Salon.com > Teddy Wayne

Sex, Spider-Man and the hubris of being a writer

Tue, 25 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Sarah Bruni, Adelle Waldman, Alissa Nutting and Periel Aschenbrand are the authors of four hot summer reads — three debut novels and a memoir. "The Night Gwen Stacy Died," by Bruni, is a strange love story about an Iowa teenager and a man who calls himself Peter Parker and her Gwen Stacy (Spider-Man’s girlfriend). Waldman’s "The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P." chronicles the romantic misadventures and status anxieties of the titular protagonist, an up-and-coming writer in Brooklyn. "Tampa," Nutting’s second work of fiction, is a ripped-from-the-tabloids tale of a female teacher’s seduction of her young male student. And Aschenbrand’s memoir "On My Knees" is — well, just read it. I interviewed them as a group with a number of verbal restrictions on some of their answers:

Without summarizing the plot in any way, what would you say your novel is about?

Sarah Bruni: The Midwest. Spider-Man. Identity-borrowing. Adolescence. Fugitives falling in love. Formative acts of reading.

Alissa Nutting: Sex. Obsession. Monstrosity. Gender roles.

“One and Only” author: “It’s like I’m suggesting that people should have aborted their own children”

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 13:57:00 +0000

Lauren Sandler's new book, "One and Only: The Freedom of Having an Only Child, and the Joy of Being One," shatters the notions that only children are lonelier, more selfish or less social than anyone else, and considers the benefit to our well-being, our economics, our environment and our very freedom, if we rejected these old myths and instead embraced the single-child family. In the New York Times Book Review, Lori Gottlieb writes that Sandler "delves deeply, thoughtfully and often humorously into history, culture, politics, religion, race, economics and, of course, scientific research to explore the origins and merits" of the assumption that only children must be screwed up. I spoke with Sandler (who's also a former editor at Salon) about the controversy over the subject, why these stereotypes are misguided, and how to balance family and work.

You’ve written about abortion, fundamentalism, the war in Iraq -- your first book was on how the religious right was winning new young converts -- and yet you’ve said that this is the most surprisingly controversial thing you’ve reported. Why?

Loneliness! Labial reconstruction! Some hostages!

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 21:02:00 +0000

Among the many sterling novels coming out this April, authors Allison Amend (“A Nearly Perfect Copy”), Amy Brill (“The Movement of Stars”), Jennifer Gilmore (“The Mothers”) and Fiona Maazel (“Woke Up Lonely”) have stood out.

I interviewed all four, limiting them primarily to incomplete sentences and indirect responses -- and asked them to pose questions to each other at the end.

Without summarizing the plot in any way, what would you say your novel is about?

FIONA MAAZEL: Loneliness! A city underneath the city of Cincinnati. North Korea. Labial reconstruction. Paths towards and away from estrangement. A cult. Some hostages. Cloud seeding.

ALLISON AMEND: "A Nearly Perfect Copy" challenges our presumptions about originality and authenticity, loss and replacement, and the perilous pursuit of perfection. OK, I copied that from the book jacket. But I wrote it the first time …

Amber Dermont: The Internet expands the way we read

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 21:41:00 +0000

Amber Dermont is the author of the bestselling novel "The Starboard Sea" and a new story collection, "Damage Control." Caitlin Macy, in the lead review of the New York Times Book Review's “Fresh Voices” issue, wrote that Dermont “seems able to throw down a convincing story set anywhere, spun from any premise … This is not, however, one of those books whose authors appear to be casting around, trying a bit of this and a bit of that in search of a collection. [Dermont] is a deft writer, bullish on her characters, assertive in her descriptions of these specific worlds.”

I spoke with the author, who teaches at Agnes Scott College in Georgia, about the differences between her short fiction and her novel, the technological paradigm shifts with short stories, and her abiding passion for comedian Nick Kroll.

How do these stories differ aesthetically from your novel?

The agony of the male novelist

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 01:00:00 +0000

Bestselling writer Jennifer Weiner revisited a favorite topic on her blog Tuesday, unearthing data on gender bias in New York Times book reviews. By her calculations, of the 254 novels reviewed by the Gray Lady in 2011 -- both in the daily pages and the Sunday book review -- only 41 percent were written by women.

This ratio is just a smidgen higher than it was in August 2010, when Weiner, along with fellow “commercial women’s fiction” writer Jodi Picoult, launched a broadside against the “literary” media machine that had luminously reviewed Jonathan Franzen twice in the Times, put him on the cover of Time, and decoded in his novel "Freedom" a viable cure for the common cold.

Their argument was that Franzen writes the same genre of books they do — indeed, Amazon categorizes "Freedom" as “Women's Fiction > Domestic Life” — yet the publishing establishment hails him as a genius while paying less attention to women writers. (Weiner later slightly, and passive-aggressively, backpedaled in a Huffington Post interview, saying, “Do I think I should be getting all of the attention that Jonathan ‘Genius’ Franzen gets? Nope. Would I like to be taken at least as seriously as a Jonathan Tropper or a Nick Hornby? Absolutely.”)

This is sexual harassment!

Wed, 02 Nov 2011 23:59:00 +0000

"These incidents include conversations allegedly filled with innuendo or personal questions of a sexually suggestive nature, taking place at hotels during conferences, at other officially sanctioned restaurant association events and at the association’s offices. There were also descriptions of physical gestures that were not overtly sexual but that made women who experienced or witnessed them uncomfortable and that they regarded as improper in a professional relationship." -- Politico, Oct. 30

“She was in my office one day, and I made a gesture saying — and I was standing close to her — and I made a gesture – you are the same height as my wife. And brought my hand — didn’t touch her — up to my chin saying, ‘You’re the same height as my wife, because my wife comes up to my chin.’ … And that was put in [the complaint] as something that made her uncomfortable."
--Herman Cain to Fox News' Greta Van Susteren, Oct. 31

“It’s a protest. It’s not Woodstock”

Mon, 10 Oct 2011 15:44:00 +0000

“You do not represent me! I am the 1 percent!” shouts a gray-haired man in a suit pulling a wheeled suitcase down Broadway past Zuccotti Park. “If it wasn’t for the 1 percent, the 99 percent would all starve!”

The crowd ignores him, save one lackadaisical retort: “We are starving.”

Well, perhaps figuratively; the Occupy Wall Street protesters, now in their fourth week of encampment in the park, are quite well-fed, in an ecosystem that so far belies the classic Onion article “Marxists’ Apartment a Microcosm of Why Marxism Doesn’t Work." But like most people, I had received the bulk of my information about the protest from the media, which tend to focus on the sexier or more risible sound bites of rebellion: video of violent police skirmishes during marches; photos of dreadlocked drummers; quotes from burned-out hippies or the occasional liberal-arts grad. But what’s a day like in Zuccotti Park? How does the operation sustain itself? And who, exactly, constitutes this 99 percent? On Friday, I spent a day inside the occupation to find out.