The women of my generation were brought up to think of themselves in terms of what they did rather than of being married or unmarried, and it took on this huge weight. Work was suddenly supposed to be a much bigger thing than work can ever be. You're supposed to give your soul to it -- and you're never supposed to not want to work at something. You're supposed to be as dedicated to your work as you would be to another person.

In that story, Jane's boss says, "It would be great if you could help out," and Jane says, "It was hard to turn down a chance to be great." You're defined by your willingness to do anything, which is something that [can also happen] in a relationship. And, well, that's not so healthy.

How do you feel about all the comparisons being made between "The Girls' Guide" and "Bridget Jones's Diary"?

I think it's sort of ridiculous -- it just seems like it's a coincidence of timing. I thought "Bridget Jones" was a good book for what it was -- a kind of satire.

I didn't see "Girls' Guide" as being strictly about the pursuit of romance.

Me neither. Jane is hunting for a life. It's about her finding a career and figuring out her family and growing up. No one would call Jane boy-crazy or think that her life would be solved by being with a man. She's more complicated than that. With "Bridget Jones," there's no real change or evolution, really.

Do you think its getting lumped together with these single-women books is pure marketing, or does this signal an emerging genre of young women's fiction?

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I'm not sure. You wonder whether there were books like these that weren't published -- I know I had a tremendous amount of difficulty getting the stories into magazines. I tried everyone, everywhere. I thought it was because the stories aren't literary in a traditional way; they're not lyrical. And there's something about the small details of a woman's life that may not have been viewed previously as worth writing about, or worth reading about. They might have been too realistic or too complicated for a women's magazine. On the other hand, maybe they weren't literary enough for the New Yorker or the Atlantic Monthly or Harper's. "The Girls' Guide" fell somewhere between the literary and the commercial. And what's happened now is that somehow people are seeing it as both literary and commercial. That may have to do with people's paying more attention to what women's lives are like now.

With writers like Philip Roth or John Updike, there was never any of the "Well, this is just about a middle-aged man in the suburbs." It was fine. But Jane is a woman who is middle-class and, in some ways, ordinary. Maybe this is becoming a kind of genre, because people are recognizing that women are a major audience.

You once said that you were so intimidated by the literary titans that you finally decided not to bother with "serious" literature.

I did feel like there was writing that I might really appreciate but that felt outside of me. I was intimidated by it all. I was a terrible student. I felt like there were things that other people -- everybody else except me -- understood, and that there were things I just wasn't smart enough to get. Remarkably, I felt really freed when I got to college. At a certain point I had this breakthrough -- I was really blocked, and I started saying this thing to myself: "You're the only person who can write this story." And that signaled more confidence in my voice. I stopped trying to write like other writers, all of whom were male, and just learned to be myself on the page.

Are there any women writers you admire?

I like Joan Didion -- I remember liking "Slouching Toward Bethlehem" a lot -- and some of Doris Lessing's early stories. In recent years, I've really liked Pam Houston, though I actually have trouble hearing women talk a lot about the difficulty of finding a man. Nothing on earth could compel me to start a conversation that way. Finding love is compelling, and connecting is compelling, and the difficulties of connecting to other people are compelling, but the idea that a man is going to save your life is cuckoo.

A lot of the women I know who are not involved with men are not involved for good reasons. They don't want to be involved. I know [being in a relationship] makes me crazy. And sometimes it makes me into somebody I don't want to be with; it brings every neurosis to the fore. "The Girls' Guide" ends with Jane sort of beginning with Robert, but it's not that simple. Someone asked me how the book might be described. I think it would be "Girl meets boy, girl loses self, girl gets self."
salon.com | June 15, 1999

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