s stories, we’re talking about the experiences of women. We also talk about male experiences from a female perspective.”

I kept thinking about that quote when I was reading Death Valley, which is this sort of millennial stream-of-consciousness novel focused around a woman trying to survive as she’s injured and stranded in the desert. You spend a lot of time inside the narrator’s head (or exploring the narrative) in the same way you might in something from Celine or John Fante or Knut Hamsun. But it was different. Like revelatory different. While those narrators shade the world with embittered prose, Broder’s narrator was shockingly receptive to the world (a world that was actively killing her).

Here’s an example. First, something from Hunger by Hamsun to show what I mean by ‘embittered’ — this is the same kind of situation (and the same spot) in both books. The narrator is starving, at the end of their rope. Anyway, Hamsun:

“I was terribly hungry and didn’t know where to turn because of my shameless appetite. I twisted and turned on the bench and pressed my chest against my knees … I ripped a pocket out of my coat and started chewing on it, without any particular purpose, frowning angrily and staring into space with unseeing eyes. I heard some small children playing around me and sensed instinctively when a pedestrian went by. Otherwise I observed nothing."

And now this from Death Valley — instead of a pocket, the narrator puts a rock in her mouth to stave her thirst. Also, you should know that the rock has a playful personality (which would not happen in Hamsun) —

The rock is too big for my mouth, and no moisture is made (if anything, the arid rock sucks me dry like a sponge). I spit the rock out in the sand. I don’t pick it back up. I put the other rocks in my shorts pocket. I feel irritable and despairing. I hate everything (nature especially).

Both of them hate the world, but Hamsun *the man* is angry at it while Broder’s narrator *the woman* is irritable and despairing. And as I read Death Valley, I kept wondering is this how women think? Is this the kind of stuff that goes through their head? It must be, at least some of the time. Katie read the book and said she “totally related” to Broder’s narrator.

I’m not breaking any new ground here. Women are different from men, they write different things — they read different things. They need different things as humans and as writers. This is as old as A Room of One’s Own and it’s a lot older than that. A hundred-thousand-years-ago, men and women were probably drawing different things on the walls of caves.

And this is where I backtrack. This is where, when my friend says, “look at you, reading women,” I shrug and say it’s what you might call a happenstance. If I do read more women this year, it’s by happenstance. And maybe that’s not good enough. But I’m pushing myself into the happenstance. It’s not on purpose, but it’s not-not on purpose. It just so happens that all the new books I want to read/buy are written by women. Here’s the immediate list:

Vanessa Cuti — The Tip Line (because I really like her writing, the sort of gritty realism of it. I’ve already bought this one, but you should buy it too.)

Naomi Klein — Doppelganger (because everybody is talking about this)

Emma Cline — Guest (because I like Cheever’s story and I like Cline’s short fiction. I would have read this before, but my galley fell through)

Zadie Smith — The Fraud (because it’s Zadie Smith and she’s brilliant)

Ruth Madievsky — All Night Pharmacy (because I keep hearing buzz about this one)

The thing here, I think the most important thing, is that I’m not reading these books because they’re written by women. I’m reading them because they’re books I’m really excited to read.

And again, I’m backtracking. I’d hate to lay claim to anything so dull as personal growth. In 2024, I’ll still read old books by men. One day in the spring, when it’s too nice to stay inside, I’ll sit out with a cup of coffee (or white wine) and read Breakfast at Tiffany’s because I do that every year. I still haven’t read anything by Anthony Powell and I want to do that. The goal is to get to a point where that wave of woke satisfaction doesn’t even come around. To shrug and say, without any motive, yeah, I read a lot of women too.

1. Also, I couldn’t remember the name of Death Valley, I just knew that I’d read some great things about this present-tense novel with a sexy minimalistic cover evoking the desert. I knew the cover art was dominated by an eye of some sort, kind of like Gatsby. That’s about what I told the lady and she found it. These people are brilliant.

2. It strikes me that I buy new books mostly when I’m at the bookstore with friends. This is what you do in your mid-thirties, this is the social interaction — you go out for lunch and maybe have two beers and then you go together to the bookstore and buy books. It’s much easier on the body than going out and drinking until you wind up somebody’s apartment, smoking cigarettes on a balcony overlooking the city at dawn. (although, there’s really something to be said for those nights too)