Michelle Dean, NY Magazine
Last week, the novelist Deborah Copaken Kogan had a piece in The Nation that made every female writer of my acquaintance cringe in at least some recognition. Kogan reports back from the front on what it’s like to be a woman who has multiple books to her name but few laurels, until recently, to go with them. She focuses on the particular horror she felt dealing with the packaging of her 2001 memoir of her experiences as a war photographer, Shutterbabe. She had wanted to title the thing Newswhore; her publisher insisted on the other. She had to fight off a pink cover dominated by a naked cartoon torso and a strategically placed camera. The book was not taken as seriously as Kogan hoped; reviewers registered complaints about her feminism, which she feels were illegitimate. Some seemed unduly interested in painting her as promiscuous.
It’s hard to tell whether she’s right about the criticism without reading Shutterbabe, and I haven’t. But Kogan’s story still has a few spit-take moments. She reacted to her bad reviews by calling one critic — Daniel Mendelsohn, then writing for New York — at home, twice, because “I was just calling for his e-mail address.” (I feel like I’ve tried that on crushes before.) She seems surprised that he found this an unwarranted intrusion. And the matter of the title, well: Is there a world in which Newswhore is really a better title than Shutterbabe? For once I’d prefer to stay put.
Still, Kogan has a point that people can get awful condescending about memoirs like hers, and their disdain has sexist implications. Shutterbabe was a best-seller, as are many books of this ilk. Cat Marnell and Lena Dunham recently scored sweet book deals on precisely that promise. And the popularity of, say, xoJane just goes to show that the appeal of women’s “personal stories” transcends dead-tree literary forms. So someone is reading these stories, and given that most book readers are female, it’s most likely women.
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