On forms to be filled out in waiting rooms, I always hesitate over the question of occupation: writer or author? For years it was only writer; now it’s a question of mood. Writer forever has her work ahead of her. Author has already done it. Writer bears no great claim: Like anyone else, she is just scrabbling away at it, unsure, experimenting. Author comes with distinction, and the right to expect that she will be read. Now, though, I think the perceived honour of the word is wrapped up in “author” sounding like a chip off the granite block of authority.
Both “writer” and “author” evolved in part from the Latin “augere” — to increase, to originate — and expanded in “author” to be someone who invents or causes something. Which returns me to a question that bothered me to no end when I was younger: Who gives her the right? Or more like: How does she take it? How does she claim for herself the authority to increase or originate, or invent or cause something, such as a book that people will read?
Now the author will write a sentence so obvious, so taken for granted, that it hardly bears writing, and yet since there is no blank for it on the endless forms to be filled out, I will go ahead and write it here: A young woman grows in the world knowing that she will have to fight for her right to authority, while around her others shrug it on without any effort at all, like a coat. An expensive coat, that buttons left to right, which is also the way the world turns.
Of course some have to fight more and some less, depending on what family or class or culture they are born into. But I have not known any woman who wields independent authority in the world who has not had to do some battle to win it. Who has not had to fix the buttons on that coat so that they work in her direction.
Born into a liberal family, in a relatively liberal country, and having received an excellent education, there was still never a time as a young woman that I wrote a page (let alone spilled out 500) without the understanding that it better scale some invisible mark, proving the worth and seriousness of the mind it came from, if it was ever going to deserve to be the work of an author, with the right to increase, originate, invent or cause something before an audience.
I knew, also, that asserting that right was only the first step: What followed would be the effort of then freeing oneself from a sticky lexicon of adjectives that go on entrapping women who command authority. Recently we’ve heard much about the price former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton paid for being labelled cold, ambitious and unlikable, and the criticisms levelled at powerful women that can become fatal to their careers.
But I have not often heard a discussion about equivalent problems with the sort of praise that successful women tend to receive, which can be equally confining — about the frustrations of female artists, for example, whose work is most consistently referred to as “lovely,” as if its beauty were its most worthy attribute, leaving its potentially more threatening aspects — its originality or strength — unrecognised or ignored. Something lovely is most often without independent power, not able to fend for itself, but rather existing under the protection of that which finds it lovely.
Young men purchase authority on credit for which they are pre-approved. But if you are a young woman, even now, no one and nothing will guarantee you. Is it any wonder, then, that if you wish to be in possession of authority, you seek to borrow before you expect to own?
But from where can you borrow, and what? As a young writer in 2001 or even 2004 or ‘05, it was less obvious to me to borrow the undertones of resistance I found in Virginia Woolf, say, or Marilynne Robinson, than it was to simply borrow a man’s voice. To speak as a man on the page, in his third or, even better, his intimate first person, was to have quicker access to the sort of authority that allows one to be assertive, brazen, even difficult, without losing the possibility of empathy, which might lead to the slamming shut of the book.
Now I think I might not have cared as much about sometimes losing the empathy of others had it not been bound up with being likable as a woman, or even just tolerable. And I think I might have cared less about being likable were that not the most reliable path, as a woman, to being readable, to being read, which was the first step to being read seriously. To borrow a man’s voice was a kind of shortcut to putting on the coat, to going out in it and not worrying that it wasn’t yet tailored for me.
I don’t recall it ever being a conscious choice, or a choice at all. Writing my first novel when I was 25, it was instinct that led me to combine what I held to be personal with my imagination in the story of a man who loses his memory. A few years later, beginning to write a novel that became The History of Love, I named a character Leo Gursky and I found he didn’t need to contain any less of me, any less of my perspective or emotional life. On the contrary, in some ways he afforded me a greater range, without risking the sacrifice of readers’ empathy, than if I had written the story of Leah Gursky. No matter that I would be asked, endlessly, if Leo was a portrait of my grandfather, as if the authority on the page was someone else’s, which I had only observed.
That resistance that runs under the surface of so many great female writers’ books — what is it? Opposition to the status quo, the power that comes of compression into a minimum of words, and also a form of refusal: to be pigeonholed, to be confined to certain tones, concerns or audiences. It is possible that I could have been taken equally seriously, equally quickly had I gone directly to writing in a woman’s voice. But these were the years when the phrase “chick lit” was thrown around nearly as often as “Osama Bin Laden,” and I was protective, not of my personal life or autobiography, but of my authority and freedom.
To write from the perspective of a man, back then, allowed me to wriggle out from under certain expectations — and out from under them, I felt more free, and more authentic, a word also related to “author.” The Latin root contains wisdom in it, because to author is indeed to increase - to expand the self until it contains multitudes, and in so doing to expand a small corner of reality.
— New York Times News Service
Nicole Krauss is the author, most recently, of the novel Forest Dark.
