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 anielle
Crittenden is the author of Amanda.Bright@Home, a fiction series
running on Mondays on opinionjournal.com.
Crittenden is also the author of What
Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us : Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Woman
and the former (and founding) editor of The
Women's Quarterly. NRO's Kathryn Lopez spoke to her earlier
this week about Amanda.
Kathryn Jean Lopez: Where did you get
the idea for Amanda.Bright@home?
Danielle Crittenden: Well, I've been
thinking about these things for a long time. That is, how to be
a modern woman in an inescapably traditional role as we become mothers
at home. About a year ago I decided to do a magazine article about
it. George commissioned the piece and I went and interviewed
all of these formerly professional and ambitious women who are now
at home. I was fascinated by the trends that were producing this.
Also, in the women themselves, how do you go from being raised as
this very ambitious person to what in our time is regarded as retrograde,
a mother at home?
So
I interviewed these women and then George magazine folded
and so the article never got published, which I am actually grateful
for because I found it very frustrating to deal with the trend in
a nonfiction way. So many of the feelings that a woman has when
she is in the situation are ambiguous. I can really explore that
much better through different characters than I can through interviewing
women for what will ultimately be another trend piece.
It
is a real phenomenon of our time. In the major cities of the United
States, women in the upper brackets who were lawyers, who were entrepreneurs,
vice presidents of companies — just quitting their jobs to
become full-time mothers. There's almost definitely a status to
it. The Christine character is representative of this. The "My
wife could have been earning $200,000 a year but thank God she doesn't
have to. I can manage it all on my own."
Lopez: Writing fiction is obviously
much different than writing nonfiction. Have you had much experience
with it? Is it a genre you're comfortable with?
Crittenden: I had a short story published
in the Wall Street Journal in 1993 on Valentine's Day. I
wrote a little op-ed that was a modern love story for them. I had
two published short stories in Canada and I wrote a collection of
short stories when my first child was born, during the first year
of her life, while she was napping. I wrote a series of stories
that were not so much about marriage but about these whole new modern
situations that women are in. The one that got published was about
a woman in her late thirties who finally conceives a child on her
own. It explored that whole sad idea. So, I was exploring these
ideas in fiction before I wound up writing about them in nonfiction
form both in The Women's Quarterly and in my book. And now
I have come back to fiction because I really enjoy writing it for
this.
Lopez: When I read Amanda, and I am
sure this is the case for many of your readers, I see people I know
in the different characters. Do you have particular real people
in mind for each character, or are they composites?
Crittenden: No character resembles
any person living or dead. Any resemblance is purely coincidental.
That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
Lopez: Why did you decide to go the
web route?
Crittenden: I think there is nothing
more depressing for a writer than the thought of sitting down in
isolation for the next year writing a novel, just going through
the whole depressing publishing side of publishing fiction today.
So when I thought of doing this Amanda Bright series, I was thinking
of the example of Bridget Jones, and Sex and the City,
and I was thinking that the story is engaged enough in daily life
and current events that maybe I could do it as a weekly column.
I figured there would really be no newspaper that would be interested
in it. This is why the web is so fantastic; it just lends itself
to this kind of thing. So, I thought I would try to pitch it to
some Internet venture or web magazine, because I also know that
these content sites, probably like NRO, are having trouble attracting
women. All these women are using the web, but they are using it
for shopping. So these sites are eagerly scrambling to get women
readers. So, I thought this would be an interesting experiment from
a website's point of view; and from my point of view, I would have
a wonderful venue to write weekly and to experiment with this whole
idea.
Lopez: Do you have any plans to package
it as a paper book when all of the chapters have been filed online?
Crittenden: My agent has the stories
to date and is preparing to sell it.
Lopez: You are writing chapters between
Mondays. Do you know what will ultimately happen to Amanda?
Crittenden: It is completely plotted
out. I would go crazy if it wasn't all plotted out.
Lopez: What kind of feedback are you
getting from readers?
Crittenden: This has been a surprisingly
wonderful experience. If you go to the reader responses there are
different ones after each chapter. They are wonderful. First, some
of them are writing in as if Amanda were a completely real person.
They are giving her advice. They are really distressed that she
doesn't appreciate what she's got. One woman is upset at her slatternly
cooking skills. They are very engaged with her, which is great fun
to read. I am getting lots of very positive e-mails from people.
You get this when you write a column, or as a journalist, but getting
this kind of reaction when you are writing fiction is just so encouraging.
It is really making it a lot of fun to do.
Lopez: Even though you have everything
plotted out, are reader responses influencing the way Amanda goes
from week to week?
Crittenden: It is not that they change
the plot, but some of them will raise an issue that I hadn't thought
about or wasn't really going to expand on and they raise it as being
important to them. So it does have an effect that way. And a couple
people have sent in minor factual corrections. Someone sent me something
about majors at Brown University, which really was a minor point,
but I was very grateful for it. If it ever appears in hardcover,
I will have this correction. It has been very useful.
Lopez: Do you have any feel for who
your audience is? Are there men reading it?
Crittenden: I only know from the e-mails
I get and from people I meet in Washington, but there are a lot
of men reading it. The responses posted on the site are mostly from
women, but of the e-mails I am getting, they are about 50-50, male-female.
And some of my male friends who I would not expect to be interested
in this type of story are following it avidly. I had one friend
out west who wrote me an e-mail saying that he was staying up Sunday
night waiting for the next installment to be posted. It has become
like The Sopranos for him; he's addicted. It is very flattering
and very sweet. It is so gratifying to know that you have people
plugged in and they are caring about these characters and they want
to know what happens next.
Lopez: What do you ultimately hope
readers get out of Amanda.Bright@home?
Crittenden: Several years ago I had
to write a review of a bunch of feminist novels. I have had few
more depressing literary experiences than reading a pile of feminist
novels one after the other. Their plots were formulaic and it was
the same plot in each one, which was the opposite of the traditional
fairy tale. It would start with a woman in a bad marriage. The woman
was totally virtuous. The man was some caricature of a man, the
piggish husband. Finally, the novel was about gaining her strength
to leave him and realize herself outside the marriage. The end would
be — she would never be alone — her going with some weedy,
left-wing academic guy and becoming a potter in Santa Fe. That would
the general plotline. You see that point running, more subtly, through
a lot of modern women's novels. What I feel, when I read these modern
books, is that we are not honestly grappling with the true situations
of women today.
What I think is interesting about Amanda is that she is begins in
some ways like these characters. She's obviously insecure. She is
obviously anxious about her situation. But the way she works her
way through it is not going to end up — I can say this much
— with her divorcing Bob and becoming a potter in Santa Fe.
I hope that the achievement will be her honestly working through
her situation, resolving those feelings of anxiety and insecurity
in a way that isn't divorce. I think if you grapple with these issues
truthfully a lot of people will identify with them.
You don't hope to change anybody. You certainly don't want to make
the character a stereotype of a poster child for some idea because
then she would cease to be real.
What is so wonderful about dealing with these ideas in fiction is
that so often they are ambiguous. There's not always a clear, better
reason. I am right now in Chapter 5 writing about how suddenly dependent
Amanda feels in her marriage. And she is. There's no getting around
it. If Bob were to divorce her she would be in real trouble. She
has made a tremendous risk in this decision. We ought to recognize
it. In some ways conservatives downplay the risks women make in
getting married and quitting their jobs and liberals overplay the
risk, and assume the answer is not quitting your job or not getting
married, or not depending on anyone. That's not satisfying at all.
You can't have a marriage in which you are both not dependent upon
one another in some way, where there isn't risk. So that's an interesting,
real situation she has to come to grips with and try to work out.
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