Take it like a man

The phrase “dick for a day” used to be bandied about quite a bit by me and many other women I knew, mostly fellow writers, back in the 1980s, when we were young and ambitious but unsuccessful, our tone somewhere between wistful yearning and pugnacious wrath: “If I had a dick for a day, I’d show them”—“them” being overrated male writers, ex-lovers who’d treated us badly, and, frankly, men in general. They had all the luck. We were stuck being women.

I grew up in an all-female family—two sisters and a mostly single mother—and we often bonded, in part, by disparaging men and feeling superior to them. My charismatic, handsome, intelligent, crazy father, a Marxist lawyer, disappeared from our lives (led off by the cops in hand-cuffs for beating my mother; I was the one who called them) when my little sisters and I were young, three years after my mother had divorced him. After that, my mother struggled to raise us without child support or help, during a time when she was working toward a doctorate in psychology from Arizona State University.

As my family saw them, men were ­untrustworthy, weak, and selfish. Our mother taught us to get along without them, to get along without much of anything, and to live well and have fun anyway.

But even after he was gone, I still loved my father. I looked Norwegian, like him, with a long face, strong jaw, thin mouth, and flashing eyes. And, like him, I was ­verbal, easygoing, and low-key on the ­surface, and, deep down, proud, socially paranoid, full of self-loathing, and prone to rage at injustice. Until I was nine, I was my father’s “son,” the one he could talk to. And after he left, I still felt like the boy—the ­ambitious, hotheaded one. I never liked dolls or played house. I read and wrote, climbed trees, collected rocks, rode my bike, and befriended boys, platonically. ­Although part of me yearned for a husband, a house, and kids, most of my brain was ­single-mindedly determined to do whatever it took to be a successful published novelist, and that part of me felt male.

In spite of my family’s attitude toward men, I loved, admired, and identified with them. I envied them, too—their power and autonomy, their freedom to be selfish, to walk away, to start over, to get angry, to speak frankly without appearing to give a damn what anyone thinks. Men were assholes, women were victims; men were ­active, women passive. Given the choice, I would have preferred to be an active ­asshole. Instead, I kept writing.

After a lot of floundering around, post-MFA, with bad relationships and worse jobs, I published my first novel, In the Drink, when I was 36. Its first-person narrator was a woman, but I was writing in a consciously male genre I privately called Loser Lit. I wanted my female narrator, Claudia ­Steiner, to join the ranks of Lucky Jim, ­Gulley Jimson, and Peter Jernigan. Claudia is a hard-drinking ghostwriter who’s in love with her seemingly unattainable male best friend, in debt, hapless, and bleakly, comically gritty. As I wrote the book, I was sure I was breaking new literary ground. ­Reviewers (all of them female) felt otherwise: When it came out, In the Drink was lumped with two other recently published, superficially similar books by women; ours were collectively hailed as the first wave of “chick lit” in America. This didn’t feel like a compliment to any of us. Naively, having expected everyone to somehow magically get what I was up to (“It’s the female Lucky Jim! Hooray!”), I was insulted and flummoxed. How could they not recognize that I was a secret guy? I had never expected to be put into a basket of “chicks.”

I was determined anew to prove myself as a serious writer; writing in a female voice was evidently not the way to achieve this. My second novel, Jeremy Thrane, is narrated by a man who, in the opening passages of the novel, describes his penis, in case anyone is in any doubt as to his sex. The persona of Jeremy allowed me to write in a way I couldn’t have otherwise—a female narrator would have been too close to my own voice to tell certain autobiographical truths I needed to expose, especially about my father: Jeremy is me as a gay man.

The novel’s publication coincided with 9/11; the book sank into oblivion without a ripple—but even worse, the city I had loved for so long as much as a ­family ­member or a part of my own body was devastated. During the long, bleak ­winter of 2001 to 2002, I cried constantly and could not get out of bed and was catatonic with grief. Not being the suicidal type, and unwilling to go on antidepressants, I launched a two-pronged attack on my own neurasthenic disintegration: During the ensuing year, I wrote The Epicure’s Lament and trained for and ran the 2002 New York City marathon. In other words, I unleashed my inner dick.

[Source : elle.com]