By Guest Blogger Joanna Smith Rakoff

A year or so ago, when I was pregnant with Pearl, I sat on the bench of a local playground with a pregnant friend, watching her daughter and Coleman race over a structure known in our neighborhood as “the jiggly bridge.” Neither my friend nor I had chosen to find out the sex of our babies and I, for some reason, asked if she and her husband would be glad to have a boy.

“Oh, God, no,” she replied. “Boys are a nightmare.”

“Really?” I said, an eye on my own boy, who, like all children, can certainly be a nightmare, but is usually a delight.

“Totally,” she said, and explained, at some length, that boys’ brains develop rather more slowly than girls, that boys tend to be less verbal than girls and, lacking the words to express their thoughts, they go crazy and have tantrums. “Girls,” she told me, “just have their shit together.”

I’m definitely no expert on brain development—my friend is much more the lay scientist—but all of this sounded a bit fishy to me. I am, after all, the mother of a boy, who happens to be incredibly chatty, and from a very young age has been pretty well able to articulate whatever’s going on in his kooky little brain. He also, of course, goes to school, and it didn’t seem to me that the girls in his preschool were, in general, more eloquent—or immune to meltdowns—than the boys.

As a rule, though, I tend to avoid massive generalizations, particularly those having to do with gender, and the older Coleman gets, the more annoyed I find myself at the way today’s children are intensely guided toward troubling gender divisions seemingly from the moment of their birth, when boys are flooded with blue baseball-themed onesies and girls are given pink T-shirts that say “sweetheart” and “cutie.” But I’m more troubled by the way parents have developed this tendency to tell themselves that girls are biologically programmed to envision themselves as Disney princesses and boys have a hormone-driven desire to build things with Magna Tiles and fight with swords. I know, of course, that there’s an extent to which this must be slightly true, but it’s equally clear that kids, from a very early age, pick up on social cues—like, for instance, their parents’ playground chatter about how they’re irresistibly drawn to fairies, or guns.

In other words, I sometimes feel like there’s a bit of wish fulfillment going on. It’s as though our world is so chaotic and confusing—particularly with regard to gender roles—that perhaps we seek a bit of comfort in girls behaving the way we’ve been conditioned to think girls should—even if we give lip service to our surprise at it, insisting that we did nothing to encourage this predilection for pink—and boys the way they should (er, like savages or miniature engineers). This is, I’m certain, also part of the appeal of Mad Men.

All of this is on my mind, I suppose, because of writing this blog about the difficulty of being an artist and a mother, a subject I was reluctant to take on at first, in part because, I realize now, I’m loathe to fall into the trap of traditional “women’s writing”—opining on subjects domestic—and in part because, paradoxically, I worried that the issues I wanted to broach were too slight to warrant attention. But a day or two into the project, my trepidation disappeared, for suddenly notes started coming in, from old friends and new, from strangers and relatives, all of them women, about the ways in which their lives—the tenuous relationship with whatever meaningful work—resembles the outlines of mine. One friend, the novelist Emily Chenoweth, sent on a strange and fascinating correspondence between two poets, Sarah Manguso and Rachel Zucker, about, basically, what it means to be a woman writer. Manguso, who has no children, utterly resists such definitions—to the extent that she doesn’t even want her work to appear in anthologies of women’s writing—while Zucker, who has three sons, feels that she’s defined by the fact that she’s a mother (“I feel very much like an egg-box,” she writes, at one point, which made me laugh out loud, though I’m not sure the humor was intentional). I read through the dialogue with an odd mixture of recognition and resistance, somehow agreeing and disagreeing with both of them at the same time. But perhaps the most strange and shocking moment came when I read these words of Manguso’s:

At this point in history, wife and mother are still noncomplex, nonqualifiable categories—they’re such powerful archetypes, they swallow all the others, even if a woman has been a writer beforehand.

This is undoubtedly true. But, at the same time these “categories” aren’t just archetypes, they’re actual, human experiences. And though having children—becoming a mother—might briefly trump one’s identity as an artist, it also lends an urgency and depth to one’s life and, without question, to one’s art. Maybe it’s good and necessary to allow ourselves to be consumed by another being once or twice in our lives, and to come out on the other side with the power to delineate a whole new set of experiences—and in doing so complicate those monolithic archetypes. Or at the very least, raise daughters who don’t want to be Disney princesses. Or, if they do, are happy to—like Coleman’s little friend Beatrix—engage in a swordfight while clad in their princess costumes.

By Guest Blogger Joanna Smith Rakoff

Jonathan Dee’s novel St. Famous centers on would-be writer named Paul Soloway, who’s been working on a Proustian epic for a decade, while his wife, Renata, supports the family—they have two young sons–toiling in the bowels of a photo archive, a job that gives her no pleasure, except in the knowledge that she’s putting food on the table and freeing up Paul to work on his magnum opus. Paul has an agent, who plucked him out of obscurity after reading one of his stories in a literary magazine, but otherwise will make no concessions to the world of commerce. His agent lines up work for him, writing for glossy magazines, which he refuses to even contemplate, citing the stupidity of the publications, despite the fact that he and Renata regularly have their utilities turned off because they can’t pay the bills. The novel, which is brilliant, hinges on what becomes the defining decision—the ultimate moral question—of Paul’s life: Two months before the novel opens, Paul has been randomly kidnapped and brutally beaten during a race riot. He emerges from the incident a celebrity, an amalgam of, say, the Central Park jogger and Patty Hearst, and is quickly faced with the offer of a six-figure book deal. Will he take it and give his exhausted wife a break? And secure some financial stability for his kids, who are perpetually clad in outgrown thrift store clothes? Half the novel centers on this dilemma.

You’re probably thinking, what dilemma? Why not just take the money, churn out the book, then live off it while finishing up the novel? Which is pretty much what Renata and everyone else in Paul’s life thinks, too. But the thing is: Paul considers himself a great writer. Not a good writer, not merely a publishable writer, but a great writer, a peer of Balzac and Proust, and, thus, he feels that some tawdry, written-for-the-masses account of his misfortunes would be below him, never mind the logical argument that if he’s such a great writer, anything he writes—not just his endless novel–will, of course, be great. “ ‘ He wants to be Byron, you know?’” his best friend, Martin, says at one point. “ ‘He wants to turn his back on society.” Indeed he does. So does he loathe popular culture that taking his sons to see The Little Mermaid constitutes a “major sacrifice” on his part and he sits through the flick grateful that the darkness prohibits the boys from seeing the grimaces he’s making throughout.

Here’s the thing: The novel is set in 1989. And reading it is, in part, an exercise in nostalgia for a time in which a writer might actually wrestle with the rarified question on Paul’s mind. We live in an age of relentless self-exposure, in which confessional blogs seem to be the dominant mode of expression, in which Facebook oversharing is simply an accepted part of our daily existence, in which preschoolers dictate “journals” to their teachers, and, most pertinently, in which serious writers, from Margaret Drabble to Alice Sebold think nothing of chronicling their lives in memoir form. And the pervasiveness of memoir has, in a way, led to a strange phenomenon: Readers, it seems, now refuse to believe that fiction is actually fiction. Every story, it seems, must be autobiographical in some way. This tends to be the first question people ask me at readings, phrased in this way, “I’m assuming this is completely autobiographical.” (In fact, it’s not.) And I hear the same from other writers.

This week, as I was sitting in bed nursing a horrible cold–trying to keep Coleman, (my son) who was home from school with that same cold from using my bread knife as his “sword”—reading St. Famous, I kept wondering how Paul Soloway would fare in today’s publishing climate, in which writers lives are equated with their work, and, moreover, in which writers are pretty much disallowed the kind of privacy Paul craves, that is, unless they’re J.D. Salinger or Thomas Pynchon or even Philip Roth. Publishing, these days, seems to be so much about publicity and authors are expected to participate, to a great extent, in publicizing their own books, which is, as recounted in my first post, why I’ve not made greater inroads in my next novel.

You’ll notice—as I just did—that the first names that came to me, when cataloging of literary recluses, are men. Are their any female writers who hide themselves away from the public? Who refuse to do interviews? Or to write about their lives for Vogue or Elle? There may be, but I can’t think of any at the moment (though there is a good amount of cold medicine in my system right now). Somehow, it seems like a woman who scorned the media—who would refuse to put on what Sarah Vowell, upon returning from her first book tour, described to me as “the dog-and-pony show”—wouldn’t be looked upon so kindly. They would, perhaps, be seen as “difficult.”

Anyway, year or so ago, before I myself went through the whole rigmarole of publishing a novel, I thought about this all rather differently. It’s strange to look back on it, to think about how naïve I was, how Paul Soloway-ish, in my own, 21st Century way. I remember, in particular, my publisher suggesting I put together a Web site—joannasmithrakoff.com!—and my, after a moment’s thought, saying, with a bit of irritation, that this was unnecessary. Jonathan Franzen doesn’t have a Web site, I told my editor, who nodded with intense patience, no doubt thinking, “yes, and Jonathan Franzen also pissed off Oprah. It’s a wonder he’s still alive, much less selling books.”

Seven plus months after the novel was released into the world—having spent many of those months dragging my entire family around the country, so that I might go to bookstores and read from it–my reluctance to participate in—or shyness about—the selling of it strikes me as both silly—I’ve seen so many friends go through the same thing and didn’t think any less of them for it—and completely valid. There’s a way in which Paul Soloway—despite being a kind of pill—is right. Focusing too much on the business end of art—art of any sort—can be dangerous: it can drain the joy out of the process of creating it; or it can fully prevent you from creating it, either by crowding your head with more quotidian thoughts, thoughts that prohibit you from truly thinking, or by investing you with a sense of futility, a sense that, say, nobody is reading (or going to galleries, or movie theaters, or concert halls), so why bother. For Paul Soloway, back in the lost land of 1989, merely writing a book on contract, for actual cash money, meant that the business end had taken over. No contemporary author would, I think, make such an argument, but I sometimes wonder if we couldn’t do with thinking of ourselves in a slightly more Byronic way, if we couldn’t somehow find a way to put up more walls around ourselves. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying I want to turn my back on society—and I’m seriously looking forward to taking Coleman to see The Princess and the Frog this weekend—I just fear, sometimes, that as high and low culture become one and the same, as do, it seems, commerce and art, something is getting lost along the way, if only the freedom to not think about anything other than the art at hand.

I don’t want to give away too much about St. Famous—you should read it for yourself—but I will say that it’s a novel of reversals and that, ultimately, Renata is revealed as the real heroine, for it’s her dilemma, rather than Paul’s that proves the most compelling, that being: For how long can she maintain her devotion to a man who, essentially, considers his own pursuits—his own life—more important than hers. There comes a moment, midway through the book, when she thinks about her life, as a working mother, and is overcome with “a guilt that pulled in two directions”: On the one hand, she wonders if her sons will remember her “later in their…lives, as an infrequent visitor, an ill-tempered disciplinarian whose sleep one was always being warned not to disturb.” On the other, “she was a woman of her time, and she was harried by the incorrectness, the meagerness of those retrograde longings for domestic life and for the daily society…of small children.” Twenty years later, here I am, pulled in those exact same directions. And with, it seems, no end to the pulling.