Life Writing's Serious Implications (2021)

Life Writing's Serious Implications Mary K. Holland (bio) In the Land of Men Adrienne Miller Ecco https://www.harpercollins.com/products/in-the-land-of-men-adriennemiller?variant=32126640848930 352 Pages; Print, $13.95 "Serious fiction" has always meant fiction written by men. From Nathaniel Hawthorne, who supported women's rights but deplored their "scribblings," to the rash of physically imposing encyclopedic novels in the twentieth century—perhaps the literary version of a Harley—men have long dictated what makes fiction "serious." One of our most lauded writers of contemporary "serious" fiction, including one of the most famous encyclopedic novels, is now the subject of a book by a woman who once helmed a prestigious literary magazine. Called In the Land of Men, Adrienne Miller's 2020 memoir about David Foster Wallace and the misogyny of literary publishing seems to promise rich reflection on how patriarchy shapes serious fiction, its authors, and the industry that disseminates it. And yet, In the Land of Men turns out to be a generically curious book. It has been marketed as a feminist account of its author's struggle to gain power in the male-dominated world of literary magazine publishing and draws associations with the #MeToo memoir by foregrounding Miller's relationship with an author whose own violence against women has been well documented in recent years. But the book turns out to neatly be neither. The gap between its cultural and generic aims and its somewhat confused contents raises interesting questions about how memoirs work and how they fit into social movements; the relationship between life writing and literature; and the appropriate impact of author biography on literary pedagogy and criticism. Thus In the Land of Men, perhaps in spite of itself, offers important lessons for readers, literary scholars, and teachers on the interconnected roles of life writing and "serious fiction" in the ongoing attempt to end misogyny and rape culture by making them visible and unacceptable. While its jacket tells us the book is about "Miller learning how to survive in a man's world" in which she "forged her own path," Miller tells us immediately—in the third paragraph of the introductory "Author's Note," no less—that the book is really about David Foster Wallace. Concerned about the "lacunae in the public record of David's life" and the fact that "Nearly everyone gets him wrong," Miller decides "to write about what it was like for me to know him." The portion of the book (less than half) that does not document that relationship documents the many ways in which Miller did not so much forge her own path in a man's world as become one of the first women to successfully navigate paths laid out by men. Of course, such a feat is its own important kind of feminist success story. But it puts Miller more in the company of Pat Mitchell—whose Becoming a Dangerous Woman (2019) describes the efforts of an earlier generation of women to break into the highest levels of media by outperforming and outfoxing men at their own games, as Mitchell did by becoming a producer and president at Turner Productions and CNN—than in the company of more recent feminist work aimed at diagnosing, resisting, and constructing alternatives to the punishing patriarchy that structures such institutions. Despite reciting a litany of examples of her own objectification and dismissal by men in publishing, Miller never identifies the industry, or the literary magazine she worked for, Esquire, as inherently misogynistic. Rather, she calls the magazine "perhaps … for a period in the sixties, the greatest general-interest magazine of all time," as if "general-interest" means "reaching beyond the sartorial needs of monied men." Later, [End Page 12] she reminds us that "Esquire was an excellent magazine (minus its woman problem)," though it's not clear whether "woman problem" refers to the management's ill treatment of her and other women employees, its resistance to publishing fiction by women writers, or the magazine's gobsmackingly misogynistic content, which Miller gleefully recounts as if accompanied by a laugh track. Nor does Miller recognize that such experiences are more characteristic of misogyny...