The Irish dollar

-The Last Straight Woman continues its adventures getting read by people outside my immediate family. Emma Camp at the Wall Street Journal gets it. The Toronto Star excerpts it. Slaney Ross highlights the supreme importance of Onslow. And it’s reached the coveted (as in, I’d been coveting it) “all copies in use” for hardcover and e-book at the Toronto Public Library.

Virginia Karnstein, who knows about feminist history on a level that I do not, graciously reviewed The Last Straight Woman in a way that puts it into that context and that does not dwell on its author’s relative ignorance regarding names and waves. I never formally studied any of this stuff, never took a class that assigned Judith Butler, etc. What did I do in grad school? Unclear. Let’s just say that when Spencer Pratt reentered the news cycle my immediate thought was Speidi and not in the Spiderman sense. So that accounts for whichever years The Hills was on. (2006-2010. Started my grad program in 2006. Makes you think.)

-It happened to me: I was (almost) scammed! This too is book-related (SORRY) due to the nature of the scam.

The existence of AI-age author-baiting scams is something I’d known about for a while because these also get sent to my husband, author of a recent book not about Britcoms. So when I started getting ‘let me help you publicize your book’ spam I thought, ah, that’s what that is.

Then along came an email asking me to be on a Dublin, Ireland, radio show. The body of the text was written in obvious AI-ese, which is maybe how some people just write emails these days? The subject heading: “Invitation to Discuss *The Last Straight Woman: On Desiring Men* on All About Books (Dublin City FM).” If this should have set off alarms, do tell me which! The overall gist was similar to emails I send authors I want to have on my own podcast, apart from the AI-ishness of it all, and I googled that this was a real radio program. What I did not do is notice that the email it was sent from didn’t match the email-to provided. But they don’t always. And Katy who (supposedly) emailed does seem to be a real person with this role. Whether we’re looking at a shady person or a not-shady one with an imposter is something for Hercule Poirot to sort out, but I’m too much of an Onslow to dig.

Anyway, as someone who does in fact go on the radio and podcasts and such to discuss this very book, not to be haughty about such things, I did not find this request profound in any which way. This was not a you’re up for a literature Nobel email, it was a someone wants you on the radio email. I noted only that it was neither a US nor Canadian request which puts it into a kind of publicity limbo for boring behind-the-scenes reasons. Or rather would put it there, if it were real.

The tip-off that nobody had invited me on Irish radio: “As part of our standard production and promotional process, featured interviews carry a participation fee of $200, which supports recording, editing, broadcasting, podcast distribution, and promotional coverage connected to the feature.” It was the request for money, but also the CURRENCY mentioned. Why dollars? Which dollars, even? Anyway, this is apparently a thing; someone on Bluesky told me about a different radio station putting out warnings.

-There is a literary scandal all about a lady who’s privilege is showing and I refuse to let a little thing like my having not read the book (Belle Burden’s Strangers) to stop me having a mini-thought, or rather, some more of them. As Kat points out, Burden exists in a publishing landscape that demands its authors, its lady-memoirists especially, demonstrate privilege awareness and relatability. Unfortunately, instead of simply owning her evidently substantial privilege-in-the-sense-of-money, she was sufficiently evasive about it in this memoir that she had the New Yorker digging around her financials. Just think of the lengths writers (not just writers!) go to present themselves as more or less privileged than they really are, to construct narratives subjectively if not to lie outright. Then hello, the publication known for its commitment to fact-checking.

To repeat my podcast-self, the reason I had not picked up a copy of Strangers was that the 2023 “Modern Love” from whence it came was stand-alone compelling. I didn’t feel like I needed more information about the rich woman whose husband suddenly disappeared. Indeed, any further details would ruin the spare poignancy of this. Turning that story into a book was never going to make sense on a literary level, because it would bring in extraneous information. On a publishing level it seems to be going just fine.

But then I started thinking (like Kat, I find the galaxy beckons), it’s not that this should have stayed an essay. It’s that it would have been better as fiction. This is because as odd and upsetting as it is for a woman to be ditched out of the blue by a seemingly happily husband of 20 years, there’s an even more sordid and specific detail hovering beneath the surface: a materially-unfounded sense of financial insecurity. This woman with gobs of money beyond fathomability, a level of wealth where you’d never be checking for supermarket sales, where you could be bathing in lattes and sponging yourself down with avocado toast and no dent would be made. But, as I understand it from much-circulated passages, she FELT on the cusp of financial ruin. Body dysmorphia, but about money.

And on an emotional level, this makes sense. If you’re in a precarious, carpet-out-from-under-you situation, I could see thinking irrationally, starting to question everything. She knows she has the infinite money-pot, but she thought she knew she had a life partner and look how that went! So maybe the money-pot is not as infinite as all that. Is a thing it would be emotionally understandable, albeit inaccurate, to think.

The problem is that as deeply human as it is to be a trazillionaire who, in crisis, feels poor, there’s the small matter of the rest of humanity, including most well-off people, looking at this and saying lady you have so SO much more money than I can even conceptualize what are you talking about. And the convention, with memoir and personal essay, is that the writer present herself in a positive, sympathetic light. A memoir reader might come around to a memoir that said all the money in the world didn’t protect me from heartbreak. A memoir reader would look less favorably at I, rich woman, FELT poor. Instead of this coming across as a self-aware acknowledgement of irrationality it would read as a prompt to alert her that Actually she is extremely well-off.

A memoir reader.

A fictional character could have this flaw. Why not? Made-up people can do far worse. A fictional heiress could lack an level-headed assessment of her financial place in the world. Readers wouldn’t have to like her, but might still get drawn into the story. And the New Yorker wouldn’t be digging into anyone’s legal documents.