Photo by Morgan Sessions from unsplash.com.
I was halfway through Eve Babitz’s book I Used To Be Charming when the author died. Aside from the inevitable sadness at the loss of a talented writer, my main reaction to the news was resounding disbelief. Not disbelief that Babitz was gone, but rather a disbelief that she could have died in a natural, physical way. I came to realise this was because I didn’t see Babitz as a person at all, really, but as a sort of fiction.I saw her as not simply conflated with the fiction of her work that purposefully blurred the boundaries between the real and imaginary, but as a character in her own right. I hadn’t expected her to die because I hadn’t really thought of her as living in the way that you or I live – rather, she lived in my imagination. This seems to me a more widespread phenomenon than one might expect, particularly regarding female authors. There has been an increased awareness recently of the tendency to assume that fiction is based in reality when it is written by a woman (one only has to look at reviews of Sally Rooney or Bernadine Evaristo’s work to see this exemplified), with interviewers caveating desperately when asking about the real life influences of a character or situation. What I am considering, though, is more than not being able to distinguish an author from their creations: it is a widespread view of women writers – and it is mostly women – as characters rather than individuals.
If we look at the fictionalisation of authors from the perspective of gender, it appears that we view female authors in this way much more than male. The lore of certain celebrity authors may elevate them to a mythic, otherworldly status among readers (Jack Kerouac, J.D. Sallinger, Ernest Hemmingway), but we still hold them as a writer first and foremost. The obsession among readers over what cigarettes these authors smoke, their drinking habits, or obscure quotes are, at their core, still centred around their authorial status: what they smoke whilst writing, what they drink before a draft, and musings on the themes of their work. Our treatment of female authors is different. For those who reach the same level of celebrity as their male counterparts, fame and the subsequent dehumanisation is of course a factor in their fictionalisation, but it is not only world renowned authors that we fictionalise. For many authors, we not only merge their work and their life, but treat them like we treat their fiction – as something we can consume, mould in our minds, and feel emotionally attached to.
But why do we do this? Perhaps because of a historical lack of ‘realistic’ protagonists for girls has meant women have had to view real people as characters they could see themselves in. Fiction was not reflective of real life, so real life had to turn into fiction. Of course, throughout history there have been novels with nuanced and relatable female characters. However, it is only relatively recently that novels which explore the full complexity of living as a woman – and the intersection of issues this encompasses – have been accepted more widely. Books such as The Country Girls tried to break out of these confines but were met with censorship and the authors with vehement personal criticism.
Some authors lend themselves to being fictionalised, Babitz being one of them. She drove down LA highways at sixty miles an hour with all four windows open (“4/60 air conditioning”), played chess naked in the name of art, and, before she could begin to age in the eyes of her readers (and watchers), had a tragic accident involving a cigar and a flammable skirt which left her a recluse. She lived life on full heat and, rather than being snuffed out, went up in flames before disappearing. Perhaps the manner in which I have just described Babitz demonstrates how fictionalising writers may be harmful; it is all too easy to take the facts of their lives and view them as engaging fictions. A horrific accident becomes a metaphor for living life to the full; flesh and blood becomes a figment of our imaginations.
Further, when we turn people into characters we hold them to different standards than we do our fellow fallible humans. The characters on the pages we read belong to us in a sense: we have ownership over them because they live in our minds. When we give imaginary life to real people in the same way, we not only detract from their actual existence, but feel a sense of ownership over them. Women in the public eye already arguably have to meet a higher standard of composure and existence than men in order to avoid critique (for this, see any female writer’s twitter mentions); but when we think of writers as fictional, we add another element to these expectations. We expect to know everything about them – their routines, their messiness, their relationships – as we would a character. We expect them to be like us, to be relatable, but also riveting. Treating anyone like this is clearly not only unrealistic and invasive, but also detracts from their work. Rebecca Pelan writes of Edna O’Brien: “The authorial persona, certainly in England and America, has ensured the denial of serious critical analysis of Edna O’Brien’s work by diverting attention away from the heterogeneity of the texts to the homogeneity of the author”. Can we treat an author as a fiction without it detrimentally impacting treatment of their work?
Ultimately, as with all fiction, escaping into the lives of others can be a great joy and comfort. Yet, when these lives are not truly made up, but are the real existences of people around us, we risk not only reducing real people to figures in our heads, but we also hoist them to heights they cannot possibly stay at. Their audience is not prepared to catch them when they fall. We should consider how we treat the female authors we read, and leave the fictionalisation to the professionals.
