Book Siblings for Summer
Because I'm tired of self-promotion, and as bell hooks reminds me, it's about the ideas
Welcome to My So-Called Feminist Life: Essays, interviews, and book reviews that wrestle with what it means to be a feminist today. Comments and questions and musings and suggestions are welcome, because life and feminism are messy and I love diving in with you all!
Somehow I didn’t send a newsletter the day my book came out. Today marks two weeks since publication day and I have been on the road or doing interviews or helping my kids transition into summer since then. This morning, I woke up at 4:45 AM in order to be on Morning Joe — a dream for authors, especially first-time authors who are not famous, like me. The interview went well, I think, and now, here I am back at my desk, wondering if I have one tiny cell of self-promotion left in my body to send you all a newsletter about my book.
The strange rollercoaster of emotions over the last two weeks (Such high highs! Such low lows!) had me thinking about what the point of all of this putting yourself out there is. Did you know that the reason bell hooks went by lowercase letters in her name (and actually used her great-grandmother’s name as her pen name) was because she wanted the focus to be on her work and not her self?
“When the feminist movement was at its zenith in the late 60’s and early 70’s, there was a lot of moving away from the idea of the person. It was: let’s talk about the ideas behind the work, and the people matter less. It was kind of a gimmicky thing, but lots of feminist women were doing it. Many of us took the names of our female ancestors—bell hooks is my maternal great grandmother—to honor them and debunk the notion that we were these unique, exceptional women. We wanted to say, actually, we were the products of the women who’d gone before us.” — Northeastern Anarchist #15 in 2011
Well, after two weeks of events, and television appearances, and radio and podcast interviews, and being perceived by the public in order to try to sell this book in some kind of a marketable soundbite that I spent the past six years working on, I can see why she did this. Maybe I should have used a pen name.
I am in no way ungrateful for the press and opportunities and support this book and, by extension, myself, have been given. I’m just feeling a bit burnt out in terms of being a human in this world trying to sell something, and feeling everything very personally when I wish I could just take the long-term, big picture view that this is a good thing to have the book out there and have people reading it and success is measured in all kinds of ways. I’m learning that this kind of perspective is a particularly difficult thing to do when Internet comments, emails from strangers, and social media likes come in fast and furious, whip-lashing emotions and our brain chemistry along with them.
I’m glad I stumbled across bell hooks this morning, one of my all time favorite feminist writers and thinkers, while struggling to organize my own emotions about being a feminist writer with a feminist book in a world that is absolutely burning to the ground, because this particular quote really pulled me back to reality.
“I think we are obsessed in the U.S. with the personal, in ways that blind us to more important issues of life.”
And that’s the whole thing, isn’t it? We’re all constantly fed the narrative that our personal success, our book, our story, our work, is what matters the most. But that’s not it at all. What matters, to me, as a journalist, and a feminist, and an author, is that the ideas I write about and care about get out there in the world and are read and understood and thought about by others. A strange thing about a book is it takes years and years to work on and write and go through edits and the publishing process, and then your dearest friends and family members read it in like a day and a half. And then it’s done. It lives on, of course, in minds and souls, memories, and libraries (hopefully), but that whole idea that people will just be … done with it, and move on, emphasizes the feeling that the market must be captured, that we must win the attention wars with our own viral moments and bestseller lists and presales! But in reality, a book is an idea, a collection of ideas that lives among other collections of ideas, and narratives, and art that all come together at various points and in conversation with one another and that’s what makes literature and journalism and art so movement-making.
So today, I offer, yes a reminder that my book is now for sale (and if you have bought it, please do consider rating and reviewing on Amaz*n, Goodreads, etc.). But additionally, and more importantly, a reminder that my book lives in conversation with many other books that are coming out this summer that I have been reading and loving and cannot wait for you all to read and love, too. Here are some of my book’s summer siblings.
This Summer, Sports and Gender are Invading Your Bookshelf!!!
The Striker and The Clock: On Being in the Game
by Georgia Cloepfil
A brilliant form-breaking memoir, written in ninety vignettes to reflect the 90 minutes of a soccer game, about Cloepfil’s experience as a professional women’s soccer player for six years in six different countries after leaving college, while professional women’s soccer was still getting off the ground here in the U.S. I loved every moment of this book, the joy, the pain, the passion for a sport told lyrically and achingly. Historically, sports writing has only been considered literary when it’s men writing about baseball, but this book should be on every literary sports-lover’s list. (July 16, Riverhead Books)
Swimming Pretty: The Untold Story of Women in Water
by Vicki Valosik
If you, like me, are actually astounded when you see synchronized swimming events in the Olympics because they look literally physically impossible, then you’ll be on board with Valosik’s brilliant history of how this particularly physiologically difficult sport came to be seen as the pinnacle of femininity. Reading the fascinating history of women’s swimming, one that parallels but also diverges greatly at points, from women’s running history, was enlightening and sometimes shocking even for me. I loved thinking about the ways society has determined certain forms of movement and sport as feminine, and some as masculine. Did you know this will be the first Olympics when male synchronized swimmers would be allowed in the team events? (Available now, Liveright)
The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports
by Michael Waters
With incredible attention to detail and clear care for his subjects, Waters takes the reader on an historical journey back to the early days of women’s track and field, and to the beginning of sex testing in women’s sports, through the story of Zdeněk Koubek, and Mark Weston, two track and field athletes who competed in the women’s field before publicly transitioning gender. He places these stories of gender, public perception, and sport alongside a keen understanding of how the looming threat of fascism at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin impacted society at large. (Available now, Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Thanks for reading! My So-Called Feminist Life is a weekly newsletter wrestling with feminism in today’s world. I encourage conversation in the comments if you wish to share your own thoughts, feelings, memories, opinions. If you’d like to support this project financially, you can become a paid subscriber.
You can find me on Instagram: @maggiejmertens
You can order my book Better, Faster, Farther: How Running Changed Everything We Know About Women (Algonquin Books, June 18, 2024) from your favorite local bookstore, request it from your local library, or push this quick order button from Bookshop.org
Ugh, yes, all the feelings when a book comes out are so chaotic and just weird. But especially as we discover that so many other forms of media are fleeting and ephemeral, you made a book. And books last. They stick around, along with their ideas. I don't know, that's what I try to tell myself.
Also, totally ordering this for my local library.
I was really glad to read the stellar review of your book in The Seattle Times, and bummed that I wasn’t able to make it to your booklaunch at Elliot Bay Book Co. Even though we’ve not met in real life, I really wanted to go to the event to support you! Your description of how long it takes to write a book compared to how long it takes us to read it reminds me of the elaborate prep for a dinner that’s devoured in moments. I am looking forward to reading the book. (I will endeavor to savor, not snarf!)