Like those in her boldly honest sisterhood — Oprah, Cheryl Strayed, Glennon Doyle — Gilbert talks plainly about fear, about her setbacks and delusions, about womanhood, and about spirituality. She eschews snark. She does not have children, she is not married, she defies so many of the standard expectations of women and yet somehow gives permission to a woman like me — married, a mother, in a conventional home in a conventional city out in the Midwest — to embrace my womanhood. She is not suspicious or disdainful of her female audience, she does not reject them as less-than the male literary elite who might have accepted her had she just not written about her own damn female self. In an interview with The New York Times Magazine she said of those who might praise her for suddenly attracting the “serious” male readers, “I want to say: ‘Go [expletive] yourself!’ … ‘You have no idea who the women are who read my books, and if I have to choose between them and you, I’m choosing them.’”
It has taken me years to realize that I aspire to this �� to finally recognize that I am interested in women, and in writing as a woman. I love the women at my readings who talk to me about the self, the women who write me emails and tell me how they raised their daughters. I’ve developed somewhat of an allergy to the cynicism and ruthless intelligence that often elevates endless equivocations and qualifications to the level of truth. In a recent Instagram post, Gilbert held up a homemade cake that read, Girls, girls, girls! I thought about putting a Post-it of this simple incantation above my desk, as an antidote to the constant tug of skepticism that has me wanting to prove my work is serious, canting toward whatever male taste-makers consider relevant and important.
In an interview with Krista Tippett on the On Being podcast, Elizabeth Gilbert said, “With Eat Pray Love…I sort of came out of the closet as a woman.” It sometimes feels as if so many women writers I know are still trapped in the closet of their womanhood. How can we embody it, own it, celebrate it, meaningfully interrogate it, in a literary culture in which the central question remains what it means to be and become a man?
“Our fear is contagious,�� Gilbert told Tippett, “but our courage also is. And our courage makes other people be able to be more brave and come out of their houses and come out of their shells and out of their fear.” For me, part of that courage is continuing to write about women, to be straightforward about the fact that I do, and to hope that someday this work will redefine the bounds of serious literature.
Very Intriguing Person
Thank God Throwing Muses’ Kristin Hersh still gives a shit
I love Elizabeth Gilbert, and you can too
Beverly Glenn-Copeland needed the world to catch up
Amy Winehouse was good for girls like me
Ricky Williams was my favorite athlete
Tom Green is doing just fine
Dale Earnhardt Sr. was a true rebel
The many second lives of Lindsay Lohan
Zadie Smith showed me how to believe in the novel
Frankie Muniz doesn’t remember the show that made him famous
Sufjan Stevens helped me understand God
Nadine Gordimer wrote furiously, in every sense
M.I.A. is too raw for the radio
Dean Winters is the only celebrity for me
Sarah Menkedick is the author of Ordinary Insanity: Fear and the Silent Crisis of Motherhood in America, forthcoming from Pantheon in April 2020. Her first book, Homing Instincts (Pantheon, 2017) was longlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. She lives with her family in Pittsburgh.