"A Big Woman's Book"

Shortly after The Conqueror's Child was published about a year ago my agent called me to tell me that two editors had phoned her to say that they were very interested in seeing my future work; anything, that is, except science fiction (which is what I write). What was asked for specifically was "a big women's book" (not, I quickly determined, a sly allusion to the fact that I am 5'8" and pretty solid; there is only one of me, after all).

To put this in context, let me say that (like most SF/F authors) I have hoped in the past to break out into the "mainstream" with my work, because generally mainstream authors make better money and have more readers and a whole lot more respect than most SF/F authors do. Here was an invitation, times two, to do that very thing, after 30+ years writing SF/F. But good Heavens, why? The Conqueror's Child is the fourth and concluding volume of the only futuristic, feminist epic I know of, not only SF but SF that is tainted with the "feminist" label that the dominant culture has persuaded most women to reject.

Granted, The Conqueror's Child is a comparatively "big" book, comprising some 428 pages in which about several distinct cultures and three religions (four, counting the men's Bear cult) impinge on the characters' lives; taken together with the three preceding books it's even bigger. There are lots of women in Child too, but they are running their world overtly and with strength, not as the iron hand in the velvet glove. It's iron hand all the way.

It occurred to me that maybe what had happened was that editors had been reading (not books, they have no time to read books other than the ones they themselves publish) reviews, and in skimming some favorable reviews of The Conqueror's Child they had registered "bigness," as described above, and "women," although contaminated with nasty science fiction and fantasy cooties, not to mention radical feminist ones. So they had concluded that if I could be pried out of the offending genres, my writing's other qualities might sell in the "big women's book" market.

I was not at all averse to this program; in the course of my career I've said what I have to say in the radical feminism department about as well as I could, and I repeating myself bores me. And there seemed to be no reason that a "big women's book" could not also be a very good book, one I could like writing and be proud of once it was done and published. I had heard great things about A Thousand Acres, which my agent had suggested as a succesful example. So I began reading.

What's required seems to be a fat novel about a large family of several generations, told primarily through the viewpoints of its female members. One model is multi-generational enough to be a version of what used to be called "historical fiction" (immigrant Irish family struggles through heartbreak and triumph under the canny rule of a tough matriarch; or, immigrant Jewish family + same formula, etc. etc. through the many possible nations and ethnicities). Another, more contemporary model is narrower in temporal focus: just a couple of young-matures (the main characters) and their parents and kids and maybe a grandparent or two; in this case the focus tends to be on a Family Problem — suicide, alcoholism, a secret history of child abuse. But since the emphasis is on women transcending their problems, the tone is ultimately up-beat.

I found that these books put me to sleep. Clearly, I could no more write one than I could fly. For the most part, the the characters are dull and their lives are pedestrian beyond belief (though in the "romance" sub-genre the family is engaged in some glamorous occupation — diamonds, racehorses, modeling, fashion design — but it doesn't help, since then the characters are downright cardboard; maybe all the author's creative energy gets used up in bringing the flashy background so lovingly to life). There's no getting around it: I just hated the damned things.

Yeah, I know A Thousand Acres is a rewrite of King Lear. I never much liked King Lear, an irritating play about a stupid, spoiled old man who can't tell which of his kids are straight and which are bent (which argues a lethal degree of self-absorption), plus a "good" daughter who insists on cementing her father's error by not speaking up for herself, which is as maddening as those romances in which one simple question and answer (in place of all that prickly "banter") would resolve the whole plot-problem, if only anyone had the wit to ask it and if the author would quit interfering to prevent it from being asked.

Clearly, though (since these novels sell in the millions and King Lear is one of Shakespeare's greatest hits), I am in the minority here; something must be wrong with me. But what? I have given it a good deal of thought lately. I find that as a reader (and a writer) I need an element of mystery, of ambiguity, of the alien, the supernatural, the the truly strange (by which I do not mean quixotic behavior imposed by the author in order to get a plot going) for a novel to catch and hold my interest. I can't tell you whether this is because I've been writing and reading fantasy and SF for decades and it's turned my brain, or whether I began writing fantasy and SF because my brain came already turned so there was nothing else I that I could write.

Anyway, my "big women's book" clearly was not going to happen (with or without Shakespeare) no matter how much the editors wanted it, my agent wanted it, and I myself wanted it. I resigned myself to disappointing everybody.

Instead, I started looking through some old material, a folder full of legal sized pages with typing on them (that's how old), scenes for a play I had once begun writing about my old Dad and me. Pop was a painter, a hermit, a handsome self-taught intellectual and apparent total failure who left when I was eight and then, through unexpected circumstances, about twenty years later came to live next door to my husband and me in New Mexico for the two decades until his death (Dad's, not my husband's). He was funny and sour and brilliant and maddening, and I'd thought that what we managed to make of our relatonship after that long interruption was of interest and, because Pop was Pop, also entertaining.

So I began last fall to make a book of those old scraps, filling in the blanks, ruminating a bit, and selecting excerpts from the 40 volumes of handwritten journals the old man left to me. You get an outside view and an inside view of the human enigma that was my father. Not exactly King Lear, but there are a father and a couple of daughters in it, and god knows the old man made at least one impulsively stupid choice in his life that had dark consequences; there's even an upbeat twist out of left field. It has turned out to be a pretty good-sized book ("big"), and it's about a family (albeit a fractured one), and even though it's ends with death it's positive and hopeful in the end.

On August 18 the revised manuscript (completed draft #2) of My Father's Ghost, my first book-length venture into non-fiction, went off to my agent. Now, the last time she and I talked about this book, in July, she had the previous completed draft on her desk. She hovered protectively over the typescript in front of her and said with a smile, "I think you've got something here."

Time will tell; but it seems there's a chance that I've written a "big women's book" after all. If I have, I've done it in my own weird way, which I find to be a very, very pleasing thought.

--SMC
August 21, 2000

Copyright © 2000 by Suzy McKee Charnas