Today I caught up with the latest episode of The Writer and The Critic (with special guest Jonathan Strahan). Again I’m late. My excuse is that the darn thing is well over 2 hours long. Fortunately you don’t have to listen to all of it. The first half hour is given over to discussion of some sort of Internet blow-up that appears to have resulted from people misinterpreted something I wrote in a blog post. You don’t need to listen to that. Then there’s some discussion of Galveston by Sean Stewart (which I didn’t like much when I read it, but should probably revisit if only I had the time), and Akata Witch by Nnedi Okorafor, which I definitely want to read. Most of the last hour is given over to discussion of The Drowning Girl by CaitlÃn R. Kiernan, and quite right too. In my not-so-humble opinion it is best book I have read thus far this year.
Of course that is only my opinion, and while I do think I am a reasonably good judge of literary quality, I recognize that people don’t always judge a book by the same standards that I use. Lots of people absolutely loathe books with unreliable narrators, or books that they can’t neatly pigeonhole into one genre or another. There is some discussion of this in the podcast.
One issue that Kirstyn raises is that works by women writers that contain some autobiographical elements are often dismissed out of hand because of that, whereas works by men that are similarly autobiographical are widely praised. She cites the furor that greeted Cat Valente’s story, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Space/Time”, as an example. Mondy, because one of his functions on the podcast is to play the clueless, sexist male, asked for examples of stories by men getting praise, and Kirstyn provided a few, but what immediately sprang into my mind is the fact that the archetypal plot for a LitFic novel is that of a middle-aged literature professor with an unhappy marriage who has an affair with a student. I suspect that a lot of those are either autobiographical or wish-fulfillment. And of course the reason this happens is that for far too many people the course of men’s lives is a matter of supreme importance, whereas the course of women’s lives is irrelevant. Give the sort of social structures we’ve had in recent history, it is hardly surprising that people think that way.
Discussion of how others might see the book moved inevitably on to discussion of its chances in awards. Mondy, bless him, is still hung up on the daft notion that if a book is really good then it should win all the awards. If that was the case there would be no point in having multiple awards. I can’t see The Drowning Girl appearing on the Hugo or Nebula ballot, though I’ll be voting for it in the Hugos. Those awards simply don’t favor this sort of book. I do expect it to appear on the Shirley Jackson Award ballot, as it is very much their sort of thing. It has been suggested to the Tiptree jury, but I think they are far more likely to go for something like Beyond Binary or 2312 where gender is more central to the book. As for World Fantasy, I’d love to see it there, but juries can be capricious. It won’t win the popular vote, and one of the three jury slots will doubtless be taken by Graham Joyce’s Some Kind of Fairy Tale. I’ll keep my fingers crossed, but I’m bearing in mind that Deathless didn’t make this year’s ballot, which is a travesty if ever there was one.
Finally I’d like to address Jonathan Strahan’s comments about the trans elements of the book. Jonathan says he’d like to see more work discussing why trans people do what they do, because he and other cis people find it so very hard to understand. Now Jonathan is a good friend, so I know he’s approaching this with the best of intentions, but what trans people tend to hear when faced with requests like that is, “I think you are crazy, I demand that you justify yourself”, which is one reason why we don’t write about it much.
Another reason is that there’s not a lot to say. Jay Lake did a great blog post a few years back in which he asked cis people to justify their gender (without reference to their biology). It’s not easy. You just are who you are. A good illustration of the issue comes up in a recent BBC radio show on philosophy. The program focuses on a well known philosophical problem known as “Theseus’ Ship”. The idea is that Theseus has a ship which is so old, and has been repaired so often, that not one of the original timbers remains: is it the same ship?
One of the guests on the program is my friend Cathy Butler (whom I’m sure Jonathan knows as well). She’s a trans woman, and she makes the point that since her transition many people have told her that she has become a “different person”. Indeed, some people claim that the “person she used to be” is now “dead”. That’s an excuse that families often use for ostracizing trans relatives. But, Cathy says, as far as she’s concerned, she’s still the same person. I’d go further than that. For many trans people, post-transition we are still exactly the same person, with the exception that we no longer have to be habitual liars. Surely that makes us better people?
So I’m not sure, Jonathan, that I can give you an explanation. I am who I am. So are Cathy and CaitlÃn and all of the other trans people you know. All we can do is ask you to accept that we are being honest about ourselves and accept that we feel the way we do, much as you might accept someone’s word if they say that they are color-blind, or can “feel” a phantom limb after an amputation, or any of the other odd things that our bodies and minds do to us.
