What Is So Hard About Writing Women?

 And now for something completely un-Japan related.

Warning: lots of unsolicited opinions head.

So I finally finished Jonathan Franzen's Freedom; it's been an on-and-off project of mine since the beginning of winter break, and though I made a concerted effort to finish it before my mom came a couple of weeks ago, I still managed to lag behind by about 60 or 70 pages.  I guess I can start with generalities: I'd recommend it to anyone who is interested (or not interested, but you can't make people pick up a book if they don't want to).  I'd also recommend reading The Corrections as well, and perhaps first if you are anything at all like me.  I connected on a much more visceral level with The Corrections, but it's entirely possible that Freedom is more in your emotional vein.  Freedom's story moves quickly, and like any good novel, asks social, cultural, and familial questions that force you to face some uncomfortable truths about the life to which you are accustomed.  And naturally, with a title like Freedom, it challenges the sacred status that word holds in the American lexicon, persisting in the argument that perhaps the pursuit of freedom in and of itself is limiting, and also what we should do when the perceived "freedoms" of two people or groups of people do not intersect.  There's a lot to talk about in this book, but there is one topic on top of them all that I feel has gotten absolutely no attention when Freedom was being cranked through the media machine.  My problem is this:

Jonathan Franzen can't write women.

I've had this discussion with Kelly before as she introduced me to Franzen a couple of years ago, and it is a really frustrating point in his fiction because he does try.  Some novelists just write off women entirely, treat them as literary devices for the development of their male characters, and/or lay them as stereotypes flat against the page, and at least it can be said that Franzen tries to write a variety of women.  But in this, I don't think he succeeds.  And it's particularly strange considering the hubbub surrounding the publication of  Freedom and its glorification in the press also stirred the so-called Franzenfreude backlash of female authors (lead by Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Weiner, neither of whom I  admittedly have ever or have any intention of reading) who reacted sharply against the immediate media explosion around yet another white, male author.  This in itself is true, but in looking over the internet posts and quotes from these writers along with a couple of other female authors, I have to conclude that these women also didn't bother to read the book because what should outrage them more is the fact that women absolutely get the short shrift in Franzen's books.  The hilarious thing is that half of Freedom is dedicated to the psychology of a woman, in this case housewife-coming-apart-at-the-seams Patty Berglund.

I tried to ignore the book reviews, interviews and profiles surrounding Franzen at the time of Freedom's publication in September because I wanted to read the book with a clear head.  Of course, I also recognized this as impossible because I was so taken with The Corrections that it seemed very unlikely that anything could live up to that standard.  However, when I first heard about women authors reacting to the praise and attention showered upon Franzen, I wondered also if someone wouldn't say something about the way he writes women.  It was also one of the biggest faults of The Corrections for me; about a third of that novel was dedicated to the complicated personal relationships of the self-destructive (it seems almost redundant to call her this since pretty much everyone in that novel was imploding) youngest child Denise to mostly unconvincing effect.  Franzen attempted to show a woman in the middle of a sexual/identity crisis, but the investigation into the unstable psychology behind it left me feeling mostly cold.  I'll have to save the discussion of this book for a later time when it's fresher in my mind, but overall the female characters in The Corrections (including also the Lambert matriarch, Enid, who despite at some points making me feel like I could understand my own grandmother through her, was still a vehicle for the emotional exhibition of her husband Alfred) never quite came off the page as their male counterparts.

Freedom suffers from the same problem.  The structure of Freedom itself points to this: it's written in mostly third-person limited or omniscient voice (with breaks for Patty's memoir) from the perspective of the main characters including Patty's husband Walter, her son Joey and Walter's former roommate and  minor rock star Richard Katz.  Only one of these four main narratives is written from the perspective of a woman, and her voice sounds just like Franzen's (a problem I'll get to in a little bit because it's given me a space to try and understand why I am unable to write any kind of convincing fiction).  There are other female characters in the book, including Walter's loyal and idealized assistant Lalitha, Patty's unstable stalker "best friend" from college Eliza, Joey's devoted-to-the-point-of-mentally-illness girlfriend Connie, the spoiled princess in the sights of Joey's lust Jenna, and a line-up of groupies and insecure women clamoring for Richard's attention.  There is also the Berglund's eldest Jessica, but I'm getting to her.  In the end, these peripheral women were just that: peripheral.  Their characterizations were so flimsy that if they were to turn sideways they'd disappear, though Franzen was particularly good at idealizing them to the point they wind up a martyr (just what every woman wants), or skewering them for the flaws he would otherwise play to sympathizing effect in male characters.  Take for instance, this quote:

"...Lucy[] waylaid him on the third-floor landing and offered, unsolicited, her opinion that the Traumatics [the name of Richard's first punk outfit]  had been the kind of adolescently posturing, angst-mongering boy group that never interested her.  Then she waited, with parted lips and a saucy challenge in her eyes, to see how her presence - the drama of being her - was registering.  In the way of such chicks, she seemed convinced of the originality of her provocation.  Katz had encountered, practically verbatim, the same provocation a hundred times before, which put him in the ridiculous position of now feeling bad for being unable to pretend to be provoked: of pitying Lucy's doughty little ego, its flotation on a sea of aging-female insecurity..."

Why is the midlife crisis is always spun to make you feel for male characters (despite how pathetically they cling for the halcyon days of their youth), but women in novels never wear it quite as well?  In the same critical turning point, men are making a valiant last ditch effort to hold onto some vestige of their virility, while women are vainly and vacuously trying to assert some kind of relevance as a sexual object.  The fact that this character of Lucy goes onto leave herself in plain view of Richard wearing no underwear as he's building decks to scrape together a living while he's on hiatus from music completes this very flattering portraiture. Meanwhile, the "midlife crisis" has become such a trope of 40-something men in movies and books that it seems like every man feels entitled to go through one of these periods where they eschew responsibility to act like the 15-year-old they never stopped being anyway. 

Since finishing Freedom I've sat down to read some of the reviews and also the Franzenfreude backlash, and most everyone has glanced over the fact women are the weak point in Franzen's novels.  Curtis Sittenfeld in The Observer made note of the fact he also found Patty to be unpersuasive because the multiple perspectives on her (from neighbors, from the narrator and from Patty herself in her memoir) never quite jibe with each other.  I agree with this assessment; she comes off as pretty flat.  For all the talking that Franzen does about her, she never seemed to jump off the page and I never felt like I could relate to her on any level.  Again, this is kind of strange considering she hails from none other than Westchester County, New York, insisted on running away as far as possible, and suffered from a strained relationship with her father (but for different reasons).  She's also got a viciously competitive streak - something  of which I know a thing or two - which often leads her into compromising situations. Looking back, I feel like I should also sympathize with her sisyphean struggle to be the best at something despite knowing that you'll never achieve it (and also managing to psych yourself out before an important sports game), but I never really did.  I'm not sure I really understood her overarching motivations at all; she just seemed complicated and tortured for the sake of making her complicated and tortured.  As if her suffering in some way was supposed to make her an interesting character, but the psychology was lacking.  Franzen relies on the "bored housewife who needs a hobby" stereotype too much even as he tries to assert there's more to this character.  I'll stop here before giving much else about the events of the novel away.  However, one quote as I was flipping through the book again:

"Richard looked her over carefully, piece by piece.  It felt to her as if, with each new piece of her that his eyes alit on, she was being further tacked onto the wall behind her, so that, when he was done looking over all of her, she had been rendered entirely two-dimensional and fashioned to the wall."

This quote is lifted from Patty's memoir about her first meeting with Richard when he was dating her crazy ex-roommate Eliza.  It's a good description of how I feel Franzen handles his own descriptions of Patty.
 

However, my biggest gripe is not with the main characters.  It is in fact with such a peripheral character that I haven't seen her name come up in any of the reviews I've read, which has only made me all the more frustrated.  She's the Berglund's eldest daughter, Jessica. Here's how she's introduced:

"Though Jessica was the more obvious credit to her parents - smitten with books, devoted to wildlife, talented at flute, stalwart on the soccer field, coveted as a babysitter, not so pretty as to be morally deformed by it, admired even by Merrie Paulsen - Joey was the child Patty could not shut up about."

The trouble with her character is laid plainly right from the get-go: she's to be understood in relation to her brother.  Though she's later highlighted for  "her self-sufficient nature" (in this book not necessarily a good thing), in the above it doesn't matter how well she sets herself apart and tries to succeed: she's not her brother.  And Franzen himself winds up like a surrogate parent because though I was immediately attached to Jessica and hoped (given the structure of the novel) there'd be a section about her perspective on the decay of her family, he never lets her speak.  That section of the book was never there.

In fact, she was barely there at all.  It became increasingly clear to me as I crossed the halfway mark of the book that Franzen was not going to write about Jessica at all except for tangentially when the other characters interacted with her.  In fact, despite her "self-sufficient nature" and her attempts to lead a stable life while mediating between her spiraling father, mother and brother, Franzen basically writes her as shrill, whiny and a wet blanket  She's the voice that comes in every once in awhile that rankles every one elses' nerves; the one you almost actively try to piss off just to get her off your back.  Moreover, one of the more obnoxious female caricatures from the novel (that of the unattainably beautiful, materialistic, spoiled object of Joey's lust Jenna, his roommate's sister) probably gets more airtime than Jessica does.  Instead of getting of her view on trying to be resolute and strong despite the withering of her parents' marriage and the selfish grabs at power and wealth by her brother, she never gets to be much more than a petulant, self-righteous brat who ignores phone calls and delivers all the truths that no other characters want to hear.

Okay, fine, so I related with this character more than a little and projected myself into her plight.  It's probably why other critics never stopped to give this any kind of examination, or if they did they ultimately decided it wasn't worth writing in their reviews.  But the fact that Jessica doesn't get more than a couple of lines of characterization - as either "rule-bound and cold" or as representing an ideal of the younger generation ("ideal" is never a word that gets played for the positive for me since it's completely intangible) - was a complete frustration for me.  Why shouldn't she also get to say her piece/peace?  We only understand her through other characters (particularly - as in her introduction - through her brother), and as such gets treated with the broad strokes of generalization rather than a fair investigation of why she feels she needs to be resolute in the face of chaos rather than just stirring up the pot like everyone else, and just how difficult it is to wield "self-control" when the rest of the family throws theirs to the wind.   

I think Franzen missed a perfectly good opportunity to explore a type of character that never gets any kind of credit in novels: the rock in the proverbial storm.  I understand that a story revolves around conflict, but it's as though that stability is self-generating and regenerating: it just is and is constant.  These characters never get to dissect their moral principles and we never see them questioning whether what they're doing is right or wrong, or wondering what kind of effect they have on other people.  There's no exposition on just how exhausting it is to stay constant while everything else falls apart; that perhaps they're showing a strong face for the sake of everyone else, but when they retreat into solitude that that's exactly when they start to break down.  There has to be some kind of emotional toll to be paid for trying to be the constant as situations unravel, for trying to be strong when it'd be so much easier to unravel too.

Here is the thing I think authors miss when they're writing women: we are constantly accommodating.  But it's in a way that no one notices what they are doing to make the gears of their lives turn; it's subtle adjustments, quietly shifting weights, and taking into account the little details that so many others easily overlook.   I remember Kelly telling me a story about how one of her male coworkers wanted everyone to throw him a fucking parade for the fact he was able to mitigate the fall-out of some problem whose details I am forgetting 2 years on; meanwhile she worked constantly to make sure such a disaster could never happen in the first place, but no one was stopping to pat her on the back or shoot off a firework in her honor.  No one notices all the plates spinning until one of them falls, it seems.  I'm not saying this is all women, but certainly the women who never get their due in novels are the ones who are overlooked precisely for their practicality and efficiency.  It's kind of a sad fact to me that people would rather read about the small steps Joey makes towards having a conscience than what Jessica has to do to make all the cogs in her life work.  It's similarly unrealistic that Jessica holds it together all the time; there's a hint of some romantic troubles for her, but Franzen decides to let that be a point to show that Patty allowed the heartache to happen so as to allow her to learn a valuable lesson in life.  A story that could have humanized Jessica a bit more, but instead we get Joey crowing he knew the boyfriend was a little shit from the start.

This song sums the above up best:


I can already hear people yelling at me BUT THOSE PEOPLE ARE BORING.  Not necessarily.  We all think they're boring because that's exactly what every book, movie and song has been saying telling us all these years.  No one always makes the right decisions, says the right things, or knows instinctively what to do in any situation.  Self-doubt is every present, they learn from their mistakes just like everyone else.  I wanted to yell later on in the novel (and SPOILER) "do you think it's easy to not speak to your father?!"  From what we get of Walter and Jessica once Patty leaves is very one-sided; Walter feels neglected and that she hasn't gotten the whole story about what happened, and Jessica just comes off as self-righteous and haughty.  Why should it be so cut and dry for her?  I guarantee you it wasn't.  She questioned that decision every day, but she persisted because it's the only way she could allay her conscience. 

And in truth, I am reacting strongly to something that has only a small role in the book.  Because that's all Jessica has; she's not central, nothing she does really has any bearing on any of the events of the novel.  Her ability to exhibit cool-headness is what leaves her exempt from being any kind of mover.

I suppose what struck a chord with me here is the fact that this is probably how I come off when I wind up mired in drama by refusing to be dramatic.  That instead of getting credit for being strong, people think of you as cold, unreasonable and unmoving because you give it your all not lash out at people just because you can; because it'd be so much more human for you to do away with self-control and behave like they do.  And you know what?  It's unsustainable: you wind up lashing out.  I can think of many instances over the course of the last couple of years where the only thing I could think to do was lose myself at the bottom of the nearest bottle and then saying or doing things I later regretted while trying to work out the tension between my heart and head.  Or perhaps that time I came across a book that left me feeling emotionally floored because it forced me to understand the one person I'd rather leave to be the  black-and-white villain in my own story.

Oh hey, that was The Corrections, huh.

Why is stability never written to be a good trait in novels? At best, it's neutral.  Authors rely on peripheral characters to be stable when the main character is swirling in torment, but that stability is never the focus.  Or the stable character (as in Jessica's case) is annoying and seems too self-satisfied in their ability to avoid conflict and not drop a bomb on their personal life.  I think of Laura from High Fidelity, Mary in Pride & Prejudice, or Lee and Abra in East of Eden.  In the end, though, Jessica never gets her own story line.  In some ways, the "development" of the character Lalitha (I put that in quotes because she never grows at all; of all the female characters she was absolutely the flattest) took the space of any further investigation of Jessica.  But Lalitha was so idealized and so high up on that pedestal that I got bored of staring up her nose and her narrative was just too convenient (I can't be any more specific than that without giving anything away) for it to really contribute much of anything to the story.  She acted on a set of principles with unflagging energy and enthusiasm, unquestioningly adored Walter, never exhibited feeling at all ethically conflicted about anything she did.  She just kind of was.  

And that's kind of the problem with female characters in any media, whether it's books, movies or music.  If they're not some stock stereotype of scheming temptresses, cold fish, or an unattainable ideal (note that for the most part, these stereotypes are sexually based) the characters just are the way they are.  There's no deeper investigation of their motives the same way male characters get a deeper exposition of their moral quagmires, futile attempts to behave responsibly.  There's never a convincing depiction of them trying to be something else because they already are.  

I originally thought to title this "Why Can't Men Write Women" but honestly, women aren't particularly good at writing their own gender either.  It may just be an indication that I am not digging deep enough, but I'm trying to think of a depiction of any female character that I found particularly convincing.  Out of all my favorite novels, the characters I love (and therefore I identify the most with... it's a fault of mine when it comes to reading fiction) are exclusively male and unfortunately, my favorite writers are pretty much all male.  I ached with Stevens in his inability to get in touch with his own emotions in The Remains of the Day, felt the deep burn of embarrassment in Philip's struggle to grow up in Of Human Bondage, and fell right into the chasm between the rigidness of personal convictions and the illogical nature of emotional longing along with Bazarov in Fathers and Sons.  In thinking about all my favorites, I'm realizing that about the only female characters I accept beyond question are the ones in Mad Men, as they lead just as complex personal lives and ride the character arc of emotional growth as any of the other male characters and even (heaven forbid!) succeed.

And in writing all of this, all I can come back to is this:


OH MY GOD I JUST REALIZED THAT'S JULIE BENZ!  I had no idea.  Man she looked so much better then than what she did to herself in later seasons of Dexter.  She actually looks human here.

The final point I want to make about Freedom comes back to the character of Patty and the use of her memoir (composed at her therapist's suggestion) to develop the story.  It was pretty genius of Franzen to have Patty write about herself in all but the first-person, and I appreciate that the tone of the memoir changes depending on if you read it as a love letter to Walter or to Richard.  But even with that, the problem with the memoir is that the voice does not change.  Patty sounds like Franzen only a little altered; I forget which critic cheekily pointed it out, but based on her memoir it's a wonder why Patty herself never went after a book deal.  It also comes around to the third-person narrator he uses for the other main stories of the novel because it never changes.  The Corrections was a slightly different case as Franzen did succeed in varying his voice to reflect the mental decline of Alfred due to his Parkinson's.  And that's exactly what Freedom needed: variation.

If the voice had changed in telling the story of morally-upright-to-a-fault Walter who quite literally can't see the forest for the trees, grossly self-obsessed Joey who eventually grows a conscience, and world weary Richard who wants to be as good as Walter but also can't help playing dirty when competing with him, I think it would have teased out less so the differences between the characters but their similarities.  Walter and Joey appear as polar opposites on the surface, but clearly as father and son and as the story unfolds, they're more alike than perhaps they'll admit.  It's a similar situation with Walter and Richard who can't help loving and yet competing with each other.  Beyond that, it's hard for me to be any more concrete in this suggestion because it's also my weakness in writing fiction.

Before I break into this discussion, I want to make it clear I am in no way trying to compare myself to Franzen.  This entire post has been a criticism of Freedom and I think this may end up overshadowing the plain fact that I did like the book.  And I also love his style and what makes people come back to Franzen's fiction is the fact that his narrative voice is so compelling and frank.  Again, I'm forgetting the reviewer, but someone pointed out that Franzen is an antidote to the obnoxiously self-aware opaqueness of post-modern (how I hate that term) fiction by actually writing about human beings.  The above is meant really as a small criticism because it seems to me that if you're going to try to write from the perspective of multiple characters, the voice should reflect something of that character's psychology.  And again, Patty's memoir sounds about as Franzenian as you get.

But this all gave me some fodder for trying to understand why I have all but abandoned fiction writing.  I am not lying when I say I am mother to some pretty appalling half-fiction: half because it's largely unfinished as I realized how bad it was in transit, and because the only narrative voice I have is mine.  My characters all talk like me.  First person or third person narration: it doesn't matter.  Everyone sounds the same.  I am able to get into the heads of other people, but I can't write as them or as they understand themselves.  I only know the way I understand them, and that is perhaps my fault as both a writer and as a human being.  Adopting someone else's voice for me is something of an impossible task, and if I succeed, I end up sounding like I'm mocking more than I am trying to investigate their psychology.  It's much like when I'm talking out loud as someone else; I either get a high squeaky voice or lower my pitch and speak slowly in order to poke fun.

And I guess this circles back around to what I think I've ended up doing in this post, as I wind up doing in almost all of my posts: talking about everything as it relates to me.  Though am terribly self-centered, I think I do a good job of understanding other people and their motivations.  I'm finding I do it less and less often now, however.  Oddly enough, it was when I was younger that I tried to understand people as they were, but that is an incredibly exhausting exercise and more often than not, I'd realize I should've seen it coming when they ended up hurting me in some way.  Or I'd wind up empathizing with them so much it was almost as though their failures became my own.  Particularly with the development of events in the last two years, I've found myself much more reluctant to want to understand people because it became clearer to me that just because I could rationalize someone's behavior, it doesn't mean I have to accept it.  If I don't make the emotional investment of wanting to know someone, then there is no emotional debt when they continue to behave badly.  I'm a little startled with my own callousness here, but that's exactly what my former naivety left me with: a whole lot of scar tissue.

My final thought: this is the only song written by a man that I feel like gets close to understanding what it is to be a woman.  Most other songs are just invectives that serve to make the singer feel better about the way events turned out.  This song at least gets that there is a piece that's missing, that perhaps they'll never understand.



It is, in fact, different for girls.