A Harsh Book Review, Some Things to Ponder

I recently did a little post here about Rick Moody's latest book, The Long Accomplishment: A Memoir of Hope and Struggle in Matrimony, a memoir about the difficulties he and his wife had with conceiving (and delivering) a child. I generally liked the book (as I wrote here), so I have to admit I was surprised when I saw the very negative review of it in the New York Times Book Review a couple of days ago. (Link to the review, which apparently ran online nearly a month before its appearance in the NYTBR.)

The reviewer, Hillary Kelly, blasted Moody because he, in her view, was writing about women's difficulties (as well as his own), "women who aren't allowed to have their own say."

Really? The women in the story are prohibited from writing about the experience?

Let me hurry to say this: Of course he doesn't/can't know the feelings and thoughts of women who are struggling to conceive--who desperately want to be mothers. All he can know is what he observes and infers--and what they tell him. And this Moody does throughout the book. As far as I can remember, he never presumes. He talks about his own view of the journey they're taking together. (She, by the way, is an artist and thereby has her own techniques/media of expressing her experiences.)

We seem to be in an age now when writers cannot write about anything except their own lives, lives that, apparently, cannot even intersect with those that are "different" in some way (gender, race, economic class, religion, etc..).

Oh, and not just writers. Other artists, too--filmmakers, for example--must stick to their "own" terrain.

A couple of stories from the past.

• In 1967, novelist William Styron published The Confessions of Nat Turner, a novel about the slave rebellion in Virginia in 1831. It won a Pulitzer Prize in 1968. But the book also profoundly annoyed a number of high-profile black intellectuals who believed that Styron had no real right to tell that story--and had not told it properly. They even published a book of criticism of Styron and his "take" on the historical event (William Styron's Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond, 1968). One prominent black writer who elsewhere defended Styron was James Baldwin. And in an interview, Styron called the reaction full of "hysteria" (Conversations with William Styron, 96).
• When Zelda Fitzgerald decided that she wanted to become a writer, too, her husband, Scott, was not pleased. He believed that their experiences were his to write about because he was the "real" writer--that, as Nancy Milford puts it her in biography Zelda (1970), "the entire fabric of their life was his material, none of it was Zelda's" (273).

And now we have our current age of "cultural appropriation"--the idea that stories belong only to those who are/have been directly involved. Does this mean that I can't write about Shakespeare because I'm not English? Or Mary Shelley because I'm not a woman--or English? Or that Shakespeare himself should not have written about, oh, a King of Scotland? Or a Danish prince?

I have a hard time with that idea. Let me give you an example: I've been dealing with metastatic prostate cancer for more than fourteen years now--have had many treatments, some successes, some failures. I'm incurable, so I know it will eventually kill me. I've written about it here and there--in this blog, in my memoir about teaching (Schoolboy).

My wife is also writer--a wonderful one. And if she were to tell my story--rather, her story about traveling with me on this journey--I wouldn't be angry; I wouldn't feel as if she'd stolen something from me.

No, I would be deeply honored, profoundly moved. Grateful. For I know that her journey is just as valuable as my own. It's a part of my own--a crucial part.

I'm just worried that if we start deciding who can tell stories and who can't, then we are impoverishing ourselves--denying ourselves the insights from people who may be a step or two (or more) away from things but whose eyes just might have a broader perspective, who just might help us understand.

Anyway, Hillary Kelly's review of Moody ended with this: "It's wonderful that he got all this out of his system and onto the page, but it's a shame he felt the need to share it with the rest of us."

But that's what writers do, isn't it? Get it out? Put it on the page? Make it available for the rest of us to read--or not?

Should we really be telling writers they can't write about something (publish something) as intimate as their own marriage--can't share their own version of their common though also different and unequal struggles?