No fear

Even in the third wave, it's not something that's really discussed. It seems sometimes that it's all reproductive rights, all the time. There's no substantive discussion about child care.

I mean, I know of women in my daughter's cohort who are married to bankers and they can afford the $800 a week nanny. OK. Lucky them. But most people can't.

I've actually read that some people pay almost 50 percent of their income for child care.

Yeah. If I were running a political movement today, I would focus on children and how parents are being screwed. Why is there no political will to support parents? That's where my mind is now. I'm thinking we're going to lose choice, and we may have to lose choice to get it back in a more permanent way. Which sounds like a radical thing to say, but I'm afraid that we will lose it because now we have sonograms and we can see all the little fingers and toes. And also because the right-to-lifers have the better slogan. Our slogan sucks. Choice is very abstract. Life is not. We will get choice back -- but it may take three generations. But my focus right now would be on how parents are penalized for having children -- both men and women.

So you think that should be the focus for the next generation of feminists?

I do. Because I think it's critical, and it's never been addressed properly in this country.

I agree. Back to the book for a minute -- you say at one point that a writer's life is "silence and despair." It seems to me that you've had a pretty damn good life.

Well, when I'm sitting at the desk not being able to write line one, it's silence and despair! It's not so easy to put the pen to the legal pad or type the first sentence on the computer screen. It's difficult and it's lonely ... And you're always self-critical ... I've been so blocked throughout my life at different times.

You wouldn't know it from the book. You say that "humans don't feel any experience is complete unless it's recorded." How did that play into how you chose which experiences to write about? Because I think there are times when it seems as if things are there just for shock value. I mean, what's really the point of writing about having an affair with Martha Stewart's husband? Or a graphic description of giving oral sex to a publisher? Are these really the experiences that you need to "complete"?

In the book I made a decision that I would write about all the terrible mistakes I made as a young writer. And all the self-deceptions. And all the times that I found myself in a compromising situation that I later regretted. But that in my vulnerability and naiveti -- and perhaps a desire for experience to write about -- I fell into these reckless and stupid things. And I thought that thematically that ... worked with the idea that I was trying to write a book about how I survived as a writer. And boy did I do some stupid things ... It's really about all the mistakes you make along the way as a writer. And I present it as a mistake. I'm sorry I did it. It's not presented as, Look at me, I'm so smart. It's sort of, I'm so stupid and I did so many idiotic things, but I think that readers can identify with that. Because nobody grows up without making a gazillion mistakes. And admitting to them. I mean, at some point along the way you have to acknowledge what an asshole you are.

You would hope so!

Or you don't grow up!

Well, what also struck me was that when you wrote about certain experiences -- the affair with Martha Stewart's husband or even your daughter's rehab experience, for example -- you were careful to say that all of these people in one way or another had spoken or written about you before. The mother in your daughter's novel went to Europe instead of taking her daughter to rehab (which wasn't the case in your real life), Martha had said nasty things about you -- was this just your chance to get a last shot in? To set the record straight?

Oh dear. Well, I didn't really have an affair. I had a "hook-up." What kids call a "hook-up." I don't know that I care that much about setting the record straight. Since "Fear of Flying," it's been my experience that one minute people are telling me that I'm a pornographer and a tramp and a commie kike bitch, and the next minute someone is writing me from Russia and saying, "I'm writing my Ph.D. thesis on you." I don't really think what people think about you is so important. It's taught me that the very same book can get opposite reactions. And maybe that's a good thing for a writer to know about. So setting the record straight? ... I don't really need to set the record straight.

Well that also kind of relates to what you write about women writers pushing boundaries. I thought a lot about what you had to say about women writers and suicide -- that whenever women writers transgress, they have to punish themselves. Something that has always stuck with me is something [Edgar Allen] Poe said, that "the death of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world." That's the best story. So I wonder if women writers who kill themselves are, in a way, trying to complete that narrative, to make the best story.

I think they are. They are trying to complete the narrative. There's also another paradigm that one finds often, which is the woman losing the child. Instead of committing suicide. I mean it's true that Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Virginia Woolf and many others committed suicide and completed the narrative of the doomed maiden. Or the doomed mother. But also think about "August Is a Wicked Month," by the wonderful Irish writer Edna O'Brien, where the mother goes away on holiday, and the father takes the little boy on holiday, and the mother for the first time since her separation from the boy's father has a wonderful sexual experience and that very moment the little boy is run over. Or Mary McCarthy's "The Group" -- the most sexual of the girls dies first as a suicide. So this paradigm of the doomed rebel, the woman who reaches out either for sexuality or rebellion or something different in her life and dies. It's all through our literature. We have all these legends, really female legends, of women who either die or lose their children -- which is like dying -- because of reaching out beyond what women are allowed. It may be sexual, it may be intellectual, but they are rebelling in some way and they are stricken down for it.

Well how are we -- or, at least, women writers -- supposed to stop that narrative?

It's not to be suicides and spinsters. As I say in one of my poems, "suicides and spinsters -- all our kind." Partly by embracing life instead of embracing death, partly by writing and living. And I've tried to do that because I really wanted to change the paradigm.

Are there any young women writers now that you think are challenging that paradigm? Or challenging the idea of female invisibility or silence?

I think you have to have produced a body of work to see the trends of the paradigms and the fables, so it's hard to say which of the many talented young women who are out there, and there are many ... But I think that a lot of women of my daughter's generation, women in their 20s and 30s, believe that it's possible to be a writer, a mother and a wife, without necessarily killing yourself. It's hard, god knows. But I think we are shifting the paradigm.

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