Personal Boundaries Versus Book Promotion
Women continuously have to mine our personal lives to 'promote' our work. How can we push back?
Dear Readers,
This week’s edition is a special guest essay from my internet friend and Substack colleague,
. Emma is a Sunday Times bestselling and award-winning author (most recently of The Success Myth, OLIVE and A Year of Nothing) and writes which I love reading.We admire each other’s work and thought it would be fun to swap microphones for a week! Today you’re hearing from Emma here about the pressures a lot of us feel to share our personal lives when we publish books. Tomorrow over on The Hyphen there will be an essay from me, on how I stay romantic about writing while being cynical about the industry.
I think these two personal essays are sort of sisters. They speak to tensions in the public-private divide for women writers, and they push back against the pressure for us to be perpetually! performing! gushing! gratitude! and never ever complaining or questioning. I hope they spark some reflections for you too.
Best wishes and happy reading,
Bri
Personal Boundaries Versus Book Promotion
It’s Rooney season. Getting a proof of Sally Rooney’s fourth novel, Intermezzo, is proving as difficult as getting Oasis tickets. I admire the distance Rooney creates between her work and her personal life. In a 2021 interview with The Guardian on Zoom, she purposefully sat in front of a plain white wall. In an era of over-sharing Instagram posts, house tours, and ‘what I ate today’ content, Rooney just wants to do her work. Yes, she’s in a privileged position now whereby she doesn’t need to do much promotion at all, but still: she’s choosing to have some semblance of privacy and I respect that. After all, ‘Sally Rooney’ is the same name she goes to the dentist with.
In an interview (that seems to now be deleted), Rooney was asked if her short story, Mr Salary was somewhat autobiographical. She responded with a question back, readjusting the power dynamic:
‘How does that information make the scene any different for readers? Does it imbue the reading experience with some kind of increased authenticity because of its proximity to my real life? Or does it imply that rather than being the invention of a creative mind, this incident was just something that happened to me as a passive observer? In which case, is the story somehow “less literary”?’
For many female authors, we are immediately assumed to have written about our personal lives; there’s a collective inability to believe that things are made up—that we haven’t just written down ‘our feelings’. I do believe this is definitely thought of as ‘less literary’. Somehow, sadly, many female authors I know have fallen into the trap of needing to personally promote themselves and their personal lives (click bait headline, photoshoot, snapping the book in situ at home or with pets.) There’s an increasingly blurred line between ‘person’ and ‘book’.
It’s so socially ingrained that we do it without realising, and I’m not immune. I recently read the novels of three men (David Nicholls, Ian McEwan, and Nick Hornby) and I didn’t once feel the need to Google them or try and figure out if the storyline was a reflection of their current love lives. So why do we do this with women? I often look up the female author after I’ve read a novel and often I do look for clues to see if the story matches up with her own. For example, when The Nine Lives of Rose Napolitano came out, a novel about the choice to have kids or not, I wondered if the author Donna Freitas was also child-free-by-choice. (And she was.) I admit that as a reader, it made me feel somewhat closer to the book (and the author).
Perhaps I’ve become so used to women being tied up with the themed marketing campaign of their books that it’s become the norm to assume novels are a thinly disguised memoir. Many writers choose to be more closely embroiled in the story they write and actively enjoy the outward-facing publicity, that’s all well and good for them. But I’m starting to resent the immediate assumptions.
Novels are often emotionally truthful, but that doesn’t mean the plot actually happened. In my experience, there are so many truths inside a novel, in a sort of Frankenstein-Picasso way, it’s all upside down and back to front, but only the novelist knows where the clues are. That’s what makes a novel so magical to write. It all happened, but it didn’t happen at all.
When my first novel OLIVE came out, about a child-free-by-choice protagonist, I gave her brown hair. (Look, it’s not me!) It was lightly inspired by my own life and friendships but the character and storyline was completely fictionalised. The reason I wrote it as a novel in the first place was because I wasn’t quite ready to share with the world my child-free status. I wanted to hide in plain sight.
I was only 28 when I wrote the book, 30 when it came out, and that seemed a bit young to be going on national radio to say I did not want to ever have kids. I wasn’t bullied into it by any stretch, and my publicist always checked I was okay, but I still felt some kind of duty to be honest about my own life. I knew how much I’d responded positively to other child-free-by-choice women and how much it made me feel less alone, so I wanted to contribute. Only afterwards did I realise: you can’t put the snake back in the box. The headlines about ‘me’ became more prominent than the novel itself. That made me sad. I was only touting my personal life so I could sell the book. I wanted people to read the book, and now I was on the radio being interviewed about my child-free status with no mention of the book.
I came of age as a young journalist during the ‘personal essay boom’. This was when writers (mostly women) were asked to reveal the deepest parts of themselves, for not very much money at all. These stories sold. ‘I eloped with my biological brother’ or ‘I was drugged in a bar’. I worked at an online magazine at the time, and I was privy to the conversations my bosses were having about click-through rates and SEO and ad revenue. It was a hotbed for trauma porn. The era of ‘doing it for the byline’. It became normalised to share every little morsel of your life for a hit article (maybe it would be the new ‘Cat Person’ and go viral and get turned into a film!) This popular type of article started filtering down, and then I noticed most female authors were expected to mine their personal life for an article and then for a book deal—it was literally bedded into the marketing plans. Perhaps we’ve always been interested in the private lives of certain ‘star’ writers (such as the Joan Didion/Eve Babitz of the world) but on the whole, in the pre-Internet era, writers were able to write in relative peace.
My second novel comes out in April next year, and I am thinking very differently about the process this time round. I won’t be putting too much of my personal life on a platter to ‘sell’ the book. I will put the book forward, as its own piece of art. I will discuss the themes, my writing, the idea, the inspiration, but I won’t feel the need to reveal parts of myself to feel worthy for it to exist. I may even sit in front of a plain white wall.
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Having published a memoir (and you would get this, Bri), it's like people think that nothing is off limits. There's a bit of an 'I can ask you anything' mentality and some people just do not know how to 'do a boundary'. I'm a very private person (I know - writing a memoir sounds antithetical), and while I do share some of my family and my dog daughter on IG, it's reasonably generic stuff.
I've been super fortunate that people have been kind, gentle and that they've respected my boundaries and have been mindful of what questions they can ask. There's some confronting sh*t in my book (literal shit, actually), so I understand people wanting to know just that little bit more. But when we put up a boundary (when I say 'we', I mean women) we often get savaged for it. Yes, I've written a memoir, but there is *so* much people don't know because I have a private life. I like that I still have things just for me.
She spoke about this really eloquently in this podcast interview I listened to today - “Sally Rooney Thinks Career Growth is Overrated” from NYT’s The Interview podcast