I had every intention of writing about Caitlin Flanagan’s Girl Land, but then I thought the better of preaching to the choir. The New York Times and Bookforum already butchered it, and honestly, I couldn’t get past the Kindle sample. Besides, it’s not really fair to knock a book because my views differ from those of the author. Flanagan did bring up this fabulous little Mystery Date game that looks like the predecessor to my beloved Girl Talk and that’s about all you need to know.

I really bring up Flanagan because I want to talk about Joan Didion again. Flanagan skewered Didion the Atlantic in such a way that felt very pointed, and frankly, not in the fairy dust and unicorns spirit of Girl Land, from what I can gather. And I only bring this up because of this brief snippet of an interview with Didion in the Believer.

In it, Didion talks about writing as performance. I often credit my early acting experiences with instigating my writing career, and so her words rang clear as a bell. No, I never wanted to be a move star. I just wanted to be myself. What I mean is that I was painfully, shamefully shy, and felt most comfortable – or more accurately, most myself – when I was someone else. So if the page is now my stage, then does each measured phrase becomes part of the character who loves to fool you all into thinking I’m more confident and witty and thoughtful than I am? If anything, perhaps feeling uneasy in your own voice makes it easier to slip into someone else’s. No, that’s not it at all. Eventually I discovered Uta Hagan and the irony of acting: the more I “became” someone else, the more I became myself. All along, I was only trying to like my cringeworthy voice.

So in many ways, this blog is a performance. Calling myself a writer is a performance. Every time – every single time – I sit down to write I feel like a fraud, and then sometimes, somehow, I tap into something so honest and real I know it can’t be coming from my phony self. I suppose, in some roundabout way, that’s why I was drawn to acting. It’s easier to express myself while stripped of my own circumstances and safer to channel emotion through fictional scenarios rather than my real life situations. Sitting down to write requires a similar process: as with acting, you rehearse a ton, but when it comes time to perform all the rules go out the window. I stop thinking and simply let myself be. Briefly.

But back to Didion. There was a line from Pluphead that sticks with me about all talent being about subtlety, and I think it’s probably true, especially in Didion’s case. Yes, Ms. Flanagan, Didion’s stance was a pose, and yes, it hinged on Didion’s youth and innocence. But the pose was just a means to an end. The pose is the story, and the story is the conduit for what’s real, which is why writing with blunt force fails to capture slippery truth.

Be ruthless about protecting writing days, i.e., do not cave in to endless requests to have “essential” and “long overdue” meetings on those days. The funny thing is that, although writing has been my actual job for several years now, I still seem to have to fight for time in which to do it. Some people do not seem to grasp that I still have to sit down in peace and write the books, apparently believing that they pop up like mushrooms without my connivance. I must therefore guard the time allotted to writing as a Hungarian Horntail guards its firstborn egg.

J.K. ROWLING

In 2011, my reading wheelhouse seemed to be death. (Shocker!) I was stuck on work that explored the tension between order and chaos. I found myself enthralled by stories that tapped into either a thrilling life lived on the edge or a life of stability that made perfect sense, in a picket fence sort of way, but verged on suffocating. I mention this because while one can argue about objective quality in art, for the sake of this post I’d like to define “best” not by quality of language or craft, (though many of the pieces mentioned possess top quality style) but by my reading experience. I often judge whether or not a book captures me by how strongly I feel like writing after I’ve read it, and that has just as much to do with my sense of ennui as it does with the quality of the text.

The truth is, for all my yoga-practicing, list-making, straight and narrow behavior, I prefer to live at life’s extremes (perhaps that explains all the douchey guys I date?)  I’m no tastemaker, so take this all with a grain of kosher salt.

BOOKS:

1. Pulphead: Essays
John Jeremiah Sullivan
At first glance, it appears that Sullivan has been blessed with every writer’s wet dream: a bizarre, tumultuous, experience-rich life. Then it becomes clear that Sullivan is a writer’s writer; he can make the ordinary seem extraordinary and the extraordinary ordinary. In essays on everything from Jesus freaks to reality television, he finds hidden meanings that get lost in the fissures of everyday life.

2. Blue Nights
Joan Didion
I hesitate to include Didion’s masterpiece because I‘ve written about it before, and because it received such critical acclaim. All I’ll say is that for many, this has been a really shitty year. This book made me wonder what, really, I was trying to hold onto, and why the heck I just can’t let go.

3. Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles and Speeches
Roberto Bolaño
Okay, full disclosure: I didn’t read the whole thing! I know enough to know that Bolaño writes like no one is listening: his writing has the freedom, playfulness and expansiveness of me singing alone into my hairbrush microphone. He is that rare breed of writer who can riff on almost anything in a seemingly scattered manner, and then, just as you’re about to give up on looking fora a point, kazzam! He whips out a gem of wisdom, and you’re back on the Bolano train.

4. Lost in America
Colby Buzzell
This book epitomizes what’s happening to my generation, in my America, in this moment, better than any fluffy NY Mag trends piece ever could. I can’t really understand why it hasn’t received more publicity. Anyway, Buzzell drives from the East coast to West looking for work. Along the way he encounters people who embody the struggles of our nation with more complexity and depth than anyone interviewed in Zuccotti Park. (Sorry friends.)

5. Griftopia: Bubble machines, Vampire Squids and the Long Con That is Breaking America
Matt Taibbi
I started reading this while Wall Street was being occupied right outside my window. I can now say I know what a credit default swap and why the housing boom went bust. But more importantly, I sort of get why we’re still screwed. Yes, it will make you angrier than you probably already are.

LONGFORM

6. The Long Run – Kindle Single
Mishka Shubaly
Lots of people like to write about how fucked up they once were and how they’ve changed. Shubaly is different. He’s honest enough to admit that recovery doesn’t mean life is any less messy, and that a change in behavior doesn’t mean your demons disappear.This is the story of  a man who goes from being addicted to drugs and alcohol for nearly two decades to being addicted to putting one foot in front of the other. By that I mean he does ultra runs, which sort of sound like voluntary Bataan death marches. They go for scores of miles and make your toenails fall off.

7. The Wave – The New Yorker
Francisco Goldman
Based on facts alone, this may sound like a run-of-the-mill tale of tragedy, heartbreak and loss. It is the story of how Goldman loses his beautiful and vibrant wife in a freak swimming accident off the coast in Mexico.  But the thing about this piece is the way it simmers for so long you almost forget its going burn. This story of loss isn’t a quick shattering, like a mirror breaking. The slow, suspended narrative details the wretched days and moments between the time you known someone you love is going to die and the instant they are gone.

8. I’m Gonna Need You to Fight Me On This: How Violent Sex Helped Ease My PTSD - GOOD magazine
Mac McClelland
Forget about the provocative title for a moment, and consider this: In a psych book, I read about a guy who used to stand in the middle of a busy street in the middle of the night. He’d wait for a car to come zipping along, perhaps with a drunk driver behind the wheel.  Then, the moment before he was about to get flattened, he’d jump out of harm’s way. We do things like this in order to deal with trauma, to try and change the past. Same circumstances, different outcome. People don’t often write this honestly about the brutality inherent in love and healing, and I don’t mean the physical.

9. A Murder Foretold-The New Yorker
David Grann
This twisty story of conspiracy and murder offers a glimpse into political corruption in Guatemala has seeped deep into the psyche of a people. When you read, pay attention. This is one of those intricately reported, layered masterpieces that reads like fiction. I could not put this one done.

Didion with her daughter. From the LA Time's Jacket Copy

In order to do the heavy lifting of reading a Joan Didion book, the brain – and the heart – must be prepared to carry the weight. This is especially true with Blue Nights, Didion’s extended eulogy to her daughter Quintana, who died in 2005.  For this reason I hesitated picking it up immediately; one has to be in the right place to read about death, especially when it’s a mother writing about the death of her only child. I wanted to save Blue Nights, but the Bookforum cover, the NPR interview, the review after interview after review all finally got to me. I had to read it to know what all the fuss was about. I had recently finished the book and started jotting notes for a blog post when I found out about the death of my father’s girlfriend (for lack of a better word), who had lived with us for many years and played a major role in my upbringing. I returned to Chicago before I had the time – no, before I could create the mental space – to flesh these out.

• It is impossible to read Blue Nights without thinking about all the things one has loved and lost.
• Didion lets us see the small cracks in the veneer
• We are constantly shaping and reshaping the stories of our lives to align with the changing visions of ourselves.

In spite of my deliberate decision, I found myself reading the book at the wrong (or perhaps exactly the right?) time. What I was then forced to be reminded of – or rather, what I found myself doing – was what Didion describes: the frantic piecing together of two lives: the one that has been lost, and the altered version of one’s own.

Much of Blue Nights is devoted to an examination of the bizarre way that particular objects take on extreme significance, and how holding onto them is a paltry proxy for the loved one lost. Her jarring incantation throughtout the book about the flowers Quintana wore at her wedding and her school uniform serves a dual purpose: they first give the objects significance, but the repetition, at some point, becomes a chant, sacrificing meaning for cadence, rhythm and the sake of continuity until the objects lose their power. Talking about memories isn’t just about wanting to remember. It’s about remembering hard enough so you can purge them from the system, and maybe (but likely not) forget.

I have often been surprised at the clumsiness with which people handle something has universal as death. After Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking became a seminal book about death, there seemed to be a general awakening about dying. We don’t know how to talk about it! It’s our last cultural taboo, so let’s share all the gory, nasty details of what death smells like and what grief feels like, how it possesses the body with a force unknown.In Blue Nights, Didion practically bludgeons the reader with the fact there is no comfort in the wake of death:

“You have your wonderful memories,” people said later, as if memories were solace. Memories are not. Memories are by definition of times past, things gone…memories are what you no longer want to remember.

Didion, and perhaps Tim O’Brien, are among the few who get it right about how death changes life: it reignites the desire to do something that matters. Not because of the realization that life is so precious and profound, but precisely because of the difficulty in convincing oneself that there is any meaning at all.

Didion also captures the post-death discombobulation. Grievers often become time travelers by finding blips in the past that lead to entire periods of memories that take on a new chronology, a new role in the narrative, after a death. There is a quote from Magical Thinking that about sums it up:

…yet this is a case in which I wish I had instead of words and their rhythms a cutting room, equipped with an Avid, a digital editing system on which I could touch a key and collapse the sequence of time, show you simultaneously all the frames of memory that come to me now, let you pick the takes, the marginally different expressions, the variant readings of the same lines. This is a case in which I need more than words to find the meaning.

Please don’t hate me.

I know we’ve all got our pleather thongs bunched up over the Kardashian kerfuffle. Real or fake, for money or for love,  it’s Kim K..’s life – and she’s now alone. For reals. So why is America taking it so personally?

Aren’t we, like, totally over marriage? Considering that many successful, independent women have resigned to, shall we say, less than stellar husband choices (exhibit A: Kris Humphries) should we even be surprised?  I’m not really sure about the rest of the country, but I can tell you why I care. If you have an overbearing mother, a sister with whom you fight constantly but still consider your best friend, or are a petite white girl who doesn’t look like she belongs on The Hills and has butt and not a pancake for an ass, you might, on some level, be able to relate to the Kardashians (Surprise! I have all three).

Kardashian is oft maligned for being a superficial famewhore who epitomizes the self-absorbed, insular lifestyle of America’s wealthy (See the 1%). So when she makes a move that is decidedly not for the cameras, she’s criticized for being all too real. It’s not just Kim, but the rest of us that want the fairytale to continue.

I know, I know.  There was money and lots of attention involved. But beneath the pancake makeup there is a real person there somewhere – complete with her own reality. We’ve done to Kim what we always do to our most cherished celebrities. We put them on pedestals and build them up to unattainable heights, pinning our hopes and dreams on fictionalized reality in the hope that our narratives will somehow veer closer to theirs. When Kim dumped her oaf of a husband after a mere 72-days, it’s not only that we feel betrayed. It’s that we start to fear whatever the fairytale version of our own life is may not come to fruition (and we all have them). Finding “the one” seems even more difficult, because if one of the world’s most beautiful and sought after women can’t make it happen, then how the hell could little old we? (I mean, me).

We raise our noses to the lowbrow action of reality television because it allows us to feel superior about our own lives. Oh! Let me just leave these juiceheads and pregnant teens in the idiot box and go back to my Didion and Harukami novels! I’ll simply return to my own organic, fair-trade, ethically unambiguous world. I mean, it’s not like I ever think about owning lots and lots of shoes (guilty). And  I never consider how I’m going to strengthen my online brand by perfecting the font and color of my name on my Web site (guilty). I’ve never, ever, been blinded to the fact a relationship was going nowhere, either (SO guilty). I mean, it’s not like I have a sex tape lying around (okay, NOT guilty). While I may not have a closet full of Louboutins, I’m not sure that makes me any less superficial. Yes, reality shows depict our hopes and dreams (and fears and failures) and push them to the extreme. We aren’t them, and yet we are.

The obsession with Kardashian’s marriage – not to mention with the British royal nuptials, Bridalplasty, and every other tying-the-knot reality show out there – says more about a cultural fascination with lavish weddings and society’s own love/hate relationship with courtship and marriage than it does about Kim Kardashian. The truth is that we want – and perhaps need – to believe in the made-for-television fairytale now more than ever. And while the speculation about her intentions is understandable, I have a hard time believing that Kim, at 31, wants something all that different from what I  want – and maybe you want too: a successful career, a little bambino or two or three, and maybe, just maybe, not to be alone. And these.

Then there was this week’s Modern Love, which pointed out that we often choose lovers not because they’ll make great partners, but because they fit an epic love story. Who we think we should love has less to do with the object of affection than with the love story we hope to write. This is the reason can’t bring myself to date online - not out of shame, but simply because I don’t want my love story to start on the Internet. (Okay, I tried it once. Not a huge fan.)

But here I go digressing and confusing love stories with love. They are quite distinct, and this is exactly what Euginides is trying to reconcile in The Marriage Plot, or perhaps, more accurately, what I was trying to negotiate as I read it. Oh, how the swift undertoe of love can seem so separate from the actual relationship! How the supposed euphoria is really just a guise for the extreme solitude of the lover in love! But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Our privileged protagonist, Madeline, became an English major at Brown for the most banal of reasons: she loves to read. But here, loving to read means more than loving the experience of reading. Madeline is the type of person who defines herself by books: from the Madeline wallpaper in her childhood bedroom to A Lover’s Discourse, which serves as balm for her broken heart, books become the metric by which her life is measured. So as she works on her thesis – The Marriage Plot – about literary courtship and marriage of the Victorian era, we can be certain her story – the one Eugenides is writing – won’t end up like a Jane Austen novel.

These are only two of the many books that form a vast literary ensemble: Eugenides references Tolstoy, quotes Hemingway, and drops the names of many a semiotician and philosopher. This isn’t just a book about books. It’s a book about the the way books can become the organizing principle of our lives. More importnatly, The Marriage Plot  is also about what transpires when books fail us. What hapepens when the stories of our lives veer from the narratives in the books we love – the ones we’ve come to depend on to tell us how to live? The books we’ve read become points of reference for the story that we – er, Madeline – will inevitably create.

In a period of shifting gender roles and ideas about courtship and marriage, The Marriage Plot defines (must refrain from using the phrase “captures the zeitgeist”) a very particular type of love story: one in which the only suitable ending isn’t a happy ever after. It’s the sort of ending that tries to bridge the gap between love and love stories,  and the chasm between emotions and the language used to define them. 

Still, I don’t know which I like better: the romantic love story or the story about real love. For whatever reason I need my cheeseball romatic comedy endings, but I also need to be moved and challenged by the shattering imperfection of a true love story like Euginedes’ (and by true I mean honest, not factual).

Perhaps that’s because the most real sort of love is also the most romantic,  in all its pain and solitude.

When I lost my iPhone in the back of a taxi a few weeks ago, I decided I wouldn’t replace it. My incessant checking of Gmail, Facebook and Twitter had bred a certain gadget co-dependency that I felt rather ashamed of. I had become that girl walking down the street while texting without looking where she was going. I’m also the girl who has to check her phone in the middle of meals, meetings, and otherwise important events. Rude? Maybe. But you’re probably that girl or guy, too. Still. Perhaps the iPhone mishap was a blessing in disguise. I replaced it with a $20 go-phone, which is the modern-day tin-can-on-a-string equivalent: it makes calls and texts. That’s it. No photos, no email, no Internet – and worst of all, no Tweets. I’d survive. Maybe.

Day one. I could feel myself twitching. Gmail is blocked at my work, so by midday I couldn’t take it. I almost wanted to run into Rite-Aid and get the Patch. But this had nothing to do with nicotine. Finally, I ask to borrow a co-worker’s iPhone to check my email. I had important freelance-writer type emails to keep up with, I rationalized. But I knew there was more to it than that. The emails could wait a few hours. But I couldn’t. After some thought, I realized my Smartphone addiction had nothing to do with any one email, person or app. It had everything to do with a real time current of information that I desperately needed to feel was carrying me along. It wasn’t the information I needed so much as the sense of security I derived from knowing the world was at my fingertips – and not slipping through them. So when I got an email about Connected, a documentary about how our hyper-connected world is changing the way we live and think, I knew I had to see it.

But the film wasn’t at all what I expected. The narrative was propelled by Shlain’s story, but it wasn’t one about connectedness exclusively in the technological sense. It was the story of a tumultuous year, and how her father’s cancer diagnosis changed the trajectory of her story. Shlain lost her father to cancer in the spring of 2009, as did I, and this fact altered my experience of the film.

I really wanted to hone in on the anthropology of it all. The film touched on how societies throughout the world became more patriarchal as soon as literacy was introduced. Shlain’s grief and love for her father was palpable in the way that only a work of art that tries to wrap itself around life and death can be. What Connected does is what all effective stories must do: negotiate something universal behind the particular thrust of the narrative.

So I didn’t get all my answers. I didn’t figure out what to do about my Smartphone addiction, or if I should stop tweeting ridiculous nothings. Nor did I feel much better about feeling more isolated the more connected I become. Perhaps it serves as a facile justification for believing that my device is merely an extension of myself, but Connected helped to put things in perspective. The desire to be connected is fueled by something much more primal than owning a sexy new phone or serotonin-inducing status updates. It’s bound up with our need to create patterns and seek consistency to make sense of the world, especially when reason and logic reach their limits, and most particularly after a loss.

Want to come over and watch MSNBC?

I don’t get bunny ears. Are they sexy because they seem docile and coquettish, just like the furry creatures that procreate a lot? Or have they simply become associated with sex after years of Playboy-inspired scantily clad bunny Halloween costumes?

It turns out a lot of people are skeptical about bunny ears. NBC’s sitcom The Playboy Club premiered last week to a swift backlash against the show’s regressive portrayal of women. At The Washington Post, network television’s fall lineup of shows depicting grown women as kewpie-dolls in kitschy uniforms had critic Hank Stuever asking a simple yet provocative enough to warrant all caps question: WHAT THE [EXPLETIVE] HAPPENED TO WOMEN?

“It’s all bunnies, baby dolls and broads — and bridezillas and bimbos, if you get into reality TV,” writes Stuever. “It’s still giggles and jiggles.”

But perhaps the show isn’t regressive but empowering, suggested Playboy Club star Amber Heard when asked about the show’s potential for glamorizing an era when “boys will be boys” was justification for institutionalized sexual harassment. Women did what women had to do, even if that meant becoming a bunny:

I think there is a common, puritanical way that we look at things where, if it involves sexuality, somehow the women must be compromised. It’s just chauvinistic to deny women their sexuality. It’s about empowering. It comes down to choices. If the choices are available and they’re making that choice, they’re not being exploited.

But many are looking at the whole ‘fluffy bunny tail as a re-branding strategy for the empowered women thing’ with a jaundiced eye. Yet the “if you’ve got it, flaunt it” school of thought seems have struck a nerve.

In a controversial new book, Catherine Hakim, a professor of sociology at the London School of Economics, suggests that women should consider feminine wiles useful weapons in their personal arsenal of marketable skills, right up there with intelligence and assertiveness. Erotic Capitol: The Power of Attraction in the Boardroom and the Bedroom, explores why sex appeal is just one trait that can and should be used to get ahead. Hakim highlight social grace, liveliness, and sexual competence as potent forms of cultural currency that women and men can use to achieve success (but especially women):

As I see it, patriarchal men, but also to a larger extent, radical feminist women, which women seem to listen to more than men, say that beauty is only skin deep, it’s trivial, it’s superficial, it has no value, and you should be ashamed of yourself for trying to exploit it. And the whole purpose of my book is to say, for men and for women, there is absolutely no reason to feel ashamed of exploiting it and no reason at all for you to be embarrassed at saying this has value.

So where can we draw the line between exploitation and empowerment? Let’s not forget those real-life bunnies, Kendra Wilkinson and Holly Madison, whose roles as Hugh Hefner’s arm candies in The Girls Next Door landed them their own reality shows based on their personal struggles, opinions and lives. And in another realm of the media universe, the superstars of the conservative movement – Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann – haven’t been shy about capitalizing on their attractiveness in their political campaigns (and nor has the media). Finally, when feminist icon Gloria Steinem donned bunny ears and a cottontail in order to expose low wages and poor working conditions at the Playboy club years ago, her subversive move spawned the 1963 article I Was a Playboy Bunny and launched her career as legendary thinker, writer and activist. And if Catherine Hakim had anything to say about it, all of these women, in one way or the other, did the right thing by using their erotic capitol to get ahead.

So at the end of the day, one can’t help but wonder two things: 1) Which of these women are empowered and 2) Would those bunnies ever be taken seriously in the boardroom?

Perhaps we need to look further back. A woman who is smart, savvy and sexy hasn’t always been considered empowered- she’s long been considered a threat. From the beautiful Helen of Troy to the seductive Delilah (held up as an example of the way an attractive women can cause the downfall of powerful men) women who possess beauty and brains have always been a wee bit difficult to pin down.  A t.v. show isn’t just a show, it’s a reflection of the economic and social insecurities of this particular historical moment.

So perhaps this is the real reason a fluffy bunny tail is needed to mitigate feminine power, and why kick-ass vampire slayers have names like Buffy: It’s okay for a woman to use her sexuality for empowerment when navigating a man’s world, as long as women allow the real power of to remain in the hands of men – just like the “good old days.”

British author Polly Courtney didn’t want her latest novel, It’s a Man’s World (given the tagline “but it takes a woman to run it”) marketed as “chick lit,” that sub-genre of fiction often stigmatized as the cotton candy of literature: saccharine, insubstantial fluff that dissolves the minute it comes into contact with a warm brain. So when her publisher, HarperCollins, gave the book a “condescending and fluffy” makeover — complete with a cover spotlighting slender gams and pointy heels — Courtney subsequently announced she won’t be working with them again. She spoke to the Guardian about her decision:

“My writing has been shoehorned into a place that’s not right for it,” she said this morning. “It is commercial fiction, it is not literary, but the real issue I have is that it has been completely defined as women’s fiction … Yes it is page turning, no it’s not War and Peace. But it shouldn’t be portrayed as chick lit.”

Courtney isn’t the first woman who writes about women to find her work inaccurately packaged as chick lit. Yet should a misleading high heel on the cover of a book be a mark of shame?

According to Jennifer Weiner, the author of Good in Bed and other chick lit favorites, the genre’s light and humorous tone – or its signature subjects like dating, sex and shopping — doesn’t mean her books should automatically be equated with trite frivolity. She spoke with USA Today on the subject:

“Real” chick lit speaks very personally to women about their lives and about their choices. Those books are always going to be with us. Women want to read stories about characters who feel familiar and whose choices feel relatable.

Weiner kicked off last year’s now-infamous franzenfreude frenzy (instigated by her creation of #franzenfreude on Twitter). Her beef stemmed from the fact that Freedom, Jonathan Franzen’s critically acclaimed novel about the complex inner world of a unsatisfied housewife living in the suburbs (among other things) would’ve been slapped with a stiletto and labeled chick lit had it been written by a woman. Slate hashed out the details of the chick lit/literary fiction match:

Weiner tweeted prolifically after starting the franzenfreude meme. “In summation: NYT sexist, unfair, loves Gary Shteyngart, hates chick lit, ignores romance. And now, to go weep into my royalty statement,” she wrote on Aug. 19. Not everyone felt her pain. Paris Review editor in chief and former Farrar, Straus, and Giroux editor Lorin Stein responded to Weiner and Picoult’s complaints on the Atlantic’s Web site, slamming their desire for mass-market fiction to be reviewed by the Times as “fake populism” that “pretends to speak for women.”

So must a book by a woman about sex, love or shopping be packaged with stereotypical symbols of femininity in order to get published? For writers like Polly Courtney, that’s precisely problem. Yet with the literary establishment’s questionable legacy of being an (white) old boy’s club, it’s no wonder novels by women often get the fluff treatment.

Or get written off entirely. In an interview with the Royal Geographic Society last June, V.S. Naipaul, a recipient of the Nobel Prize for literature, callously dismissed women writers as peddlers of “feminist tosh” whose work couldn’t be compared to that of male literary giants.

In response to this “feud-picking, egomaniacal literary blowhard,” Salon’s Mary Elizabeth Willams opined about why literary difference between the sexes doesn’t equal inferiority:

The female experience in the world is unique from that of the male. Yet plenty of people, not just gasbag old men giving interviews to the Royal Geographic Society, believe different is lesser, that merit is synonymous with masculinity. That to think or run or react or write like a girl is insufficient.

There are, of course, plenty of female novelists whose books receive ample attention from influential critics — Zadie Smith, Nicole Krauss, Jhumpa Lahiri and Joyce Carol Oates, to name a few. But their ranks are far smaller than those of men, and there are numbers to prove it.

The rigid division of chick lit and fiction considered insightful and deep into mutually exclusive categories says more about the narrow vision of women’s lives than it does about the quality or content of either type of books. From the vantage point of history, all lives resemble the sweeping narratives of literary fiction, compete with epic romances, tragedies and reoccurring themes that are set against the backdrop of a distinct time and place. Yet on a day to day level, life, for many of us, is rather pedestrian and even “fluffy:” deciding what to eat for lunch, getting annoyed at AT&T customer service, constructing a marriage and babies fantasy about random cute guy on the train, searching for Mr. or Ms. Right, and, yes, shoe shopping, which I happen to thoroughly enjoy. There’s meaning to be found in the banal details, too.

Polly Courtney says she’ll self-publish her next novel. With the rise of e-books, who knows if it will even have a cover?

“I fake it so real, I am beyond fake.” When Courtney Love sings “Doll Parts,” she may not realize she’s summing up the contemporary novel.

The novel is in decline, and some literary critics and authors even believe that the genre is in danger of extinction. In 2009, Philip Roth predicted that the novel would become a “cultic” niche interest within the next three decades; he posited that most modern readers lack the concentration and focus to consume a work of fiction in its entirety. The same month, N + 1 co-founding editor Marco Roth lamented over the rise of the “neuro-novel,” fiction such as Mark Haddon’s Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time that focuses so intently on the workings of the brain, it leaves the traditional territory of literature – the mind, heart, and soul – barren and undiscovered. Roth considers the neuro-novel’s growth as yet “another sign of the novel’s diminishing purview.”

Both Roths tap into theories that James Woods first touched upon in “Hysterical Realism” in 2000, where he maligned the “big, ambitious novel” (i.e. Zadie Smith’s White Teeth) for privileging grandiose themes over the reality of characters’ lives. In a later New Yorker article, Woods asserted that the novelistic conventions of hysterical realism – “the preference for the concrete over the abstract (“She was twenty-nine, but still went home every evening to her mom’s ground-floor apartment in Queens, which doubled by day as a yoga studio”)” – “congeal” so they have become the conventions of the novel, while other standards of fiction writing have lost their cachet. The craft of writing suffers, but more importantly, so does the art of storytelling.

The bottom line is that writers haven’t just whittled away at the literary techniques that give fiction its authenticity and realness, they’ve mitigated literary sensibilities. But if readers have lost the ability to distinguish between the real and the fabricated, does it matter much anyway? The ostensible argument is that the dulling of literary senses is due to the invention of the Internet, the atomization of information and the increase of mash-ups in popular culture. But the novels’ decline started well before the world wide web.

In the classic reading guide How to Read a Book, Mortimer Adler compared the “artificial props” of television and radio (and now, of course, he’d likely include the Internet) to drug addiction: “We grow used to them, and we continuously need more and more of them. Eventually, they have little or no effect. Then, if we lack resources within ourselves, we cease to grow intellectually, morally, and spiritually. And we when cease to grow, we begin to die.”

The blurring between the lines producer/consumer and audience/entertainer began to materialize well before the advent of the Internet. David Shields challenged the very concept of the novel as a distinct genre in his new book, Reality Hunger: “There’s inevitably something terribly contrived about the standard novel; you can always feel the wheels grinding and going on,” he wrote. Shields can’t get through Franzen’s The Corrections (one of those big, ambitious novels) not because it’s “bad” or “good” but due to something much deeper about the way he reacts to text: “…something has happened to my imagination, which can no longer yield to the earnest embrace of a novelistic form,” he wrote.

On one hand, both writers and readers need and want stories. On the other, stories fail to penetrate because of the paradigm shift in the way readers decode information – the growing inability to “read creatively” – and situate a text in its entirely within their lives. So what are writers and readers to do? One writer took a chance: rather than place a text within her life, Elif Batuman placed her life within various texts. She intertwined her life with the lives she reads about, and succeeded not in writing a big, ambitious novel, but in living one.

The central question Batuman poses in The Possessed – how to bring our lives closer to the stories we cherish – is really a literary means of unraveling a 21st century problematic: how to bring our lives – fragmented, isolated, and vapid as they may be – closer to authenticity and wholeness. Batuman remains true to contemporary forms of disseminating information: she aggregates various texts by quoting from many sources, she comments on commentary, and even borrows the title of her book from Dostoevsky’s 1872 novel The Possessed, which was later translated into Demons. Yet her book is not a pastiche cobbled together from other sources. The idea clearly germinated from her identity and experiences, and Russian novels are used as roadmaps to navigate her own story, not comprise the story itself.  The book is both a product of the Internet age, and a backlash against it.

Batuman’s theory of the novel reflects the hunger for authenticity and integrity in her own life, and explains why she decided to study Russian literature instead of writing a novel: “the novel form is “about” the protagonist’s struggle to transform his arbitrary, fragmented, given experience into a narrative as meaningful as his favorite books. Looking back, this is how I understand my interest in Central Asia: there was an actual place you could visit, with a language you could learn, that linked my favorite books with one of the more arbitrary and “given” aspects of my life: being Turkish,” she wrote.

Throughout The Possessed, Batuman juxtaposes the stories of her life with those of the authors and the characters she so adores. She introduces her book by comparing her life in grad school to the journey of the central character in Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, who spends seven years at a tuberculosis sanatorium though he doesn’t actually have tuberculosis: “How does someone with no real academic aspirations end up spending seven years in suburban California studying the form of the Russian novel?” she asked herself.

In essence, Batuman writes a “real” novel about her own experiences: the preposterous bureaucracy of graduate school, learning Uzbek in Samarkand, and visiting Russian ice castles, all the while examining, studying, and obsessing over the lives of Russian authors from Tolstoy to Babel. Yet Turkish-American Batuman is not concerned with how to make fiction reflect “real” lives – she’ll leave that to students in creative writing programs obsessed with craft and the false realism that Woods so harshly critiques.  Rather, through nonfiction, she explores how to make our lives more like the books we love, and by extension, how to make our lives feel more real. In turn, her readers are forced to do the same.

Batuman posits theories about the significance of her work by comparing her methods to literature and philosophy, using stories as a consistent guide for navigating her life: “In the The Night’s Move, Shklovsky proposes that the history of literature proceeds not in a straight line, but in a bent one, like the L-shaped path of a chess knight. The authors who influence one another are not always the ones you would expect….literary forms themselves grow by assimilating foreign or extraliterary material, veering off in new angles.”

It is unlikely that Batuman’s book will rescue the sinking novel or drowning authors from the tempest of change. It does, however slightly, veer off in a new angle and offer an alternative, ultimately making readers question whether appropriating fragments of understanding from others is more satisfying than grappling with understanding themselves. It begs questions of whether we can tolerate a reality that is beyond fake, and what it would mean if writers ceased striving for authenticity and truth via fiction. For Batuman, the answer is clear.

“If I could start over today, I could choose literature again. If the answers exist in the world or in the universe, I still think that’s where we’re going to find them.”