Remarks given by Guest Speaker Rivka Galchen
23rd Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Awards Ceremony
September 14, 2017 – New York City
When I was twenty-five years old, I looked around at the books on my shelf, shelves I was very proud of, and with excellent books on them, and I noticed that there were pretty close to no books on those shelves by women. I didn’t regret the books I’d read, and I didn’t know the difference between first and second and third wave feminism—somehow I went to college at precisely the year to miss all that-- but I did know that the situation on my shelves was absurd. I will add here that being a Dead-Writers-Reader at the time I had at least read George Eliot’s Middlemarch, and had been more surprised than I should have been that George was a woman writing under a man’s name. Well, I said, if the books that naturally make their way to me are all by men—I should also mention here that through no fault of theirs I had an ignorance-based allergy to Jane Austen and Edith Wharton—then I should go out and find the books by women myself.
Weirdly enough I’d never been particularly drawn to bookish people—no offense to present company intended—and so I didn’t really have many people to ask for recommendations. Or maybe I was just too embarrassed to ask for recommendations. Anyhow, this is in part a wandering way of explaining how I first came to know the wonderful writer, who I figured was probably French or maybe French Canadian, named Denis (pronounced Den-Nee) Johnson. Who is, of course Denis (pronounced Den-Niss) Johnson. There wasn’t an author photo on the first book I read, The Name of the World. I remember thinking that it was pretty impressive and refreshing to think that this woman had so convincingly and compellingly imagined the inner life of this male main character.
Now this anecdote itself is just its own wandering way of saying that in the subsequent fifteen years I did find my way to so many great books by writers who also happened to be women. I found many books I loved. I also began noticing a series of curious biographical details associated with those books.
I learned for example that: the Booker prize-winning British novelist Penelope Fitzgerald published her first of nine novels at the age of sixty. The book, The Golden Child, was a goofy mystery set in a museum, titled and it was written, mostly, to entertain her Fitzgerald’s dying husband; she would read the pages of it out to him as he lay in bed. Other men, if, sick in bed, found that their wives were writing a murder mystery to entertain them might have been worried; but apparently the marriage was a happy one.
I learned that: Alice Munro published one story as a teenager, and then a story collection later, at age 37, once her daughters had reached double digits. She is said to have spent the decades of child-rearing thinking up a short bit here, a short bit there, something to remember to work on another time.
I learned that: Toni Morrison published her first novel, The Bluest Eye, at age 39, a novel she wrote while raising two children on her own, waking up at 4am to write.
I learned that Louise Erdrich (who was in the first class at Dartmouth that included women) in addition to the six children she raised and the dozen novels she wrote under her own name, also co-wrote romance stories under the pseudonym Milou North, in order to make extra money for the family.
I learned that pretty close to all of the other women I found myself reading had no children.
I don’t think of these as sad stories or hard luck stories, and I don’t think they are today’s stories—not at all-- but they were stories that I noticed, and under whose long shadow we still write. And I noticed the same kinds of stories even in men, and even in men who had quite a lot of money. Flaubert may not have been a woman but I remain, in this same line of thinking, touched and amused by the story that he may not even have really had the epilepsy which he used as an excuse to drop out of law school, go home to live with his mom, and write. Even Proust, though his main obstacles were just life, love and dinner parties, had to make it back to a quiet room back home, with his mom, to get anything done.
The world is so different now, of course! You can even put out a remake of Ghostbusters with a female lead cast and everyone thinks it’s really great, or at least ignores it.
But I do honestly think the world for women writers is much better than in the past. And I like to think that with the help of the Rona Jaffe fellowships more women might get to their first book via ever so slightly more direct paths, and that their books can be discovered more directly as well. The Rona Jaffe Fellowships help six wonderful writers have more time, more space, and more attention, and the writers don’t even have to feign at illness or live with mom or necessarily get up at 4am to do it.
In 1958, when Rona Jaffe published, The Best of Everything, a book that followed young women working in publishing, she interviewed fifty women before she started to write. She wanted to know if her sense of how things were was, actually, how things were. The book, a huge sensation, didn’t have any straightforwardly happy outcomes for the characters. But one wonderful outcome was for the writer outside of the book. The book, a huge success, was Jaffe’s first. Jaffe’s editor, the great Robert Gottlieb, has said that he told Jaffe while she was working on the book that she should just, “look back in horror and write.”
Tonight we aren’t looking back, but instead forward, in happiness. It’s an honor to be in this room this evening as we celebrate and recognize Aamina Ahmad, Ama Codjoe, Ebony Flowers, Tiana Nobile, Domenica Phetteplace and Shawna Rodenberg.
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