[HN Gopher] How Penelope Fitzgerald became a late blooming novelist
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How Penelope Fitzgerald became a late blooming novelist
Author : lermontov
Score : 23 points
Date : 2024-04-25 05:12 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.commonreader.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.commonreader.co.uk)
| dhosek wrote:
| I was 45 when I had my first fiction published and I've published
| at least one story a year since then (although there have been
| years that it's felt like I just barely met that goal). I think
| my MFA thesis advisor assigned Fitzgerald to me as a role model
| of a late-in-life writer (it's amusing to think of my
| then-45-year-old self as "old" a decade later). But like
| Fitzgerald, it's not like I wasn't writing before. I've written
| my whole life and while I took multiple extended breaks from
| sending things out and I have notebooks full of unfinished
| stories, I still wrote and after really pushing myself back into
| writing (and more importantly, _finishing_ ) when I was coming up
| on 40 years old and subsequently pursuing an MFA to further
| polish my craft, I managed to get that first bit of external
| validation in the form of a published story (one which was paid,
| and in print). The seeking of validation is a bit brutal and
| soul-crushing (at best I've gotten 1 acceptance for 25
| rejections, overall it's more like 49 rejections for each
| acceptance), but as W. P. Kinsella said, it's not the publishing
| that makes a writer, but the writing.
|
| And a bit more apropos of the article, I'd add that to a large
| extent, I think that the 45 years of life leading up to my first
| publication were a big part of what made me able to write
| something worth publishing.
| HenryOliver87 wrote:
| What's interesting about PF, of course, is that she just didn't
| do very _much_ writing earlier on. Glad to hear you have made
| some progress!
| dhosek wrote:
| But she did. From the article:
|
| > The other answer given is that she wasn't, in fact, such a
| late starter. Critics point to her childhood stories,
| anonymous reviews for the Times Literary Supplement, her
| probable contributions to Desmond's history of the Irish
| Guards, and the literary magazine she and Desmond ran
| together when the children were little. There were also four
| short stories she wrote earlier in life: two as a young
| child, two in the 1950s when she was a mother. (Fitzgerald
| wrote very few short stories overall.)
|
| I would guess that were I to die today, there would be very
| little evidence that I wrote anything before 2014.
| breck wrote:
| > I think that the 45 years of life leading up to my first
| publication were a big part of what made me able to write
| something worth publishing.
|
| "Before you can write the book, you have to be the book."
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| The article indicates that she likely ghostwrote a piece
| published under her husband's name during the period when many
| feel she "wasn't writing." I am reminded of the plot for the
| biopic _Collette_ about a French writer whose initial success was
| from works published under her husband 's name.
|
| In the biopic _Out of Africa_ , Karen Blixen is portrayed as
| learning to tell stories orally to her nieces and later her
| guests. The man who later becomes her lover gifts her a pen and
| tells her both "we pay our storytellers here" and "write them
| down sometime."
|
| Blixen was a socialite who was able to access family money by
| marrying her "lover's brother." When they divorced, she was
| sterile from syphilis contracted from her unfaithful husband who
| slept around casually and probably couldn't use marriage and
| family inheritance a second time as a means to support herself.
|
| She also published some of her works under a male name. And I
| read a piece called _Homme de Plume_ on Jezebel that told the
| story of a woman writer submitting her work to publishers under a
| male name and getting much more positive feedback for the exact
| same manuscript.
|
| So gender discrimination is certainly real, but I'm a woman and I
| don't see getting a sex change operation to fix my issues. Some
| women downplay their gender by using initials, like JK Rowling.
|
| But the thing that interests me is the pieces I might control in
| some way on my end. Both Penelope Fitzgerald and Karen Blixen
| appear to have had no ambition initially. They both appear to
| have been content to try to make life work financially by being
| _wives_ , the role society expected of them, and it seems likely
| they only sought to develop a career as paid writers when it
| became clear they couldn't make life work via that means.
|
| I think women get generally inculcated from birth with the idea
| that a "successful" woman living The Good Life is a woman who
| _married well_ and had kids and put her husband 's career and
| children's welfare first. Career women tend to get vilified as
| bad mothers and seem to divorce frequently, possibly because if a
| woman has sufficient income she doesn't need to try to _make_ a
| bad marriage work.
|
| So I think women tend to lack mental models men seem to be
| inculcated with and this seems to be a separate issue from the
| much more readily recognized issue of gender discrimination.
|
| No clue how to fix it. It doesn't seem to be part of the public
| discourse and seems unlikely to ever become so.
| dhosek wrote:
| I think it is part of the public discourse, you just may not
| have encountered it. I recently had cause to recommend some
| examples of science fiction books that had good world-building
| that would be useful models for another writer. The two that
| sprang to mind that I gave the writer, it turned out, were both
| by female writers (although another non-fiction book I
| suggested was by a male writer). Part of my onboarding training
| at my current job was about avoiding unconscious biases by
| being aware of them.
|
| It does feel a little counter-intuitive that women get
| discriminated against in publishing given that I think the
| majority of workers in publishing are women (although the
| gender balance is reversed as you move up the ladder). I'm
| querying a novel right now and 85% of the agents on my query
| list are women. Of course, ultimately what matters is the views
| of the people writing the checks.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| This is what I think is not really being talked about:
|
| _So I think women tend to lack mental models men seem to be
| inculcated with and this seems to be a separate issue from
| the much more readily recognized issue of gender
| discrimination._
|
| And you don't talk about it either. You talk about things
| like subconscious bias in other people.
|
| Bias in other people gets talked about a great deal. It
| certainly is a real issue but I don't think it fully explains
| the issue and I think bias and stereotypes have some basis in
| reality, which people don't like hearing.
|
| Most people "bet the odds" when interacting socially. If
| bosses tend to be white males, white males get assumed to be
| the boss instead of the woman or person of color who really
| is in charge.
|
| It makes "minorities" -- i.e. the people subjected to bias --
| really crazy but lots of people actively justify navigating
| the world this way as the convenient and logical answer and
| feel that "only an idiot" would waste their time on checking
| if this is the 10 or 20 percent of the time or whatever that
| it's not true.
|
| The thing we don't discuss is the degree to which women get
| effectively brainwashed and trained from birth to assume her
| man's career comes first, she will do the cooking and
| cleaning, etc.
|
| It's so invisible you are telling me "it gets discussed" and
| not noticing that what you think I'm talking about isn't my
| point at all.
|
| Real world bias exists which actively discriminates against
| women in all kinds of careers. But there is a more insidious
| force which convinces women to think and act in ways which
| undermine their careers and we tend to be older before we
| have put some of that behind us.
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