Author: Helen Boyd

As if to encourage me to pick up where I left off, I got an email today from Meg, who is both a talented cartoonist and writer. She’s been looking at resources for writers, and so came upon the Ghettoe of the Womyn Author – as I like to call it. So another aspect of this sense of identity has come to mind – of parsing not just who else decides you belong, but where you yourself decide you do. And whether you want to.
I’ll be honest – for me it’s a case of sour grapes. I was always too white and even middle-class for multi-culti spaces, and the connections I did make working for an African-American author for nearly a decade did me no good whatsoever. Likewise, I wasn’t actually white in the sense of having privilege or connections or time to do internships; like a lot of other poorer folks, I worked my way though college, but because my parents had a house, I didn’t qualify financially.
In a sense, culturally I always felt like the many millions of Americans who make too much money to qualify for Medicare but who don’t have enough money to get decent insurance: between pillar and post.
I didn’t get the perks of being a ‘woman author’ as a result – it’s not like there are a ton of grants & scholarships out there for women writers, anyway, as the people who might fund such things are often – ba rump bump! – women authors and not making a ton of money themselves (cf. A Room of One’s Own, of course). But being “just an author” is somewhat impossible, too – as in class after class, I watched guys of relative competence get more attention from professors then my fellow women writers did, and people who had more money and privilege who were able to afford even the time to write, and who Knew the Right People.
(My favorite story, told by a professor of mine, was from when he was deciding whether or not to do his PhD, as he was writing reviews for Vogue and doing alright, starting to make a name for himself. And at parties he’d talk to other freelance journalists, trying to find out if they were making a living writing, and they’d always cough into their hands, and quietly say, “I have a little something” which he finally parsed to mean trust fund. He got his PhD.)
That is, the system is biased against you, but doing anything about that bias – tosses you into the ghetto. And I imagine it’s similar with being an LGBT writer, or an African American writer, or – etc. Luckily some identities become fashionable, as an Hispanic writer friend of mine has since found out. But unfortunately, despite the paucity of women journalists, humorists, & the like, there is nothing fashionable about being a women author anymore. I’m not sure there ever was; after all, we did invent the form, so theoretically, the writer’s trade has been a woman’s all along.
So while I understand the urge to be only an author, and not a woman-author, I’m afraid that’s not possible. What I suggested to Meg and what I suggest to any woman author is to make a trip to Chicago’s Women & Children First bookstore, where she can – probabably for the first time in her life – be in a bookstore full of books by women, and see one dinky little shelf labelled “Books by Male Authors.”
Then laugh, & get back to work.