Chick Lit

JM, Classics at Atwater, 3.6.08

Joseph Mailander a guy in la • elsewhere • email

There is certainly an irony attendant to the exposing of two fake female-written and female-edited and mostly female-reviewed memoirs during Women's History Month. Everyone's blamed the author and publisher plenty; but what about the critics who stood in line and swallowed the narratives whole? Did they do their jobs as critics?

In the local case of Love and Consequences, at the LA Times and the New York Times the scribes who fell for the latest and reviewed the book without noticing any inventions in the narrative were also femmes largely unacquainted with either gangs or crime statistics or the science of probability in general. The one at the local fishwrap has already defended herself, unflinchingly, assigning all the blame elsewhere and holding herself completely harmless. The one at the NYTimes...the notorious Michiko Kakutani...once described by the late Norman Mailer as "a one woman kamikaze...who disdains white male authors"...and who "can't be fired because she's a feminist..."

Now that they've pulled the book, nobody gets to read it. But when you go back and read Kakutani's NYT review, the narrative she describes reads like pure fantasy:

Both her older brothers, Terrell and Taye, were sent to prison, and after his release, Terrell, who’d talked of getting a straight job so his children wouldn’t grow up in the ’hood, was shot to death by Crips as he sat outside Big Mom’s house, waiting to meet his son for his weekend visit. Ms. Jones’s friend Marcus, a brother figure with whom she used to drive around Los Angeles, dreaming of what life might be like “beyond the lights” of the city, was shot and killed, she says, and her boyfriend, Slikk, was arrested for an attempted murder he didn’t commit.

Keeping score: that's one brother, murdered; one best friend, murdered; one b/f, framed for life---and nobody from editor to publisher to reviewer found it odd enough to make a single fact-check call, or thought to google a news story.

If you swallowed all that as the experience of one person who still found time to string a narrative together all by her lonesome later, without even making a single phone call inquiring about any of the principles, well, it's no wonder you thought the Brat Pack were writing masterpieces in the early eighties.

Victimization is everywhere in this story: after the author made a case of herself as victim, the editor and publisher then became the victim, then the reviewers became the victim, etc. But how complicit is this victimization? And what has happened to due diligence in everyone's rush to be victim?

We've seen earlier in this election cycle how sexy it is to be a victim in America---Hillary's whole campaign is fueled by it, and it's no accident the supreme contest for the presidency is between a cheated-on feminist and a sotto voce African American. This Woman's History Month, via publishing, the lesson is no less than that we may have reached true equality at last; it's a time when we are finding that women can lie, deceive, be deceived, and spin their mistakes away, all without flinching, and just as readily as men can.