The other day I overheard a woman at a coffee shop talking to a male friend about Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In: “Have you heard about this book? It’s like the new manifesto for professional women. My friends are saying it for everything. Like, who wants the last cupcake? Lean in!”

I noticed her Moleskine notebook with “Google” etched in bright colors on the cover, her nice purse. It seemed like she had it together, and by the tone of her voice she already seemed like the type of woman who wasn’t shy about going for what she wanted.

I haven’t read Lean In yet, and I basically forgot about this eavesdropped conversation until I read Deborah Copaken Kogan’s startling, brutally honest essay about her “so-called post-feminist life in arts and letters.” The essay chronicles how she’s been slut-shamed, her books given the diluted barbie treatment (look left) and written off as crazy when she was merely being assertive.

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Philip Roth’s recent kerfuffle with Elizabeth Gilbert (if one can even call it a kerfuffle) didn’t help to soften his image as a miserable curmudgeon. But that Roth is nowhere to be seen in Philip Roth: Unmasked, the documentary about the author’s prolific career that opened this weekend at Film Forum (tickets are free!). A few words of caution: don’t see this for some revelatory experience about how Roth is like Portnoy or Zuckerman. Do not expect a great feat in documentary film, either: mostly, Unmasked is Roth and his admirers talking to the camera, about, well, what else? His writing.

But I didn’t care to know more about Roth’s childhood or marriage. I just wanted to know how he does it. Write. So damn much, and so damn well. Full disclosure: I’ve only read three of Roth’s 27  novels, and while I respect him as a master of language and  story, I’m not one of the many Roth fanatics out there. The Jewish women in the ones I’ve read have been portrayed as unattractive harpies, which rubbed me the wrong way as a Jewish woman. But let’s just leave that off the table for now. The real question is, how does he do it? Not just continue to write, but constantly provoke, push, and strike a nerve?

Roth talked quite a bit about shame, and how you have to leave it aside when you’re putting your world on the page. I wonder if women have more shame than men, and if there’s a certain resentment that, say, Portnoy’s obsession with his salami would come off as a slutty nympo if he were a she. Shame. This seems to be one of the hardest things about the job for writing: for me, it’s not the story or the language or the ideas that don’t come. It’s getting over the fact that every story I desperately want to write feels cringeworthy, embarrassing, and truer than the truth. Those moments, of course, are the “hot spots” – the hidden geisers of of honesty that should explode on the page. The hot spots burn. Honesty is water in your lungs. The fact that Roth churns out books year after year (whether or not I like them) suggests, to me, that the floodgates are wide open, and for all these years he’s been unafraid to get swept up the current.

I don’t know. Maybe I just always find myself partial to old Jewish men who use terms like “lady friend.”  In truth, Roth was far more affable and approachable than the reputation that proceeds him would suggest. When he talks about how Portnoy’s Complaint “changed everything” with people calling his name on the street, it comes off as sentimental, not swagger (were their really tons of people who recognized him on the street? Or are the handful who did magnified in his memory?) He talks about needing “two sticks of reality” to rub together to make a spark of reality. We get a poignant shot of him standing up as he writes so his imagination can wander, and even if he doesn’t agree with the critique of the friends who read his drafts, they open him up to thinking in a very different way. This reveals a certain openness to the ideas of others, a certain humility about the craft, that one might find refreshing. Even Roth doesn’t have a perfect draft right out of the gate.

So perhaps I have a late-blooming interest in Roth because I’m looking at his path more than the person. I’m intrigued with how he looks back on the road he took precisely because mine, and probably yours too, is still so unclear. And that Roth has managed to create and traverse his own path time and time again makes him worth listening to. And to return to the kerfuffle, though he has devoted his life to writing and clearly loves it, love is not necessarily pleasure. Love hurts a lot of the time, love takes work, and love is something that you simply can’t live without. To feel so compelled to do something like writing, otherwise you feel anxious or slightly off, as Roth notes, is both a blessing and curse. It’s worse, says Roth, when I’m not writing. I agree.

So perhaps Roth saying “it’s an awful business” was a way of a test. Perhaps, like many writers, he was simply having a moment – one of those common instances in which many writers question the isolating, circumstances of their craft. At the end of the day, Roth shows he trusts himself, and his art.

If you work anywhere in media and publishing, you’ve probably heard about the VIDA (Women in the Literary Arts) numbers and realized not much has changed since last year, or the year before (although let me give a quick shout out to Tin House.) In short, the gender disparity at basically all major literary publications is pretty pathetic. No surprise there.

As a woman in the literary arts, I think quite a lot – probably too much – about what these numbers mean. (Maybe I shouldn’t – you know, Marissa Mayer’s whole “I’m not a girl at Google, I’m a geek at Google thing.) A few years ago, I wrote about the lack of women in criticism for Bookslut. I can’t say my feelings have changed much since then.  Also, is there gender disparity among chicken farmers? Coal miners? The tech industry? Sure.

So here’s my theory: eager, gregarious young women writers suffer from the Anne Hathaway problem. Think about her ambition and enthusiasm translated to the page. (In case you’ve been too busy humming the boob song,  there’s a lot of Annie hate going around because she’s girly and earnest and doesn’t try to to put on the hot mess/bitchy diva/I could care less face a la Lindsay/Angelina/Kristen and the rest.)

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“Somewhere between 30 seconds and all night long. That’s your problem.”

Nora Ephron was talking about cuddling. Or rather Harry was talking about post-coital cuddling in one of the many instances he and Sally discuss the differences between men and women when it comes to sex. Fine. Cuddling isn’t sex, but the point is Ephron wrote about sex with wit and subtly. E.L. James of Fifty Shades fame, not so much — and yet there was something undeniably appealing about her raunchy S&M riffs.

So which is it? Do we want to hear spank me or sweet talk? The point is, writing about sex is really hard. I normally avoid sex in fiction because it seems as complicated and sticky as it is in real life. How much do you describe? Where is the line between making love and sex and fucking? All the questions I’d often had about the ambiguities of sex in real life seemed magnified on the page.

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For all this to make sense, clearly Julian Tepper will have to write an amazing second novel.

The bizarre kerfuffle between Philip Roth (who hasn’t actually thrown a punch) and Elizabeth Gilbert, moderated by the seemingly earnest and eager to please Julian Tepper, continued in the New Yorker. Read the piece if you haven’t, then let me get a few things out of the way.

• Yes, Philip Roth’s response struck me as curmudgeonly, but also as honest, and perhaps playful.
• Both Gilbert and Roth have received more accolades than most writers can dream of getting.
• We tend to trust those who seem tortured and cynical because they seem “real.”
• As a culture we’ve become leery of optimism, especially if it comes from people who use a lot of superlatives and fall in love on beaches in Bali.
• Now, a little about me:

I like stability. I like to know that I’m going to earn the same amount every month. I like goals that I can achieve in a finite amount of time. I like to write sentences once, twice at most. But I don’t have stability, a steady income, or easy goals. I’ve been at work for an embarrassingly long time on a manuscript that may never be read, or even published. I have sentences that begin on Tue. and end on Fri. The writing, I enjoy. Being a writer, not so much.

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In novels written for adults, children don’t often exist. They seem written into the text for the sake of giving the adults something to be responsible for. But hold a match to them and you’ll see they have no depth. They’re as melty and translucent as wax figures and come dripping off the page the minute the plot heats up. It’s sort of like how the boy on Two and a Half Men must feel.

I thought this might be the case in A.M. Homes May We Be Forgiven. The kids start out as Dick and Jane types: Ashley and Nate like to text. Ashley and Nate like to text at the dinner table. Ashley and Nate exist only at boarding school so they don’t have to figure significantly into the plot. In the opening Thanksgiving scene, Homes writes that the children “sat like lumps at the table, hunched, or more like curled, as if poured into their chairs, truly spineless, eyes focused on their small screens, the only thing in motion their thumbs.” See? Pre-pubescent puddles of wax.

But all that changes, and quickly.  The children – feeling, functioning, and utterly messed up – are foils for the adults. It is the grown-ups who turn out to be the “two by fours” and need the kids to make them real.

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This year, I decided to do something a little different. Since there are so many best books of the year lists, I wanted to write about not only novels I loved, but those that had social or cultural relevance in 2012. What good is a good book if it doesn’t resonate? 2012 was a watershed year in writing, and it was also a great reading year for me. So I saw no reason to disregard those books that didn’t come out this year from my list. These were the books that informed my life this year, the ones that I just couldn’t shake.

Disclaimer: apologies for shameless self-promotion by  linking to previous work, but of course it was the books I enjoyed the most that I wrote about/author-stalked.

The Listeners by Leni Zumas

Leni Zumas’ debut novel is as a much about a troubled almost-rock star searching for her place in the world as it is about how to make life feel whole again after a grave loss. Quinn’s world is turned upside down when a stray bullet enters her bedroom window and kills her younger sister in her sleep – on the one night that the siblings randomly switched places. This is a fragmented, patchwork quilt of a novel, but it’s one that accurate reflects what life feels like when peering over precipice of loss to the deep dark future below. The Listeners offers insight on how make sense of random acts of violence, and though what happened to Quinn’s sister can’t be compared to the atrocity in Newtown, this book will resonate with readers grappling to make sense with unspeakable loss.

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I remember a lot of things about first grade. I remember the thrill of celebrating the 100th day of school by counting out 100 Cheerios. I remember receiving a small blank book in which I could write and illustrate my very own story. I remember releasing balloons with the entire school, before people worried about seagulls and raccoons choking on the discarded plastic. I even remember making a class quilt that was presented at Chicago’s Swedish American Museum and getting to see the king and queen of Sweden in person. I mention these memories to make clear that my childhood was full of privileges and positive experiences, and although in first grade I also remember hearing gunshots in the hallway and seeing a classmate soaked in blood after he was shot in a washroom down the hall, this trauma didn’t outweigh the affirmative influences during upbringing.

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