Writing is freedom. The freedom to express ideas; the freedom to influence others; the freedom to explore all facets of humanity. Many authors have used this power to delve into one of our greatest unknowns: what life would be like as a member of the opposite gender. Through fiction, male and female writers get to convey what they perceive to be the feelings, emotions, and struggles of, respectively, the fairer and fouler sexes. With that in mind, let’s consider some prime examples of both genders’ attempts to inhabit the minds of the other.

The Hours­ by Michael Cunningham, 1998
Cunningham creates not one but three substantial female characters, each of them deeply effected by Virginia Woolf’s 1925 book Mrs. Dalloway. The Hours follows Ms. Woolf (a fictional portrayal of the author), Laura Brown, and Clarissa Vaughn as they grapple with mental illness, suicide, and sexual identity. Cunningham borrows not only Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness writing style, but also many themes from her life and the plot of Mrs. Dalloway. His Pulitzer Prize–winning novel (which was transformed into an Oscar-winning film) is celebrated for its realistic portrayal of how women confront major problems of human existence.

Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton, 1911
This novella has Wharton examining the social pressures at work on a Victorian husband who is vexed by a difficult choice: stay with his ailing shrew of a wife, or run off with their young, comely housemaid. Ethan longs to make a new life for himself with Mattie, but society imposes his obligation to honour his vows to Zeena. The male protagonist has often been called an analog for Wharton, who was experiencing a similar pressure — juggling a spouse and a lover — at the time of writing. The story ultimately ends in tragedy, as Ethan and Mattie are brutally injured in a sledding accident. Wharton’s marriage fared no better; she divorced in 1913 after suffering a nervous breakdown.

The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides, 1993
Eugenides’ debut novel, told in flashback by a chorus of middle-aged, male narrators, is about five teenaged sisters who all kill themselves. There’s a line near the beginning, when a doctor bandages the youngest sister’s wrists after a failed suicide attempt, that speaks volumes about the pitfalls of writing the opposing gender:

“Chucking her under the chin, he said, ‘What are you doing here, honey? You’re not even old enough to know how bad life gets.’ And it was then Cecelia gave orally what was to be her only form of suicide note, and a useless one at that, because she was going to live: ‘Obviously, doctor,’ she said, ‘you’ve never been a thirteen-year-old girl.’”

Obviously, neither was Eugenides. It’s Sofia Coppola, though, who arguably worked harder to identify with the opposite gender when she wrote and directed a film adaptation of the novel. Her script embraces the distinct, first-person plural (male) narration that had allowed Eugenides to stay out of the sisters’ heads.

The Woman Who Walked Into Doors by Roddy Doyle, 1996
The Booker Prize–winning master of modern Irish fiction takes a complex and multifaceted look at abusive relationships from the perspective of an alcoholic mother of four. The Woman Who Walked Into Doors examines how such partnerships don’t always fit the victim-victimizer paradigm. Paula Spencer is physically and emotionally abused by her husband Charlo, yet finds herself adoring and despising him at various points throughout the narrative. Doyle goes to great lengths to make Paula more than a simple victim. He takes a more ambiguous stance, vacillating between love and hate, action and inaction. (A 2006 sequel, Paula Spencer, picks up her story ten years after Charlo’s death.)

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin, 1969
Winner of the 1969 Nebula and 1970 Hugo awards, Le Guin’s science fiction classic is told not only from the perspective of the opposite gender, but enters the world of the virtually sexless natives of the planet Winter (a.k.a. “Gethen”). Genly Ai, a human male, is sent to Winter by the Ekumen (an intergalactic UN) to convince its inhabitants to join their interplanetary alliance. He is often confused by what he finds on Winter: the absence of gender; the lack of technological development; the nonexistence of war. On Winter, female characteristics are perceived as negative qualities, and Gethens are always referred to by masculine pronouns. Like the best sci-fi, The Left Hand of Darkness uses its fantastical settings, characters, and environment to delve into real-world issues (sexual politics, gender imbalances, etc.) In that light, Le Guin’s novel can be seen as a pioneering work in the field of feminist science fiction.

She’s Come Undone by Wally Lamb, 1992
Lamb missed the major literary awards with his tale of a troubled young woman. But five years after it was first published, the novel won a far more lucrative prize, when it became an early selection to Oprah’s Book Club. She’s Come Undone tracks the life of Dolores Price from age four. Lamb details her sexually violent adolescence (she is raped at thirteen), joyless years as an obese student (she overeats for comfort), and equally tumultuous early adulthood (she endures an abortion, questions of sexual identity, and emotionally abusive relationships). Some readers have complained that the character’s problems are too exaggerated to generate any real sympathy for her (I’ve personally heard Dolores described as “fulfilling every negative female stereotype”); others, however, have identified with and embraced her sorrows.

Sarah by J.T. LeRoy, 2000
Jeremiah “Terminator” LeRoy is the pen name of Laura Albert, the Brooklyn-born writer who perpetrated the greatest literary hoax of the young twenty-first century. For years, Albert presented LeRoy as a transgendered, abused, former child prostitute and drug addict who took to writing as a therapeutic process. Many readers took J.T.’s fictions as semi-autobiographical. His/her first novel, Sarah, details the travails of twelve-year-old Cherry “Sarah” Vanilla, an aspiring lot lizard who is compelled into cross-dressing, prostitution, and shoplifting by his mother. LeRoy followed Sarah with three more novels, feature articles in major magazines, and an associate producer credit on Gus Van Sant’s 2003 film Elephant. Albert concealed LeRoy’s true identity by conducting interviews via phone and email; with the author’s consent, Savannah Knoop, the half sister of Albert’s partner, Geoffrey Knoop, appeared in public as him/her. In 2006, The New York Times and New York magazine revealed the lie, and Albert confessed all to the The Paris Review. The next year, she was convicted of fraud for signing legal documents (film contracts for Sarah) as a fictional character. It’s an open question whether the value of LeRoy’s observations has been voided by the truth of Albert’s identity.

The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler, 1985
Tyler’s tenth tome tells the story of travel writer Macon Leary. He is dispassionate and depressed, the author of a series of books for reluctant travelers. He knows where to eat Chef Boyardee pasta in Rome and whether there are Taco Bells in Mexico, should his readers ever suffer the misfortunate to visit such places. Macon’s life crumbles after his son is murdered outside of a fast food restaurant; his wife leaves him, and he devolves to become the imperfect bachelor, eating popcorn for breakfast and stomping his laundry clean in the shower. After an injury forces him to move back to his family home, which he shares with his two brothers (also divorced) and their spinster sister, what follows is a quirky comedy set against the backdrop of tragedy. With the help of his dog trainer cum girlfriend Muriel, Macon eventually learns to take charge of himself.

The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill, 2007
Hill’s sprawling novel (published as Someone Knows My Name in the U.S., Australia, and New Zealand) takes its title from a list of 3,000 African-American slaves who fought for the British during the American Revolutionary War, and were then offered free passage to Nova Scotia in return. It is told through the life of Aminata Diallo — a character drawn in three dimensions, as fully realized a protagonist as there has been in Canadian fiction. In a 2009 interview with the CBC’s George Stromboulopoulos, Hill called his novel primarily “a woman’s story.” The author confessed that he found the process of writing from a female point of view “scary,” and joked that he was able to get into the voice “through a whole bunch of cross dressing.” In fact, he imagined Aminata as his child, and gave her the ability to love “even when she’s drawn through hell.” The Book of Negroes was met with near-universal acclaim, and Hill concluded that the process of writing it gave him a better understanding not only of the world, but also of his own daughter.

Welcome to Walrusmagazine.com’s coverage of the thirtieth annual International Festival of Authors.

IFOA XXX began last night with a PEN Canada fundraiser that featured a rare public appearance by Alice Munro, who shared the stage with fellow author Diana Athill. Over the next ten days, Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre (along with several venues outside the city) will host a wide range of literary luminaries, including internationally renowned writers like John Irving, Orhan Pamuk, Margaret Atwood, and Colm Tóibín, and Walrus contributors including Lisa Moore, Mark Kingwell, and Hal Niedzviecki. The current crop of CanLit awards finalists is well represented: the festival includes readings by short-listed authors for the Governor General’s Literary Award, Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and Scotiabank Giller Prize.

There are multiple Walrus-related events throughout the festival. For those who prefer politics to the NFL, The Walrus editor John Macfarlane interviews Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff this Sunday at 2pm. A week from tonight, October 29, is Walrus Night at IFOA, with multiple editors hosting events. On the final Saturday of the festival, October 31, The Walrus comics blogger Sean Rogers will be interviewing R.O. Blechman and Seth, the latter of whom Rogers recently profiled for the magazine. Later that day, managing editor Jared Bland will host “On Influencing and Being Influenced,” a panel discussion with Debra Adelaide, William Deverell, Robert Girardi, and Nikos Papandreou.

Watch this space throughout IFOA XXX for reports on particular events, author interviews, and the latest news. And follow The Walrus on Twitter for breaking updates and chances to win event tickets.

Advance copies of our September issue arrived the other day, which means it’s probably about time that I say something about July/August, soon to disappear from shelves. The 2008 edition of our annual Summer Reading Issue is centred around the idea of escape. We have, among many others, Don Gillmor on his brother’s final, tragic escape; Wendy Dennis on fleeing Toronto for Austin, Texas; and Stephen Henighan giving Mozambique its best treatment since Bob Dylan’s Desire. (more…)

Jean Clotte’s Cave Art, out this month from the inimitable Phaidon Press, is the sort of book that convinces you to care about something you never have before. In this case it’s the titular cave art, which, despite the best efforts of a documentary on the Discovery Channel years ago, I was pretty sure was just scribbling. But no! It’s called art for a reason, and, as Clotte’s book meticulously explains, it’s essential to an understanding of both artistic and human history.

Chronicling the evolution of cave art over time, Clottes structures his book around three central periods, each explored by a detailed account of a representative cave: the Chauvet Cave begins a discussion of the period of 35,000 to 22,000 years ago, the Lascaux cave for 22,000 to 17,000 years ago, and the Niaux Cave for 17,000 to 11,000 years ago. It’s a clever approach, and as a result the book’s structure is one of its real strengths. By associating these eras with strong examples that are considered in tremendous detail, Cave Art gives one a sense not only of the broad strokes of a period’s development, but the finer details that make each unique. (more…)

Featuring: Glenn Gould, Robert Downey Jr., Christopher Shulgan, Arthur Conan Doyle (again), Barack Obama, Katie Hafner.

1. Taking the Cure I’ve been meaning to write about Christopher Shulgan’s new book, The Soviet Ambassador, but unfortunately other work has gotten in the way of me reading it first. But since we published a feature by Chris in June about his book’s subject, Aleksandr Yakovlev, and Yakovlev’s visit to British Columbia’s Doukhobors, I feel very confident in recommending the new volume to any and all. Chris’s piece one of my favourites of the year, and it shows off his charming prose and extensive research in such a manner that you’ll probably proceed directly to your local bookstore and collect a copy of his book. For actual evaluation, you could see Amy Knight’s review in the Globe. Watch that section this weekend for further discussion of the The Soviet Ambassador, and, if you’re in Toronto, tune into CBC Radio One at 9am on Sunday to hear Chris on The House.

2. Iron Man in a Tweed Jacket I’m really trying to stop talking about the upcoming Sherlock Holmes movies, which have been frequent topics of discussion here. But news continue to arrive, most lately this week’s revelation that Robert Downey Jr. is in talks to star as Holmes in Guy Ritchie’s ill-conceived action version. Now obviously the inclusion of Robert Downey Jr. makes anything better, but I don’t think even he can save this movie. It’ll still be terrible, but at least the lead will be charming.

3. Literary Biography I’m a big believer in the school of thought that says you can learn a lot about a person by what he or she reads. Al Purdy, for instance, read a lot of campy genre novels, some of which you can see pictured on this very blog, and I believe that type of reading was important to the sort of man he was. (I should say, though, that Purdy also read broadly and deeply across literary history; I would imagine he read more great books most of us could ever dream of finishing.) So I liked Laura Miller’s piece in Salon this week wherein she performs a bit of literary criticism on the idea of Barack Obama’s reading history, exploring his predilection for, among others, Melville, Roth, Nieburh, and, of course, Lincoln. (On a semi-related note, I’ll also recommend Gary Wills’s piece on Lincoln and Obama’s speeches on race from the NYRB a few months back.) And while it isn’t as nuanced as Miller’s argument, this now semi-famous photograph doubtless inspires the same sort of heart fluttering among those of us unaccustomed to seeing our leaders even holding a book.

4. The Steinway Variations McClelland & Stewart just published Katie Hafner’s excellent new book, A Romance on Three Legs: Glenn Gould’s Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Piano. It’s the first major work of Gould scholarship since Kevin Bazzana’s fine biography, Wondrous Strange, and one of the loveliest books yet written about the pianist. Hafner, who writes for Wired and the New York Times, delivers an impeccably researched take on Gould’s decades-long relationship with CD 318, a junky old Steinway piano with which he had a serious infatuation. The book also features Verne Edquist, Gould’s piano tuner, whose story hadn’t been explored in full until this volume. Alternating between the two men, Hafner explores the complexities of Gould’s relationship with his instrument.

Because Gould’s a difficult figure to wrestle with intellectually, we’ve developed a cultural fixation on his bizarreness that’s reduced his particularities as a performer and man to a set of clichés: sandwiches at Fran’s diner, summer-time top coats, his audible humming while playing. What Hafner finds, though, goes deeper, to a level that we can all understand. In his obsession with CD 318 Gould wasn’t demonstrating some strange personal tic that puts him at a remove from most people. Instead, it was among the more normal enterprises in which he engaged. More than anything, he was in love with the beauty of the instrument as it sounded to him, and it’s a lot easier for the average person to identify with finding something captivating than, say, an overwhelming need to phone people long distance in the middle of the night. In focusing on the piano, Hafner elevates the pianist to a place where I, at least, understand him in a way I never have.

Featuring: Haruki Murakami, Arthur Conan Doyle, Junot Diaz, Stephen King, and John Reibetanz.

1. Running Man In their summer fiction issue a few weeks ago, the New Yorker published an essay by Haruki Murakami about his simultaneous birth as a novelist and long-distance runner. Like most Murakami, it was really good, but sort of hard to say why. It’s actually an excerpt from his forthcoming memoir, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, which Bond Street will publish at the end of this month. What to say that doesn’t break the review embargo? I’ll note that if you enjoyed the essay, you’ll enjoy the book, and you’ll finish it with the same sense of perplexed pleasure with which you ended the excerpt. Murakami’s work is, stylistically at least, deceptively simple, and I always leave his novels a little uncertain of what’s transpired, but very sure that I’ve enjoyed its transpiring. Since the book is non-fiction, what happens within it is a bit clearer than in, say, South of the Border, West of the Sun (seriously—was she like a ghost or something?), but the prose still has its mysteries. For instance, how did it manage to entrance me enough to finish a book about long-distance running, a subject in which I have no interest? The title, of course, is borrowed from Raymond Carver, and Tess Gallagher is thanked within for permission. Not thanked, however, is Horace Silver, though he should be—Murakami’s cover borrows and adapts the running man from Silver’s semi-excellent 1972 Blue Note LP In Pursuit of the 27th Man (part of which is pictured above). (more…)

Surely Biblioasis, the small independent press run out of Emeryville, Ontario, is among the bravest entities in Canadian literature. This spring, after all, their list contained not one but two books of critical essays. One would be risk enough. Two is sort of admirably crazy. Fortunately for them, though, both books are very good, and I say that not just because both authors are contributors to The Walrus. Charles Foran’s Join the Revolution, Comrade and Stephen Henighan’s A Report on the Afterlife of Culture are excellent in part because their publisher has encouraged their scope to extend beyond the traditional confines of Canadian essay collections. Foran and Henighan are decidedly internationalist in their orientation, and what results are wide-ranging surveys of everything from, in Henighan’s book, Roberto Bolano to Haruki Murakami to Wole Soyinka, and, in Foran’s, from finding memories of Vietnam movies in Hue to searching for quality in Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons. (I’ll put a preemptive plug here for Biblioasis’s new edition of Ryszard Kapuscinski’s collected poems, which I’ve not yet bought, but sort of has to be good, no?) (more…)

Last weekend, as I was shuffling around BookExpo Canada, searching for catalogs and in need of fresh air, I came across the booth of Ten Speed Press, who really are a top-notch operation. I was drawn by what appeared to be a finished copy of Grant Achatz’s new Alinea cookbook. It turned out to be a dummy copy, though one that in its size and beautiful dust jacketry gave an idea of how impressive this book will be. The Ten Speed rep had a black and white galley of the book, though, and I can report that the recipes are aesthetically stunning and practically impossible for the average home chef. (Apparently by buying the book you’ll have access to a website that will let you learn from Grant & Co., which sounds to me like another way to feel inadequate. To learn more about Achatz, you should read D.T. Max’s very good New Yorker profile from a few weeks ago.) (more…)