Are Women Reliable Narrators?

A man and his story stare at the sun, the whole face of the sun. A woman’s story is a small, smudged thing, a stepped-on thing, a hard-to-see thing, a crowded back thing.

Today, as I walked across the L.A. Convention Center at this year’s AWP conference, someone asked me, “Are you important?”

“No,” I said, “absolutely not. Are you? I’m nobody.”

She seemed to give it some thought as I continued on my way. She watched me like she might know me, despite my explanation: I’m nobody.

I think of Emily Dickinson’s follow-up line, “Are you nobody too?”

Being nobody has always been a comfort to me. No parents. No expectations. Writing Nobody to contact in case of emergency in my young years. If I’d become a drifter or a grifter, it would have been par for the course. “I figured you’d steal your way across America,” Charity said to me once. Charity, my biological mother.

“Making enough money to support one person isn’t that hard,” I said. I was still in college then. “I suppose if I want to build a big smashing life, that might be something.”

In many of the stories I read, women are not presented as reliable or valuable narrators. You can’t quite believe the woman’s version of the tale.

A man’s story is another matter. In literature, a man’s story is a great thing, a revered thing. A big stomping thing in the world.

When I have a conversation with a man, their words stomp all over God’s world, and mine walk around the edges of the room. A man and his story stare at the sun, the whole face of the sun.

A woman’s story is a small, smudged thing, a stepped-on thing, a hard-to-see thing, a crowded back thing.

In my childhood, adults were not reliable. Other kids were not reliable. God was not reliable.

I always knew my mother was an unreliable narrator. Nothing she said was true. She said I was evil.

I’m not really evil, I thought. Evil is relative.

Now that I’m an adult, evil feels real, not relative.

There is a cult surrounding the unreliable female narrator, those who are isolated and/or lost in their stories. Books like Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, My Year of Rest and Relaxation by

Ottessa Moshfegh

, and my novel, Under A Neon Sun. I love reading books about girls who are alone.

As a woman, I know I must write a good story. That’s what I’m working on.

Writing well means writing the true story. The true stories—the ones that grow from reality—are rarely pretty stories. Pretty stories are fairy tales. The true story is that once you build a press in the desert, there is a long time when no one sees it.

All writers are split into two categories: plotters or pantsers.

Your basic plotter, as you can imagine, writes an outline first. Writers of all genres can fall into this typing, but creative nonfiction writers have to be plotters because their agents insist on it. A pantser makes it up as they go along. They play music as it enters their brain.

I started off as a pantser, and it was a slow process. I wandered through my first two badly written novels, both of which ended up stuffed in drawers.

Now, I am a plotter. I plan books. As an editor, I’ve spent massive amounts of time working on other people’s books, and I’m ready to work on my own. Late in life.

Harriet Doerr published her first book at age seventy-four and, with Stones for Ibarra, won the National Book Award. She wrote two brilliant books during her career as a novelist.

Maybe that’s what I will do. Be a late bloomer. Not necessarily win the National Book Award, but write late and well.

Today, Harryette Mullen asked me when people started to use the term “micro-press.” The term, which has been used since 2000, refers to a press that has no distribution and publishes fewer than five books a year. Despite their small output, the press does not have to worry about sales as their central goal and can typically publish whatever books the editor is excited about without worrying about the marketplace.

Red Hen was a micro-press, and then we grew into a small independent press. Now, we do have to consider the marketplace. We publish books that we think there is a market for, books that we think will find their way into the hands of at least a couple thousand readers.

In Los Angeles, publishing doesn’t count for much, and most people spend more time on social media and games than reading, but I choose to believe that reading, writing, and books still matter. I am not nobody. You are not, either. Our ancestors stepped into the sunlight, as should we.

My writing and Red Hen Press, growing by leaps and bounds, both sit inside a big story. Not a story anyone’s reading or watching except me, but a story nonetheless.