Contemporary Authors

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• Grove Atlantic - https://groveatlantic.com/author/michelle-dean/

  Michelle Dean

  Michelle Dean is a journalist, critic, and the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle’s 2016 Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. A contributing editor at the New Republic, she has written for the New Yorker, Nation, New York Times Magazine, Slate, New York Magazine, Elle, Harper’s, and BuzzFeed. She lives in Los Angeles.

• Linked In - https://www.linkedin.com/in/michelle-dean-6272271a/

  Michelle Dean
  3rd degree connection3rd
  Freelance writer, editor
  Various publications University of Toronto
  Greater New York City Area 288 288 connections

  writing, culture, ideas
  Experience

  Various publications
  Writer
  Company Name Various publications
  Dates Employed Jul 2010 – Present Employment Duration 7 yrs 10 mos

  My work has appeared online and in print at the New Yorker, the Guardian US, the New Republic, the New York Times Magazine, ELLE, New York's The Cut, the Nation, Slate, the Awl, and a number of other publications.

  I am the 2017 recipient of the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle.

  I write primarily about books, crime, and culture.

  I also have a book under contract to Grove Press about women critics and intellectuals called Sharp: The Women Who Made An Art of Having An Opinion.

  My favourite clips of recent-ish vintage are listed below:

  https://newrepublic.com/article/136331/oh-my

  https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/24/books/review/nordic-theory-of-everything-anu-partanen.html?_r=0

  https://www.buzzfeed.com/michelledean/dee-dee-wanted-her-daughter-to-be-sick-gypsy-wanted-her-mom#.ryAgwALoa

  https://www.wired.com/story/snopes-and-the-search-for-facts-in-a-post-fact-world/

  http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/what-masters-of-sex-overlooks/

  https://newrepublic.com/article/128999/robert-lowells-tainted-love

  https://newrepublic.com/article/132117/adrienne-richs-feminist-awakening

  http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jan/21/boy-who-came-back-from-heaven-alex-malarkey

  http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/apr/19/robert-durst-karen-mitchell-mary-casper-california

  http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/may/24/vivian-gornick-interview-memoirs-feminism-the-odd-woman-and-the-city

  http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-secrets-of-vera-caspary-the-woman-who-wrote-laura

  http://gawker.com/how-unauthorized-is-the-new-book-about-harper-lee-1605214844
  Media (6)
  This position has 6 media

  'Sex and Rage' have always been the territory of the It Girl
  'Sex and Rage' have always been the territory of the It ...
  This media is a link
  Robert Lowell’s Tainted Love
  Robert Lowell’s Tainted Love
  This media is a link
  Adrienne Rich’s Feminist Awakening
  Adrienne Rich’s Feminist Awakening
  This media is a link
  Snopes and the Search for Facts in a Post-Fact World
  Snopes and the Search for Facts in a Post-Fact World
  This media is a link
  Dee Dee Wanted Her Daughter To Be Sick, Gypsy Wanted Her Mom Murdered
  Dee Dee Wanted Her Daughter To Be Sick, Gypsy Want...
  This media is a link
  Me Oh My!
  Me Oh My!
  This media is a link
  Gawker
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  Company Name Gawker
  Dates Employed Mar 2014 – Oct 2014 Employment Duration 8 mos
  Location New York, NY

  Wrote on law, books, and culture.
  WHITE & CASE LLP
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  Company Name WHITE & CASE LLP
  Dates Employed Sep 2005 – Jun 2010 Employment Duration 4 yrs 10 mos

  IP and commercial litigation practice. Substantial experience in trademark and copyright, as well as insurance, False Claims Act, breach of contract, bankruptcy, securities, environmental law, privacy, foreign sovereign immunity, foreign corrupt practices, bankruptcy and immigration.
  White & Case LLP
  Summer Associate
  Company Name White & Case LLP
  Dates Employed May 2004 – Jul 2004 Employment Duration 3 mos

  Education

  University of Toronto
  University of Toronto

  Degree Name L.L.M.

  Field Of Study Law

  Dates attended or expected graduation 2010 – 2011

  Wrote thesis on freedom of expression and digital culture.
  McGill University
  McGill University

  Degree Name B.C.L./L.L.B.

  Field Of Study Common/Civil Law

  Dates attended or expected graduation 2002 – 2005

  Activities and Societies: McGill Law Journal, Volumes 49 & 50 (Editor, 2003-2004; Comments Editor, 2004-2005); Judicial Extern: Justice Allan R. Hilton, Québec Court of Appeal (2004-2005); Tutorial Leader, Foundations of Canadian Law (2004-2005); Tutorial Leader, Legal Writing (2004-2005).

  Graduated with Great Distinction; Dean's Honour List; F.R. Scott Prize in Constitutional Law; Cheryl Teresa Doran Award.
  McGill University
  McGill University

  Degree Name B.A

  Field Of Study History

  Dates attended or expected graduation 1998 – 2002

  Skills & Endorsements

  Writing
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  Accomplishments
  Michelle has 2 languages 2
  Languages

  English French

  Interests

  Various publications & books
  Various publications & books

  588 followers
  University of Toronto
  University of Toronto

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  McGill University - Faculty of Law
  McGill University - Faculty of Law

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  McGill University
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QUOTED: "With the word ferocity appearing with satisfying frequency, Dean presents shrewd, discerning, fresh, and crisply composed interpretations."

Sharp: The Women Who Made an
Art of Having an Opinion
Donna Seamn
Booklist.
114.14 (Mar. 15, 2018): p11. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion. By Michelle Dean.
Apr. 2018. 384p. Grove/Atlantic, $26 (9780802125095). 810.9.
By portraying intrepidly and eloquently opinionated and highly influential women writers, journalist and critic Dean brings a uniquely intellectual slant to the current renaissance in women's history via group biographies, such as Andrea Barnet's Visionary Women (2018). Beginning with Dorothy Parker, who was putting people on notice before American women had the right to vote, these "sharp" literary warriors refused to conform to gender expectations and got their start by writing daringly frank and acerbic book, theater, or film reviews; taking on established, mostly male, figures; and presenting new and challenging perspectives. As Dean chronicles the complexly difficult, provoking, and triumphant writing lives of Rebecca West, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Pauline Kael, Joan Didion, Nora Ephron, Renata Adler, and Janet Malcolm, she tracks their supportive and vituperative interactions and reveals the vibrant matrix of culturally defining ideas generated by these bold critics of society, the arts, and politics. With the word ferocity appearing with satisfying frequency, Dean presents shrewd, discerning, fresh, and crisply composed interpretations of the temperaments, experiences, and sophisticated trailblazing works of these gutsy and transformative thinkers.--Donna Seaman
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Seamn, Donna. "Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion." Booklist, 15 Mar.
2018, p. 11. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A533094382
1 of 5 4/21/18, 11:44 PM
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=dc3ad3cd. Accessed 22 Apr. 2018. Gale Document Number: GALE|A533094382
2 of 5 4/21/18, 11:44 PM

QUOTED: "This is a stunning and highly accessible introduction to a group of important writers."

http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion
Publishers Weekly.
264.48 (Nov. 27, 2017): p47+. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion
Michelle Dean. Grove, $26 (384p) ISBN 978-0-8021-2509-5
Few readers could fail to be impressed by both the research behind and readability of this first book by Dean, a journalist and critic. In it, she explores the lives and work of women writers of the 20th century, including Hannah Arendt, Janet Malcolm, Dorothy Parker, and Susan Sontag. She covers a dozen women, all A proliferation of colorful sea urchins from Honeyborne and Brownlow's Blue Planet II, a companion volume to the BBC series [reviewed on p. 51). considered "sharp" for their intelligence and insight, but also in that they were considered-- particularly by male counterparts--cutting and threatening. Dean, fortunately, doesn't keep these talented women in their own boxes, but shows many of them intersecting in the same intellectual circles, interacting and commenting--sometimes bitingly, sometimes supportingly--on each other's work. Dean provides concise synopses and comparisons of their ideas and has an eye for similarities: both Mary McCarthy and Joan Didion, for example, objected to what they saw as J.D. Salinger's triviality. The book has a few glitches--a short section on Zora Neale Hurston, for example, doesn't quite mesh with the rest. Taken as a whole, however, this is a stunning and highly accessible introduction to a group of important writers. Agent: Gary Morris, David Black Agency. (Apr.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion." Publishers Weekly, 27 Nov. 2017,
p. 47+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A517575682 /GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=921a7760. Accessed 22 Apr. 2018.
3 of 5 4/21/18, 11:44 PM

http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
Gale Document Number: GALE|A517575682
4 of 5 4/21/18, 11:44 PM

QUOTED: "Dean often discusses these female authors' writerly independence in relation to the men that occupied important places in their lives, an odd choice. ... Still, the author presents engaging portraits of brilliant minds."

http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
Dean, Michelle: SHARP
Kirkus Reviews.
(Jan. 15, 2018): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Dean, Michelle SHARP Grove (Adult Nonfiction) $26.00 4, 10 ISBN: 978-0-8021-2509-5
A debut book about the works of 20th-century women whose lives had a deep impact on culture.
"I gathered the women in this book under the sign of a compliment that every one of them received in their lives: they were called sharp," writes New Republic contributing editor Dean. At first glance, the premise seems rather elementary. Such a qualifier can't possibly carry with it the heft of a book's premise. However, by exploring the different roles that women such as Joan Didion, Hannah Arendt, Renata Adler, Susan Sontag, and Dorothy Parker occupied in the writing world, Dean makes it clear that to be called "sharp" was a steppingstone for their respective careers. All of the women are obviously extremely different: Dorothy Parker was hardly a contemporary of Susan Sontag, nor did they function within the same society. Hannah Arendt was not as progressively irreverent as Renata Adler. However, Dean reveals intriguing connections that link most, if not all, of them together. Each one of these women was involved in one way or another with CondAaAaAeA@ Nast, an extremely influenti publishing group that could make or break writers' careers. In writing for the New York Review of Books or Vogue, among other publications, they were able to test out their ideas on a captive audience of fiery New Yorkers and sophisticated, fashionable women. As is often the case with geniuses, their writings were not received with open arms; there was push back from an audience used to a male authorial power. Interestingly, however different these women may have been from each other, the author ably explains the ways in which their lives intersected, the conversations they had, and the goals they shared. Unfortunately, Dean often discusses these female authors' writerly independence in relation to the men that occupied important places in their lives, an odd choice in a book of this nature. Still, the author presents engaging portraits of brilliant minds.
A useful take on significant writers "in a world that was not eager to hear women's opinions about anything."
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Dean, Michelle: SHARP." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Jan. 2018. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A522642951/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=a406bb42. Accessed 22 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A522642951
5 of 5 4/21/18, 11:44 PM

Seamn, Donna. "Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion." Booklist, 15 Mar. 2018, p. 11. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A533094382/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=dc3ad3cd. Accessed 22 Apr. 2018. "Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion." Publishers Weekly, 27 Nov. 2017, p. 47+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A517575682/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=921a7760. Accessed 22 Apr. 2018. "Dean, Michelle: SHARP." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Jan. 2018. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A522642951/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=a406bb42. Accessed 22 Apr. 2018.

• Vulture
  http://www.vulture.com/2018/04/michelle-deans-sharp-tells-the-stories-of-10-female-critics.html
  Word count: 2705

  Michelle Dean’s Sharp Tells the Origin Stories of 10 Essential Female Critics
  By
  Christian Lorentzen
  Photo: Grove Press

  Odds are that most writers’ efforts are doomed to oblivion, and for critics that fate is practically guaranteed. Their judgments can launch other writers and artists to fame (or perhaps do the opposite), but once the launch is accomplished the memory of a critic’s praise is jettisoned like the boosters on a space shuttle. Page through any critic’s collected reviews and you’ll find raves and pans of works lost to time. Perhaps the best posthumous audience a critic can hope for is one composed of other critics, who’ll rummage through their predecessors’ out-of-print books and stray clippings after the yellowed records of youthful verdicts and forgotten feuds.

  That’s the project of Michelle Dean’s new book Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion. Dean tracks a set of writers born between 1891 (Zora Neale Hurston) and 1941 (Nora Ephron) and considers them mostly as critics and particularly as women breaking into a field dominated by men. Across these portraits it’s possible to trace currents in American literary history as it unfolded between World War I and the present. Forms that could once make a writer famous turn out to have shorter shelf-lives than graffiti. Film, both as a critical subject and a creative pursuit, attracted many of these writers in ways that were alternately productive, lucrative, and largely a waste of time and talent. They operated during the long golden age of American magazines, both little and glossy, an era that is certainly over, though it’s unclear what sort of dispensation, for readers and writers, will follow.

  Dean focuses on her subjects’ moments of emergence: These tend to involve both a lucky opportunity and a moment when a writer discovered her own powers. Dorothy Parker, Rebecca West, and Renata Adler were prodigies. Pauline Kael and Janet Malcolm were late bloomers. Hannah Arendt and Susan Sontag made their way through universities and then burst on the public scene. Joan Didion had a novel to her name before she wrote the features for the Saturday Evening Post that turned her into an icon and still account for a disproportionate share of her reputation. These origin stories —usually paired in Dean’s telling with one or more public controversies and in some cases a crucial marriage or love affair — are fun to revisit and for the uninitiated Sharp is a valuable introduction to an essential group of writers. For aspiring writers especially, these women are required reading.

  But how much are they read today and do we read them the right way? Of Dean’s subjects, only Pauline Kael counts as purely a critic, and she remains influential because many of the major film critics working today started out as her acolytes, the so-called Paulettes. But the recent surge in socially conscious pop-culture criticism spurred Jaime Weinman, writing in Vox, to suggest that “the end of Kaelism” has arrived. Politics weren’t necessarily symbiotic in Kael’s scheme of thing. Indeed, good or well-meaning politics could be the source of a film’s, or a whole decade of films’, flaws. Here she is on the turn of 1930s Hollywood screenwriters to communism:

  The writing that had given American talkies their special flavor died in the war, killed not in battle but in the politics of Stalinist “anti-Fascism.” For the writers, Hollywood was just one big crackup, and for most of them it took a political turn. The lost-in-Hollywood generation of writers, trying to clean themselves of guilt for their wasted years and their irresponsibility as writers, became political in the worst way — became a special breed of anti-Fascists. The talented writers, the major ones as well as the lightweight yet entertaining ones, went down the same drain as the clods — drawn into it, often, by bored wives, less successful brothers. They became naïvely, hysterically pro-Soviet; they ignored Stalin’s actual policies, because they so badly needed to believe in something. They had been so smart, so gifted, and yet they hadn’t been able to beat Hollywood’s contempt for the writer.

  The passage is from her 1971 essay “Raising Kane.” The essay is controversial for her claims on behalf of Citizen Kane screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz at the expense of director Orson Welles and her use of research done by UCLA film professor Howard Suber, whose work she had agreed to publish along with her own as introductory material in a paperback edition of the film’s screenplay, but it’s remarkable for her broad argument for ’30s comedy — especially in the figure of the cynical newspaperman — and the decline of comic writing in the ’40s. This was the generation led by Dorothy Parker.

  Parker’s career now reads like a cautionary tale. Her wit became famous from her theater and book reviews and reports of her lunchtime banter at the Algonquin Round Table in Franklin Pierce Adams’s newspaper column “The Conning Tower” (when informed of Calvin Coolidge’s death, she asked “Really? How can they tell?”). Volumes of her light verse were best sellers. The short story was still a commercial form, and Parker wrote one classic, “Big Blonde,” which won the O’Henry prize in 1929. In Hollywood she was nominated for an Oscar for the screenplay of A Star Is Born. She made four figures a week during the Depression. “I just sat in an office and did nothing,” she said. She had marched for causes in New York, had been fined $5 in Boston for protesting the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, became more political in California, and by the 1950s was blacklisted as a communist. During the war The Portable Dorothy Parker had become a hit among GIs and it remains the best way in to her work. There was never a novel. When she returned to New York to live alone in a hotel, write for the stage and for Esquire, she spoke with some bitterness of the old days. “Dammit, it was the ‘twenties’ and we had to be smarty,” she told a Paris Review interviewer in 1956. “I wanted to be cute. That’s the terrible thing. I should have had more sense.” All the writerly vices come together in her story: selling out, alcoholism, stridency, ostracism — everything but suicide, which she attempted five times.

  It was the “twenties”: Parker knew that writers are captives of their times. This was an advantage for Mary McCarthy, who arrived in Manhattan in the mid-1930s among a milieu of Stalinists (her unfinished Intellectual Memoirs give the impression that this was true of almost everyone she knew), gave a casual answer at a party when the novelist James T. Farrell asked her whether Leon Trotsky deserved a fair hearing, and soon found her yes had landed her name on a list of members of a committee for her defense. She was going to have her name removed until she found out that others, like Freda Kirchway, editor of the Nation, were doing the same. She left it on to be contrarian. This put her in the company of the Trotskyites who were restarting Partisan Review, free of its former Stalinist ties (and funding), among them McCarthy’s sometime boyfriend Philip Rahv. The break with Stalinism also kept the magazine on the side of the modernist avant-garde, and from within its inner circle McCarthy was ideally placed to do it all. She wrote short stories that resounded across the country: “The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt” was the “Cat Person” of its day — Dean quotes George Plimpton on the shockwaves it sent through his boarding school campus in New Hampshire — and became the heart of her novel in stories The Company She Keeps. She would write a mega–best seller in The Group — a book that would create its own genre, the collective portrait as chronicle — but also works of art criticism, on Venice and Florence, and political commentary, on Vietnam and Watergate. Strangely (to me anyway), of all Dean’s subjects, McCarthy is currently the most neglected, despite the Library of America editions of her novels issued last year. It may be hard to do at the moment because she was such a creature of her time, a novelist as annalist and a polemicist fighting it out on the (Cold War) ground. Is this also true of Kael? Her selected writings now appear under the title The Age of Movies. Is that era over, now that we’re living in the age of prestige TV recaps?

  The generation that followed McCarthy — represented in Dean’s account by Joan Didion, Susan Sontag, Renata Adler, Nora Ephron, and Janet Malcolm — operated in her shadow and under her influence as well as that of her friend Hannah Arendt. Adler was for a time engaged to McCarthy’s son Reuel Wilson, and Sontag may have been told once at a party by McCarthy that she was “the new me,” though nobody remembers whether that actually happened. On the spectrum from Ivory Tower to Pop, Sontag worked from the pulpit and Ephron at street level. Their efforts as filmmakers — Sontag’s experimental and financially draining; Ephron’s accessible and massively lucrative — couldn’t be more different, or farther away from Parker on the screenwriting assembly line. Between them Malcolm cuts a curiously single-minded path, beginning in middle age as a photography critic for The New Yorker (a second start after a first foray in the pages of The New Republic under her maiden name Janet Winn) and then becoming a reporter whose great subject was subjectivity itself — the hazards of journalism for both reporter and source.

  The most fascinating pair in Sharp to scrutinize side by side is still with us — Didion and Adler. Each has been a triple threat: reporter, critic, novelist. Both are members of the Silent Generation, born in the 1930s, children during the War, educated under Eisenhower, not yet adults at the time of McCarthyism and already mature by the arrival of the hippies. Though both have ended up as liberals, each began with conservative leanings. Didion was a National Review contributor and professed Goldwater voter. Adler wrote a sympathetic profile of G. Gordon Liddy and was at one point a registered Republican, as a form of quiet protest within her milieu at The New Yorker. Didion has written more novels (five), but Adler wrote better ones, better in part because more obviously personal even though a long-standing knock against Didion, made most famously by Barbara Grizzuti Harrison in 1980, has been that her real subject is always herself. This was never entirely fair, although Didion’s way of fusing herself with her subject matter — as she does in “The White Album,” disclosing a personal breakdown as if it were a symptom of the general malaise of the late 1960s — yielded some unforgettable writing.

  The great difference between Didion and Adler is that where Didion tended to see decline, atomization, and disorder in the culture (and in herself), Adler saw negotiation, transaction, and progress: a highly demanding theater of revolution rather than an actually violent one.
  As a result, Didion’s essays on the 1960s are now more thrilling to read but Adler’s are, without being any more or less factual, truer. They’re also more astonishing. Here she is writing about her generation’s experience in the introduction to her 1970 collection Toward a Radical Middle: “through the accident of our span of years, not too simple in the quality of our experience to know that things get better (The War’s end) and worse (the succeeding years) and better again (the great movement of non-violence sweeping out of the South to move the country briefly forward a bit) and of course, worse. But when a term like violence undergoes, in less than 30 years, a declension from Auschwitz to the Democratic convention in Chicago, from A-bombing even to napalm, the System has improved.
  Terribly, and with stumbling, but improved.” It’s breathtaking to see napalm cited as a sign of progress, but the virtue of Adler’s youthful anti-apocalyptic vision was its embrace of the long view.

  One difference between Didion and Adler is that Didion was, until she passed 80, consistently prolific. The books kept coming until her subject became the tragic disintegration of her family, the loss of her husband and daughter. There was time off to make money in Hollywood — the biggest payday came for the screenplay she and her husband John Gregory Dunne wrote for the 1976 remake of A Star Is Born — but it never derailed her literary output. Adler grew quieter over the decades and seemed mostly silent after her memoir about The New Yorker, Gone, and the controversies that attended it. But last year, to little fanfare, she published a long piece of bracing and beautifully turned reportage on the migrant crisis in Germany in Lapham’s Quarterly. Informed by her own family’s experience as refugees from Germany in the 1930s, Adler embeds at a shelter for migrants (German: Asyl) in the Bavarian suburb of Münsing. She observes the migrants as they take German lessons, do chores around the shelter, and form friendships. Some of them vanish from the scene without warning. Many have painful, even tragic, interactions with the state bureaucracy. Never shying away from the mundane, which in the lives of her subjects is shaped and constantly pierced by wretched forces of history, the essay oscillates between hopeful and heartbreaking tones, with the balance tipped toward the latter, and it concludes with a startling confession:

  When I was young, in the 1960s, I wrote an essay deploring the “apocalyptic sensibility,” which foresaw, in every essentially political disagreement, the end of the world. I still deplore it. But I now have something very like that sense. It has been obvious for decades, at least since the year 2000, that Western civilization, perhaps mankind itself, is in jeopardy from various problems and directions. People tend to adopt one or more of these problems as political causes: pollution, energy consumption, inequality, nuclear war, racism, terrorism, global warming. As though any or all of them were within our capacity to resolve and bore the prospect of human extinction. In Germany, it began to seem that another, highly imminent serious threat, intended as a humane solution, has become the attempt to absorb distant, often hostile, foreign multitudes into what had been fairly homogenous and stable cultures.

  The essay’s final scene is an encounter with an elderly German man, a farmer, Adler meets at a bus stop. She asks him about the influx of migrants and he calmly begins quoting from the Book of Revelation, implying that the apocalypse has already arrived. The threat of course isn’t the migrants themselves but the xenophobic right-wing politics that have returned, bringing the threat with them of the sort of state violence that made refugees of Adler’s family at the time of the Nazis. Here’s hoping, along with Adler, that her younger self was right.
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• The Washington Post
  https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/female-writers-and-thinkers-unfraid-to-speak-their-minds/2018/04/13/73b94e30-3841-11e8-9c0a-85d477d9a226_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.94fa1773c717
  Word count: 1518

  Female writers and thinkers unafraid to speak their minds

  Michelle Dean discusses the life and cultural contributions of Dorothy Parker along with Susan Sontag and Nora Ephron in “Sharp.” (Associated Press)
  By Robin Givhan April 13 Email the author
  Robin Givhan is a staff writer and The Washington Post's fashion critic, covering fashion as a business, as a cultural institution and as pure pleasure. A 2006 Pulitzer Prize winner for criticism, Givhan has also worked at Newsweek/Daily Beast, Vogue magazine and the Detroit Free Press.

  This book should be better. It should be racy and effervescent and captivating. It should be filled with eye-opening quotes that you can’t wait to share with your friends. Instead, a book that explores the professional lives of some of history’s most provocative essayists and theorists is slow and a bit plodding and even boring in patches, even though the women who are its subject are none of those things.

  In “Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion,” cultural critic Michelle Dean explores the work of a group of female writers who, over the course of their lives, were known for pointed and illuminating commentary. Sometimes they were in agreement on topics such as feminism — mostly in their refusal to swear allegiance to its strict tenets. At other times, they were vehemently at odds or riven by professional jealousy. But they were never dull.

  [Comedy writer Nell Scovell walked away from Letterman — and thrived]

  Some of them, such as Dorothy Parker and Nora Ephron, have had their work, over time, distilled to a famous phrase or a singular work. They have become pop-culture icons: Parker is recalled for the Algonquin Roundtable, Ephron for her sassy romantic comedies. Others, such as Susan Sontag and Pauline Kael, have been hailed as trailblazers. There are intellectuals such as Hannah Arendt and journalists Janet Malcolm, Renata Adler and Joan Didion. And rounding out Dean’s formidable group are critics Rebecca West, Mary McCarthy and Lillian Hellman.
  “Sharp,” by Michelle Dean (Grove Press)

  They are women who, in their prime, were determined not to be ignored, and they created a body of thoughtful criticism, tough analysis and tart essays. They refused to bite their tongues to make themselves more palatable to a world that expected women to be genteel. These women are smart, rebellious and witty.

  Who wouldn’t have wanted to have cocktails with Ephron, who mused about her breasts, questioned the sisterhood and turned her divorce into a novel that became a movie? Who wouldn’t have been invigorated by a little intellectual roughhousing with Arendt, who set a controversial standard for political theory?

  And yet, in “Sharp,” too many of these women feel muffled, their personalities fuzzy — never clearly delineated.

  Dean admits in her preface that she didn’t choose a diverse group of women, which probably explains why their professional lives — as well as their personal ones — often seem claustrophobic and why the narrative at times feels like it’s circling in on itself.

  “It was not so much that these women were always in the right. Nor that they are themselves a perfect demographic sample. These women came from similar backgrounds: white, and often Jewish, and middle-class,” Dean writes in her preface. “In a more perfect world, for example, a black writer like Zora Neale Hurston would have been more widely recognized as part of this cohort, but racism kept her writing at the margin of it.”

  While it’s true that Hurston’s work did not appear in the same East Coast journals as that of her contemporaries and she did not frequent the same parties, she was thinking and writing, nonetheless. And one wishes that Dean had taken more than a cursory glance at what Hurston had to say, or perhaps added someone like Alice Walker, Toni Morrison or Roxane Gay to her list of sharp-tongued writers. Such an addition might have made this book better.

  But it would not have remedied what makes “Sharp” disappointing. Too much time is given to diagramming the love lives of these women and the ways in which their intimate relationships held them back or propelled them forward. “Over the next few months, [Parker] ran into Hemingway more than once on the Continent, in France as well as in Hemingway’s beloved Spain. And she clearly began to grate on Hemingway’s nerves. Exactly what happened on that ship, and later in Spain and France as Parker and Hemingway met and talked, is lost.”

  Dean spends a lot of time lamenting these “lost” moments, but really, they don’t seem like details worth mourning.

  “Sharp” is intermittently compelling, most notably when it settles into the story of one of these singular women and spends time not just recounting her background, but giving it context and bringing it to life. It’s at its best when it focuses on what made these women significant: their words.

  It’s interesting to hear about the intellectual firepower that Arendt brought to political theory, and the ways in which her devotion to a theoretical and a certain misguided humanism led her into treacherous territory with a late-1950s argument against school desegregation:

  “To understand the nature of Arendt’s objection to school desegregation, you must also understand that by 1959, her political theory took a tripartite view of the world. At the top was politics, in the middle was society, and at bottom was the private sphere. In the political sphere, she conceded, it was not only acceptable but imperative to legislate against discrimination. But Arendt was convinced that the private sphere needed to be protected at all costs from any kind of government intrusion. She was equally certain that the social world should be left relatively alone by the government, so that people could manage their own links and associations with each other.”

  The chapter about Kael is especially engaging in that it tells the story of a writer who did not come into her own, with all the attendant professional and financial stability, until she was nearly 50. And perhaps because Kael’s style of writing is far more direct and unencumbered than, say, Arendt’s, her words give “Sharp” a needed jolt of light energy.

  So many of these writers seem to have honed their skills under the indulgent gaze of the editor William Shawn at the New Yorker, at a time when Kael could, in 1967, publish a 7,000-word essay on the film “Bonnie and Clyde.” It’s easy to make an argument that devoting so many words to the consideration of a pop film would rightfully not be tolerated today. But it is also true that what Kael had to say about it was fascinating because of what the film said about American culture. And in being willing to dissect a film with such thought and in being willing to publish her words, Kael and the New Yorker helped to transform the way in which all of us consume cinema.

  [Four women who ‘changed our world’]

  Malcolm is the last of the writers Dean considers — another New Yorker journalist. But a paragraph from a 1970 essay Malcolm had published in the New Republic has striking resonance today.

  “In any case, a woman who chooses to put her baby in someone else’s care so she can pursue a career shouldn’t be hypocritical about her decision and tell herself that she is doing it for the sake of the child. She is doing it for herself. She may be doing the right thing — selfish decisions are often the best decisions — but she ought to see what she is doing and be willing to pay the price in affection that parental neglect often exacts.”

  Nearly 50 years after Malcolm wrote that, there is still a lot to chew over in that paragraph.

  That female writers could now follow similar routes to prominence is questionable. Compared with today, it seemed that they had so many more outlets not only willing to publish their musings but also to give them the time to sort things out. And it remains unsettlingly true that women of color largely remain at the margin of the intellectual dialogue in whatever form it exists.

  Still, “Sharp” is buoyed by its subjects. These women broke through. And they offered trenchant observations and analyses that remain relevant and instructive.
  Sharp
  The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion

  By Michelle Dean

  Grove. 362 pp. $26
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  Comments
  Robin Givhan is a staff writer and The Washington Post's fashion critic, covering fashion as a business, as a cultural institution and as pure pleasure. A 2006 Pulitzer Prize winner for criticism, Givhan has also worked at Newsweek/Daily Beast, Vogue magazine and the Detroit Free Press.

• The Cut
  https://www.thecut.com/2018/04/interview-roxane-gay-and-michelle-dean-on-sharp.html
  Word count: 2325

  QUOTED: "What I’d like readers to take from the book is something a little broader, though: the sense that argument can actually be joyful. And it can be generative, in that it can actually give us energy instead of tamping us down. Maybe it’s that I marinate on Twitter too much, but I think the internet has allowed us to forget that."

  Argument Can Actually Be Joyful’: Women, Critics, and What It Means to Be Sharp
  By
  Roxane Gay
  Photo: Jay Grabiec/John Midgely

  Michelle Dean is a sharp writer who, in her first book, Sharp, tackles ten women, cultural critics from the 20th century, who have also been called “sharp” over the course of their careers. With lively, eloquent prose she writes about Dorothy Parker, Rebecca West, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Pauline Kael, Joan Didion, Nora Ephron, Renata Adler, and Janet Malcolm — and how these women thrived in a time when criticism was, and in many ways still is, considered the domain of men. “That these women achieved what they did in the 20th century only makes them more remarkable,” Dean writes. “They came up in a world that was not eager to hear women’s opinions about anything.”

  I had the chance to speak with Dean via email about the nature of criticism, what it’s like being a woman critic, and the burden of expectations.

  How did you come to writing? What has your career trajectory looked like?

  I both really wanted to be a writer and feel like I fell ass-backwards into it. I had all these drafts on my hard drive, but I didn’t have the faintest idea of how one went about writing as a mode of earning a living. So instead I was a lawyer for about five years, at a big law firm, and while I was there I was desperately bored, and started commenting too much on Jezebel. And it kind of kept going from there, in that I started to meet writers and editors (the Jezebel comments section circa 2008 was lousy with them) and that led to blogs and the blogs led on to longer essays and now, well, here I am.

  Why did you want to write Sharp? What do you want readers to take from the book?

  I was interested in the position of women in criticism back in 2013, when there was a lot of talk about byline counts and VIDA studies. And the argument was that there hadn’t been so many women critics because of, well, patriarchy. I wanted to get more specifics than I had — I was only nominally familiar with some of the writers in Sharp — so I went looking for these women who did manage to break through the largely male-dominated profession. And then realized they had all sorts of links to each other I wanted to explore.

  What I’d like readers to take from the book is something a little broader, though: the sense that argument can actually be joyful. And it can be generative, in that it can actually give us energy instead of tamping us down. Maybe it’s that I marinate on Twitter too much, but I think the internet has allowed us to forget that.

  How do you define good criticism and bad criticism?

  I tend to judge a piece of criticism by how smart I find the argument. This, I know, is not how everyone does it. I don’t mean, how much I agree with it, exactly, but more: how much does this open up the subject at hand? Does it show me things about it I didn’t already know? I like debate and argument, so I’m usually all right with disagreement, and I’m even all right if the critic doesn’t come to a clear thumbs up or thumbs down. But I need the disagreement to have some kind of line I can follow on the map. I like following an interesting mind along it.

  Bad criticism recites rote arguments. The shame of rote arguments isn’t just that they’re clichés, though they are, but that they tend to hide from us why a critic is actually thinking what they’re thinking. In which case there’s no point in reading the review at all. I don’t care about the bare fact that anyone liked or didn’t like a book or movie; they can only interest me in that bare fact by writing an intelligent review.

  The subtitle of Sharp is The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion. What common themes do you see in the opinions of the women you profile in this book? How did you decide which women to include?

  Well, they didn’t have a ton in common, content-wise, other than the adoption of a tone of ironic distance — but they often enough turned their critical sights on each other.

  I don’t feel I picked these women so much as they picked themselves, or maybe I mean that American culture picked them: they tended to become famous critics in this country almost by accident. There was usually something of the Emperor and his lack of clothes in their rise, like they called something out that no one was willing to say before they did, and after that, they were famously caustic. And then these women all got defined in terms of each other, Susan Sontag greeted as the next Mary McCarthy, Dorothy Parker getting invoked all over the place. This was what connected them: how enmeshed their personal and professional lives became.

  This approach had its limitations. For example, it meant that I didn’t cover everyone who was writing excellent or even influential critical work in the 20th century. Elizabeth Hardwick, Adrienne Rich, even Virginia Woolf: They’re not included. And then of course, because American literary and intellectual circles were mostly segregated, and white newspapers tended not to publish the work of women of color until quite late in the game, it means that this particular cadre was white. I put Zora Neale Hurston in the book to try to make sure, to paraphrase her a bit, that the whiteness of this corner of history was cast in sharp relief for the reader — that they realized there was a whole world of writing that wasn’t being included in this conversation about exceptional women.

  But it was that position — of being greeted by the wider culture as some kind of “exceptional woman” — and then having to navigate both male and female expectations about that in the 20th century, before third-wave feminism, that the book was about. Because it’s a tricky wicket. People might say they love you and your work but when and if they turned on you — and it was usually when — the reaction could be very negative, and very difficult to process.

  How do you deal with the expectations people have of you?

  I’m lucky in that there aren’t too many of them, yet. I’m not really the kind of writer people project things onto, at least not yet. For me the trouble is usually the expectations I have for myself.

  My friend Mark O’Connell wrote once about this occupational hazard critics have, that you’re so analytical you’re followed around by an “inner critic.” He said that after a while writing criticism, he’d “begun to detect a sort of hypertrophic enlargement of the part of my brain that looks at what the other parts are doing or planning to do and says, ‘Sorry, chief, but that’s not going to cut it.’” It is fair to say that I’m living that right now, where I tend to look at everything I do and see everything that might be wrong with it, and get paralyzed.

  What kinds of research did you do to write about these women? Do you enjoy research as part of your writing process?

  Oh, I pulled newspaper files, I went to archives. I developed a really insane library of everything these women had written and been written about them in my Dropbox, a kind of crazy amount of documentation, only half of which comes into the book at all.

  I do love research. Though toward the end of the process I started to notice I was hiding behind the research. I had thoroughly fetishized it, and began to let the research become a means of procrastination from the risks of writing: If only I found another cache of newspaper writing, kept thinking, or some other body of documents, maybe eventually I’d come to feel like I’d written the best book I could. But eventually you have to actually just let the book be sort of unfinished, and hope it can struggle to its legs on its own.

  When writing about Mary McCarthy, you describe an omnibus critique she wrote for The Nation about the state of criticism in her time. If you were to write such an omnibus critique, what would you tackle and why?

  It’s funny. The state of criticism no longer seems about the quality, or lack thereof, of the critics in the landscape. It seems you always get something of a mixed bag in that regard — critics writing manifestoes about the state of criticism goes back eons, and the verdict is always that things are dire, that criticism has gone soft, whatever.
  It just seems in the nature of critics that when we look around at each other, we’ll find each other wanting.

  But this issue of the distortion of social media of our space to argue with each other, as friends, as feminists, as a country or a world: that to me seems like a truly new issue and one we could all stand to talk about a little more. I don’t think it’s as simple as social media making us nicer or meaner, but it does feel like it’s made us all more dishonest in an incremental way — I don’t think people mean to be so performative on social media, but it kind of creeps up on you. You start opining on something to pass the time, and very quickly you realize you are grandstanding without even meaning to. And then people write thinkpieces about the state of the culture based on your tweets. Which all starts to get very reactive, very fast.

  What is it like being a woman critic today? How have things changed since the 1990s? What remains the same?

  Well, we are living in an explosion of women in criticism, and in a sense an explosion of criticism more generally. And I mean “explosion” in more than just the sense that the field is growing. Criticism is no longer the somewhat rarified activity that people only do in edited outlets; now there are, as you know, Goodreads critics. People always said, you know, “everyone’s a critic,” but now that is literally true.

  On the one hand that makes things more democratic: There are more women weighing in on more things than ever before. But it also means there’s a ton of critical noise, about everything.
  And some of that noise comes from people who are, themselves, complaining about the proliferation of say, feminist criticism. And some of it comes from trolls who among other things are this enormous, overwhelming distraction from the work we have to do.

  Who are some of your favorite contemporary critics?

  There are quite a lot and many are women. Laura Miller, Parul Sehgal, Ruth Franklin, Doreen St. Felix, Emily Nussbaum.

  You’ve been developing a TV show over the last year. What has working in television been like? What are you looking to do in that field?

  I never set out to work in television — like most things in my writing life, it felt like it happened by accident — but I’ve known for quite some time that I couldn’t make enough money in journalism and criticism to live, particularly not the kind I do either when I start reporting a longform story, which are taking on average eight months to a year to complete. If I can allow myself a moment of self-aggrandizement, Dorothy Parker, Joan Didion and Nora Ephron all took off for Hollywood for roughly the same reason: money.

  But the first medium I wrote about critically was television, for Bitch and the American Prospect eons ago. And I still do, from time to time. So I’ve thought a lot about where television is and what I wish I was seeing on it. Which is something like more grounded work. It’s impolitic for someone of my age and political preoccupations, but I loved all those men-run shows from the early aughts, The Sopranos and The Wire and Deadwood and Six Feet Under. In the streaming universe there’s still room for that idiosyncratic and wild but very grounded, very humanistic work. I’m hoping to do that, both with what I’m working on now and a few other projects I’m starting to float.

  We’ll see how it goes. Hollywood is so fickle, but it’s been interesting living out here, where people at least make a big show of liking you.
  A refreshing change from New York publishing, in my experience.
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• Jstor Daily
  https://daily.jstor.org/michelle-dean-a-sharp-look-at-criticism-by-women/
  Word count: 3499

  Michelle Dean: A Sharp Look at Criticism by Women
  Michelle Dean
  Author Michelle Dean
  Grove Atlantic

  How are cultural conversations shaped and who has the power to shape them? In her new book Sharp: The Women Who Made An Art of Having An Opinion, Michelle Dean offers ten enlightening portraits of female writers and critics—from Susan Sontag to Joan Didion to Janet Malcolm—who have profoundly impacted the intellectual history of the 20th century, making the case that even when they lacked the same cultural capital, these women rivaled the men around them.

  As the 2017 recipient of the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle and contributor to the Guardian, the New Yorker, the Nation, and other publications, Dean is well-poised to tackle the subject. Sharp is a compelling investigation of the intellectual careers of these women and how their professional relationships are interwoven. “The book is an exploration of what happens when the world confers exceptional status on you,” she told me.

  A native Canadian, Dean currently lives in Los Angeles. I met up with her at a coffee shop there to discuss obstacles these women faced in being taken seriously as intellectuals, the infighting among some of them, and the importance of being an outsider, among other topics. Here is our conversation, edited for length and clarity.

  Hope Reese: Joan Didion once claimed that “certain doors of perception are more open to women.” What do you think?

  Michelle Dean: It is true. I don’t think it’s an innate quality. It’s a result of women’s social position—which is changing, especially in cultural criticism, a field now dominated by women in a way it wasn’t even five years ago. Outsiders, in general, know something about a culture that insiders just don’t know. An observer is, by definition, an outsider, not a participant. There’s certainly also realms of experience that women know about more than men.

  It can cut both ways. In Didion’s case, she happened to be small and frail-looking, and people mistook that for a pushover, or someone they could boss around. She was, obviously, not that. But she was able to use that to her advantage.

  On the subject of physical appearance and manners—how did that influence how these women were perceived?

  In general, their insights were treated as more trivial and less systematic. Lionel Trilling gets to write about freedom. And when Mary McCarthy writes about it, Isaiah Berlin is very dismissive, saying, “Oh, she was better at the relations between people”—as though that is separable from the concept of, say, freedom, or democracy. To a certain extent, some of them were able to use that to carve out their own voices, rather than being in the general din of young men trying to compete with the five slots in the Partisan Review every season. It helped, but it also hindered.

  Sontag—I don’t think she was as obsessed with her appearance as commentators tend to say—but she was able to use that to have her voice heard. I sense she had an ambivalent relationship in having to do that, but it helped. An outsider, or a minority, or disempowered status can be useful. James Baldwin said the same thing about being black. So does Ta-Nehisi Coates.

  About race—these women in the collection are mostly white. How does race matter in cultural criticism?

  It matters. They’re also mostly Jewish. At the time they were writing, that was more of a restriction than it seems to be now. It’s not an accident that they were mostly Jewish—it helped accelerate their sense of outsider-ness. The concomitant of that is that black women writers are even more outside. Privy to even further insights. Sharp is an argument for outsider epistemology—and there’s more spaces to go. That’s one of the ways that we, as women critics and intellectuals, can pay it forward. The insight we should derive from the advances of these largely white women is that we do better as an intellectual or critical culture when we have more perspectives at the table.

  “To me, seriousness is a quality of engagement, not a choice of subject matter or product of learning.”

  Zora Neale Hurston is in the book largely as a piece of contradiction, to point out that although these women had access to certain insights and perspectives because of their outsider status, there were limitations. Their status as exceptional women who were invited to the table of whatever male writer intellectuals and critics happened to be doing was, in part, dependent on white privilege. It limited their perspective when Hannah Arendt came out against school desegregation—which is this huge blight on her career. You can see, in the exchanges she had with black writers about that, how few black people were in her circle, and how little she had chosen to incorporate their perspectives in her work. The upside of that was that she seemed to come to understand that. But not until after she had written a polemic.

  You write about the divisions in second wave feminism. What do the divisions in feminism look like today? We have critics like Roxane Gay who feel that black women are left out of mainstream feminism, for instance.

  There are still cleavages in feminism, and the one thing that Sharp led me to was the conclusion that we need to have more of a space for fighting in feminism. There is tons of fighting in feminism, and I have lots of feelings about how vicious the fighting gets. I think it’s partly because of ways women are socialized to have conflict, partly because of this strange white pathology about always having to demand everyone else’s solidarity without doing any work for it. But we could do better at organizing those conflicts, or seeing them as instructive, or generative, able to actually build out feminism rather than destroy it from within, which is the way they’re typically characterized. If we had more of a priority or value placed on argument in feminism—as in, it’s good for us to sit and hash these things out—I think we would end up with a better and more inclusive feminism for it.

  A lot of the pushback from women of color who are feminists has been about people being afraid that conflict would somehow destroy us. The pathology of white femininity is that any kind of criticism is destructive.

  Are there any of the ten women you wish you were able to learn more about?

  To an extent, both Janet Malcolm and Renata Adler have not been written about enough for me to have an outside perspective beyond what I know from reading the documents and talking to them. And Nora Ephron—I wish we knew more about her mother. The mother is the whole key of Nora Ephron. And her father—I think nobody reads that book he wrote. It was such a revealing book, but not in the way he thinks it is. The tone is strange; it’s forced joviality. You get the impression that the plays they wrote, to the extent they’re entertaining, were about the mother. I would love to do a movie of Phoebe Ephron’s life. I think her life was fascinating; there was no reason for her to become what she did.

  You write about Nora Ephron—do you think she’s recognized for her journalism, or has that been overlooked in light of her success as a screenwriter?

  Sometimes people ask me what the seed of the book is, and it’s actually difficult to answer. But I think I’ve now traced it to first reading Nora’s journalism and thinking “this is really good, and not what I thought it was going to be.” It was very serious. I have always liked When Harry Met Sally, but I didn’t expect this. I do think she has been under-appreciated. I also think Janet Malcolm has been under-appreciated.

  You recently tweeted: “I should write a whole separate thinkpiece on the appallingly large number of well-read men I have encountered on this book journey who breezily say, ‘I’ve never actually read Janet Malcolm.’”

  It’s strange because I’m talking about men who know she’s famous, and they know who I mean, but they have never read her. She somehow has this reputation for having destroyed the honor of the profession in The Journalist and the Murderer—and that keeps coming up. Pauline Kael had the same thing with male film critics, where they felt she attacked their honor. The target often gets misidentified that way. I do think Janet has been really undersung. And I think Pauline has been undersung. Her comfort with not being consistent all the time is not all that different from Hannah Arendt. I know there will be certain precincts of NY that will think “Why is Hannah Arendt in this book? She’s much more serious than these other ladies.”

  This is the problem: defining some things as serious and some things as not. To me, seriousness is a quality of engagement, not a choice of subject matter or product of learning.

  Pauline Kael once wrote that her approach to criticism was “eclecticism.” What is your approach?

  I am a bit like Kael in that I’m not very consistent. I tend to respond to the thing that is in front of me. I’m not really developing a system—and I think that’s the way it should be. My favorite Kael piece is Circles and Squares because that’s basically what she’s taking on: this attempt to systematize film criticism. I don’t like that it creates a barrier for entry into what I will broadly call “the appreciation of art”—that you’re supposed to know these things, know these systems in order to comment on something. That also comes from the general chip on my shoulder about not having a pedigree, not coming from a background of these people of coming from New York, went to Bard, studied with the writers of the New York Review of Books and proceeded to get an internship at the New York Review of Books, and then became critics, basically because they got that job.

  I related to Kael’s [tough background]. Not feeling like it was easy for her to break in, in spite of considerable talent. People can get really down on people who display professional resentment openly, but I find it kind of beautiful in her.

  You write that Didion, Sontag, and Kael were sometimes grouped together because of their California roots. Did they have a more difficult time being taken seriously than their East Coast peers?

  Well, Didion had a very blessed career, so it’s hard to argue she had a rough time. I don’t think she earned enough money, and that was a problem for her. I love the letter where Howard B. Weeks accuses her of being a lifelong New Yorker. To a certain extent, the California thing helped inform the outsider perspective. Certainly Didion wielded it that way. Being from Sacramento was, for her, about being from somewhere that was not like everywhere else. It’s an interesting question. Sontag was immediately like, “I’m not really from California.” It’s amazing she made it out here this long. Apparently she was in line at the University of Chicago near Mike Nichols and Elaine May, and so thrilled to get to join the world she had longed to join for so long.

  What does it mean for writers and critics to live in New York today? Is there an advantage?

  None of these women ever felt that they were rich, or that they achieved real money-making status in magazine journalism. There tends to be a bit of a fiction that, in the past, you could make scads of money. They were moving around. But now, the underpinning of publishing is really coming off the wheels—thank you, Facebook! It’s quite funny to watch journalism turn to Facebook these last few weeks. It’s my theory, although I will not admit to having heard this, that every journalist hates Facebook, because we know that it basically killed us. So now that there’s something to get them for, it’s exciting! Because of that, the center of gravity has shifted to California a bit. Suddenly, there are a lot of literary novelists who are writing their own screenplays, their own pilot scripts. Because there’s an explosion of demand for content in California —which is one of the reasons I’m here—it’s really interesting. There’s still the romance of moving to New York, but it’s increasingly a romance that got co-opted by the upper-middle class.

  New York as a center of gravity has changed, and will continue to change. I have just realized how many of my friends have actually left New York.

  You had to make tough choices about which women to include in the book and who to leave out. Why wasn’t Ellen Willis included?

  Ellen Willis is more aligned with feminism than any of the women in the book. Adrienne Rich also could’ve gone here but was also more aligned with feminism. It seems to me that the feminists were the people who joined up with the movement and were directly advocating on behalf of the movement did belong here at a certain point. And it was not because they weren’t as talented or anything like that. It was because the world responded to them differently.

  People have said, “Well, Nora Ephron was pretty aligned with feminism.” She was, and she wasn’t. She wrote pretty critically about it. Most of these women, except for Hannah Arendt, eventually came around to calling themselves feminists. But the thing that they found more difficult were movement politics. When you fancy yourself an individual, it can be a little bit hard to deal with that. Those women just belong in a different book.

  Some of these women got their start in women’s magazines. What role did that play in their career? Is there a parallel today?

  Well, I love the Parker example of someone who started in women’s magazines. Especially because a couple years ago, people were really into rehabilitating women’s magazines from basically being glorified catalogues. I’m not totally against that trend, but there was also a little bit too much argument against the trivializing of the fashion. Fashion commentary in those magazines is not separable from the business of fashion, which is where I think the problem hits.

  But women’s magazines have been a reliable source of money for people. Most of the women in my book either didn’t aspire to write for women’s magazines or eventually bit the hand that fed them, which is not always the thing you want to do. I don’t want to sound like I’m against everything that’s ever been published in a women’s magazine, but I think we could have a sense of humor about how, sometimes, it is trivializing.

  Nora Ephron once said that “sisterhood is difficult.” Can you describe the infighting between some of these women?

  I think a lot about the Sontag-McCarthy thing because they were the two that people thought of as constantly in conflict—but I’m not sure that these stories about Mary McCarthy saying, “Oh, you’re the new me,” actually happened. Those stories get told over and over, but I can’t source them well. They’re sort of rumors, usually repeated by men. Men like cat fights, so they will find them even when they don’t exist. It seems obvious that the relationship between McCarthy and Sontag was awkward. Especially because Sontag obviously considered herself a way more serious and better writer, which is one of her great faults. But I don’t know that it ever expressed itself as outright war and rivalry.

  “Most things are worthy of critical time and attention, but that doesn’t mean that every kind of critical attention is worthy.”

  Between [Renata] Adler and Kael—Adler often says that she wrote the Kael thing in part because when she was young, that’s how you made your name. She had made her career early on by going after Norman Mailer in a pretty effective fashion. And she uses all the same techniques in The Perils of Pauline. I think she’s being genuine when she says that she really just was writing what she thought of as a critique. I think she thought she had played a fair game.

  You critiqued Rebecca Solnit’s essay collection in The Guardian last year. Is it difficult for you to be critical of other women writers who you mostly agree with and respect?

  It is, especially because criticism is so destructive. That one was tough because I really do love a lot of Solnit’s work and I’ve had more trouble with it in the last few years. For me, it’s not a political thing—it’s more knowing how it’s likely to be received.

  I come from an analytical background. I was a lawyer before I was a writer. For me, all arguments are fair game and that doesn’t seem to be the case sometimes within the sphere of writers.

  With cable TV, Netflix, and a plethora of other media, what material do you think of as worth a critic’s time and attention? Is everything fair game?

  I do think everything is fair game. It’s horrible to write only about things that you dislike and it’s horrible to write only about things that you like. Most things are worthy of critical time and attention, but that doesn’t mean that every kind of critical attention is worthy. Say Hollywood superhero movies—they become such commercial products that, to a certain extent, I find attributing political meaning to them is frustrating.

  I’m not talking about Black Panther. But Captain America—I don’t know why I’m reading political think pieces about Captain America. It was made in an advertiser’s lab. I don’t see the point. We’re inundated with criticism at the moment because the internet is basically the ideal medium for criticism from anyone and everyone. That means that people are writing about all sorts of things they don’t need to write about.

  Who is your favorite woman intellectual today?

  It’s obviously Janet Malcolm. It’s tricky because the kind of writing that these women did isn’t really published anymore. There are certain writers like Jacqueline Rose I love to read. And in the New York Review Books, Zadie Smith. I feel like her essays—and this is not meant to be an insult—are exercises in congeniality. A level of congeniality I wish I could possibly replicate. I think of Zoe Heller as being pretty great. A lot of the intellectuals have retreated into the academy. Nancy Fraser is important to me, even though she doesn’t really come up in this context.

  It’s tough because we don’t live in an age that values intellectuals in any significant way. And I’ve mostly avoided judging the younger set of women writers, because it’s very hard to evaluate your contemporaries in real-time.
  JSTOR Citations
  The Insidious Ethic of Conscience

  By: Joan Didion

  The American Scholar, Vol. 34, No. 4 (Autumn, 1965), pp. 625-627

  The Phi Beta Kappa Society
  An Argument about Beauty

  By: Susan Sontag

  Daedalus, Vol. 134, No. 4, 50 Years (Fall, 2005), pp. 208-213

  The MIT Press on behalf of American Academy of Arts & Sciences
  Review: Unreality Television

  By: Michelle Dean

  The Women's Review of Books, Vol. 28, No. 3 (May / June 2011), pp. 22-23

  Old City Publishing, Inc.
  On Photography, Writing, and Aircraft Carriers

  By: Geoff Dyer and Janet Malcolm

  Aperture, No. 217, Lit. (Winter 2014), pp. 26-33

  Aperture Foundation, Inc.

• Long Reads
  https://longreads.com/2018/04/04/sharp-women-writers-an-interview-with-michelle-dean/
  Word count: 4588

  Sharp Women Writers: An Interview With Michelle Dean

  On Didion, Arendt, Malcolm, Ephron and other women writers who made an art of having an opinion.
  Illustration by Katie Kosma
  This story was funded by Longreads Members
  Join and help support great storytelling

  Natalie Daher | Longreads | April 2018 | 15 minutes (4,014 words)

  The subjects of cultural critic Michelle Dean’s new book Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion — including Dorothy Parker, Janet Malcolm, Joan Didion and Nora Ephron — have appeared in Dean’s writing and interviews again and again over the years. It’s not difficult to see how Dean would develop a fascination with opinionated women — she is one herself. Lawyer-turned-crime reporter, literary critic, and Gawker alumnus, Michelle Dean’s has had her own “sharp” opinions on topics ranging from fashion to politics, from #MeToo to the Amityville Horror.

  The book is more than just a series of biographical sketches. Dean is fascinated by the connections between these literary women — their real-life relationships, their debates, and the ways they were pitted against each other in a male-dominated field.

  We spoke by phone between New York and Los Angeles and discussed writing about famous writers, the media, editors, and feminism.

  * * *

  You started your career as a lawyer, then you transitioned into journalism. You’ve written about crime, law, women, books — how did those experiences prepare you to write this first book?

  Well, it’s funny, right, because by the time you actually publish a book, you’re somewhat beyond it. The crime stuff came in as I was finishing the book.

  I don’t come from a particularly literary background. I only came to think about literary life relatively late. I was an undergraduate debater, which is a deeply nerdy and embarrassing thing to admit, but also really formative for me. I ended up in law school by a circuitous route.
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  I think you can see a lot of that spirit in the book, because there’s one level on which the book is just an argument for debate, or for spirited argument, which is something that you’d think the world doesn’t lack right now. Except that a lot of it isn’t reasoned, or witty, or eloquent, or perceptive. It’s just yelling all the time. Lawyering is thinking and reasoning by principle. In that sense, it ties into sharpness pretty easily.

  I have had a really strange professional trajectory, and so it’s hard to exactly trace what the roots of all these things are. When I started writing more seriously, which I also did sort of accidentally, I felt like I had all this catching up to do. I started reading a lot of Janet Malcolm. I’d done a bit of work on Hannah Arendt in school. Basically, reading to catch up — to try and be more well-versed in the tradition [in which] I was writing — is what led to “Sharp.”

  Many of the women you’ve written about have been reduced to caricatures in some ways. Didion is on T-shirts now. What were some of the challenges in presenting their stories in new ways?

  Well, it depends on who you’re talking about, because some of them have biographies, and some of them do not. Ephron had died not too long before I had started this project, [and] there is now a biography of Nora Ephron.

  From my perspective, the thing that hadn’t been written about is some of the connections between these people that I was seeing through the biographies that did exist, or when I started to pull up press clips out of idle curiosity. I saw them referring to each other, being in arguments with each other. Those things are interesting, and they weren’t being talked about. I didn’t really worry too much about whether I had a fresh take, exactly.

  If we’re talking Didion, I see her a little differently than most people do. The first stuff that I read of hers was actually the political essays. I didn’t come to Didion through her personal essay stuff. I don’t mean to denigrate that work but it’s mostly not what spoke to me. The caricature of Didion that you’re talking about has come mostly out of the personal essay work, and people have responded to that, right? She’s often characterized as solely a personal essayist, and I don’t know that that’s even close to true. In that sense, I knew that my vision was slightly different.

  The thing that hadn’t been written about… is some of the connections between these people… I saw them referring to each other, being in arguments with each other.

  I’d run into Ephron’s journalism earlier. I’m not even sure how I first came across Crazy Salad, but I had been aware of it for quite some time, and how actually serious it was. It wasn’t the caricature of Nora Ephron that I had grown up with, which was director of romantic comedies, some of which were better than others. But I was aware that she had this brilliant body of work that people didn’t talk quite as much about, at the time. Certainly some of the people, like Janet Malcolm and Renata Adler, had not necessarily been written about in the career overview kind of way.

  I think the challenge is: do you do the research? Do you do the work? Do you not just write about part of a writer’s life in total isolation from anything else they may have done? Because whenever people start to write essays — I guess Didion is just the obvious example, about how privileged she is and how she’s not in touch with anything but herself — I just wonder if people didn’t read the journalism, if they’re not aware that it exists.

  I’m not saying that my take is only mine. In general, the thing you learn when you write a lot of nonfiction is that it’s not that hard to say something different if you actually do the research, because it always reveals things that people aren’t totally aware of and that aren’t captured.

  Yeah, the book put the subjects in conversation with one another in a way that I hadn’t seen before. You were also contextualizing their work and how they were viewed at the time.

  Well, the reception of their work is one of the narrative threads of the book. The reception was maybe some of the funnest stuff, because you’d find things like people saying Susan Sontag is “a very bright girl,” or something like that.

  The way that people casually, and in a sexist way of course, dismiss these women was just kind of a delight to find. Even now if you look at something like Norman Mailer trashing “The Group” in the New York Review of Books, there’s something kind of funny about how upset he is about it. I don’t even think it’s Mary’s best book myself, but there’s something amusing about the occasional hysteria that this [book] would drum up. I say that worrying that I’m trivializing the frustration that caused [her]. I don’t mean to do that but it’s kind of — you have to laugh or else you cry.

  After you research the critical history of anything, you start to have a sense of humor about the value of a review that comes out when a book is initially released. You start to realize how wildly out of sync [contemporary reviewers tend to be] with whatever later opinion of the book developed after people had the chance to digest it and think about it.

  The reception adds an element of absurdity to the whole thing, because no matter what, even when [reviewers] were trying to praise these women, sometimes the language is crazy. There’s a Carolyn Heilbrun piece about Susan Sontag that cracks me up every time I read it. It’s meant to be totally complimentary. Carolyn Heilbrun was no slouch herself intellectually or as a writer, but it’s just that she got in front of Sontag and thought, “I’m in love with this woman,” and then wrote this completely crazy profile where she was like, “There’s no point in my even quoting her words because she’s so amazing.”

  Another area that you touch on is that when these women critique media or journalism, of course everybody piles on, especially men.

  Malcolm is the best example of that. She writes The Journalist and the Murderer, and it wasn’t only men, but it was definitely a lot of men. I did interview her, and I remember I asked her, did she think her thesis was more controversial just because it was advanced by a woman? And she said, yes, she did think that. There’s something about their tone and about the position that they occupied within — I don’t know — journalism or intellectualism or any of these places, that just really pissed men off in a way that we can now sort of laugh at a little bit.

  In Malcolm’s case for example, it’s like she had maligned male honor in some way with the first line* of The Journalist and the Murderer, and it was confusing. It’s confusing to read now, especially because in subsequent eras, it’s been largely agreed that Malcolm is right. There could be some argument about whether in all cases there’s the same element of coercion and manipulation as there was in the case that she described, but I think everybody has a sense now that there’s something at the heart of journalism that is about manipulating the subject. It’s just interesting because it did feel like men were very invested [in] insisting this was an honorable profession.

  Many of the women — and you wrote this too — wanted to be public figures, even if it didn’t happen for them until their 40s. They wanted a seat at the table and they went after it. Society didn’t like that, still doesn’t really like it now. There’s just this complexity over ego, with women owning their ego. You have to have some degree of ego if you’re going to insert your opinion into the world.

  One of the reasons it took me so long in my life to actually become a writer is I assumed that writing was a thing that you were born with, an innate quality, that you had this innate confidence to do. Until I was in my late 20s, I didn’t know anybody who made a living as a writer. It was something completely beyond my imagination.

  One of the themes of the book is that the confidence is sometimes opposed. You think about Mary McCarthy asking a friend of hers, “Do you like the The Group?” Knowing that [the friend is] probably going to say “no,” she asks it anyway. There’s something very relatable to me about that.

  The reception was maybe some of the funnest stuff, because you’d find things like people saying Susan Sontag is “a very bright girl.”

  I think there were exceptions, like I do think Hannah Arendt really was actually pretty confident in her opinion, and Nora Ephron was too in many ways, but for other people it took time and practice and also it kind of — [it was] much more difficult to maintain off [the page].

  I don’t know that I have an answer about how they managed that confidence. Basically the book is about the process of learning to claim your authority, and how it happens. The truth is that there are setbacks in it. I feel like these are things that are useful for us to know — that it’s not just a one-way street of you’re either born confident or you’re not.

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  You said that it took you awhile to realize that you could make a living as a writer, and you addressed some realistic aspects of working as a writer in the book. You mentioned various women’s financial situations and the income that would come in (or not). You also mentioned their romantic relationships or friendships and marriage.

  It’s a side issue that’s sort of an interest to me. It’s interesting because you often have the conversation with contemporary writers where they believe that in the past, people made a great living as a writer, or a possible middle-class living. I’m not sure that it was ever true. It was sort of true with the New Yorker for awhile, under William Shawn, but that was only if you opted into the drawing system, and only if you were on staff. Otherwise, everybody was always in this position of uncertainty.

  Nearly everybody in the book at some point is like, “I can’t make money off of magazines. I’ve got to go do something else. I’ve got to get a teaching job. I’ve got to get married. I have to go to Hollywood.” It was mostly just to point out the parallels. There’s a parallel between Ephron and Parker in that sense. There’s a parallel [between] Didion and Parker too in that sense of — eventually just deciding I can’t make enough money in magazines no matter how brilliant people think I am.

  Almost all of these women had [something] to overcome in their background in terms of the expectation to make a life as an artist or as a writer. Not one of them really inherited the status. I guess Ephron sort of did, but it was different. It’s just complicated. I don’t have a grand theory of how it’s all going to work, or how it’s all worked, but [on the other hand] it is true that Parker in the 1920s was getting paid certain fees that would be recognizable to us today, which is scary. [laughs] I mean what do you do?

  You also note where these women were publishing their work and how that affected what they were able to say. I thought about a piece that you had written at Gawker many years ago about Bustle when it first was coming up.

  Oh my gosh I don’t even remember this piece but go ahead and tell me about it.

  You had written about how [Bustle] was driven by profit and traffic with the idea that women could be writing there, but that this whole model could actually be stripping women of an ability to have a voice. You’ve also talked in that piece about the importance of editors. I was wondering how you think a woman today might make career choices based on having or developing a voice and an opinion.

  One of the interesting things that happened early in my career is I started working as an assistant to this New Yorker writer named D. T. Max, and hopefully he won’t kill me for revealing this secret. He said to me very early on when I was working for him, “You have to remember your clients are actually editors, not the public.” The idea is to find an editor who gets you and who wants to let you do what you can do best. I hadn’t thought about it in that way before because a writing career is sold to you as becoming famous, or knowing all these people. I didn’t really think about editors necessarily as clients, or even as people who had influence.

  It is actually really tough for young women coming up now. I really made my career working for The Awl in its sort of heyday. I wrote for Choire [Sicha], and then I started writing for Carrie Frye. In both those cases, those were editors who happened to think that I had something to say and who wanted me to be able to say it. That was a really valuable venue, and actually a lot of the well-paying journals and work that I eventually got came from people finding me at The Awl. It changed my life. I think it’s harder to find those venues now. People who want to support writing in America, or what have you, need to think about how we nurture those platforms.

  Contemporary writers… believe that in the past, people made a great living as a writer, or a possible middle-class living. I’m not sure that it was ever true.

  I realize that everything now is a mess because the internet is a mess and the country is a mess, and we’re all feeling powerless and hopeless in a variety of ways, but it’s been disturbing to watch that kind of platform disappear. My whole experience at The Awl is inflecting the way that I’m telling the story in this book and elsewhere about the effect of editors on careers.

  The trouble for a young woman who wants to have a voice today is first of all, the media is too Twitter-obsessed, so everything is, “can you tweet well?” as opposed to “can you write well?” which are actually somewhat different skills. Sort of like, “are you good at writing poetry or are you good at writing prose?” It’s not that either skill is necessarily more important than the other; actually we need both. They’re not always the same skill.

  In the media right now I think there’s some difficulty in figuring out which is which. The thing that I learned from the book too is [which editors were which for these writers] — everybody from [Vanity Fair editor] Robert Benchley egging Dorothy Parker on, and [Vanity Fair editor] Frank Crowninshield hiring her in the first place, right on down to somebody like [New Yorker editor] William Shawn looking at Janet Malcolm writing about children’s books in his magazine [but] being like, “There’s more here. I could let you do more.” She eventually did photography criticism and then eventually moved into fact pieces, and the New York Times tried to hire her. Those people matter. I really don’t know what it means for — such a pretentious phrase, but — American letters. The editor is going by the wayside. It’s not good news for anybody. I also don’t think it’s necessarily good news for women.

  It’s kind of interesting, the loss of that traditional relationship. I think I read a piece many years ago by Adrian Chen about Gawker that was kind of like, the internet has [diminished] the role of the editor because now you just click publish. It depends on where you are, because I’ve worked at newspapers where you had many different layers of editing. I’ve had editors who wanted to help me hone a voice and others who really just didn’t care.

  There are some writers you can just click “publish” on, and Gawker, for better or for worse, was one of those places where they had a knack for picking them out. I don’t think I was one of them, to be honest with you. It’s tricky, and it is a relationship that is defined by the particular powers of the writer in question. Even the politics essays I’m talking about by Didion that I love — I mean, by all accounts those were Bob Silvers’ idea or [Barbara Epstein’s] idea [editors at the New York Review of Books]. That was an editor being like, “Didion doesn’t exactly really need my help, but I’d really be curious to read her on the subject.”

  I think those [types of] editors are still around. David Haglund, who edits for the New Yorker online, is a really great editor and one of my favorites. These people exist. It’s tricky to find them, but it’s probably always been tricky to find them.

  Many of the women in Sharp had reputations that changed among the younger generation while they were still alive. You’ve written about this. What is it about our culture — and maybe there is something that you have in mind beyond the fact that we’re raised to dislike other women — that drives a wedge between different generations of women and whatever form of feminism they’re occupying?

  Well I think there’s obviously a number of things. I think it’s just, disappointment is a hell of a drug — and it feels like the world is often very disappointing or has been for young women. Hopefully it’s not going to stay this way. This is one of the ways that we deal with it, to turn it on each other. In that sense, I’ve had my moments. I don’t want to come across as a complete apologist for any flaws that anybody has. I’ve had my own disagreements.

  Generally speaking, I don’t think anybody is socialized to have healthy conflict. It seems to take a lot of therapy to get there. I won’t even claim to always get there myself, or even most of the time get there myself. Because of that, it’s trickier in feminism because the premise is we have a claim on each other, we have some reason to demand fealty in some way. It’s tricky because my line on feminist solidarity has always been, I think it should be work, it’s a lifelong project.

  It’s more of an ongoing project than it is a status that we’re going to achieve. I think that’s behind a lot of it, is that people make a category mistake about solidarity. They presume that there’s going to be some eventual point where women are just going to be loyal to each other and okay with each other and never have problems with the arguments or with the techniques or anything that anybody else is using on behalf of so-called women. I don’t think it’s ever going to get there.

  Mostly they were expected to betray people, so keep that in mind — that there was some currency available to them socially to be like, “Well I’m not like those other vulgar women.”

  That’s never going to change. It’s kind of the way people talk about marriage sometimes. It’s not like you get married and everything is fine. The same thing could kind of apply to feminist solidarity, in that it’s just going to have to be a project that we keep working on. Because people don’t look at it that way every time that somebody says something that everybody disagrees with.

  The sense that we are betraying each other by disagreeing with each other is an idea that we need to dispense with. It’s not necessarily a betrayal, but it might be something that we need to argue about for a long time. If we can just diffuse it slightly, like to go from betrayal to disagreement, to me it feels like that would be a long way towards making a lot of these discussions healthier.

  For sure. Many of the women in the book betrayed their peers, or took aim at their peers or friends.

  Or feminists, yeah.

  Or even people who gave them opportunities. In some ways I thought that their ruthlessness was actually kind of refreshing to read.

  Yeah I mean, it is refreshing in the sense that the demands on them were different. Mostly they were expected to betray people, so keep that in mind — that there was some currency available to them socially to be like, “Well I’m not like those other vulgar women.” I don’t really get into this in the book, mostly because neither [Elizabeth] Hardwick nor Adrienne Rich are in it, but one gets the impression if you look a lot at the history of that friendship, [that] Rich seemed to be [a] New York intellectual because she was one of theirs, and she subsequently became a radical feminist and just horrified them, in a way that hasn’t really been talked about enough. But they were horrified by it.

  Within intellectualism, cultural criticism, journalism, the fields that they were in, there was a currency to being like, “I’m not like those other vulgar women.” You can see it in the way that Hardwick had a really interesting relationship with feminism in that she both thought it was really interesting and seemed to have trouble committing to it politically because she believed it was vulgar. That’s in Sharp a little bit, where she discourages Pauline Kael — and my little theory [is] that [had] something to do with Kael later being known to diss about feminism frequently, even though in her early work she was actually pretty stridently feminist.

  It’s interesting. She didn’t want to be considered vulgar either. The betrayal is socially inflected. Sometimes it’s portrayed as this intellectually brave thing to trash feminists, but it was complicated. It was both intellectually — it could both be intellectually brave and something that they were actually doing [to] curry social favor from other people. It’s tricky.

  *

  * “Every journalist who is not too stupid or full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.”↩

  * * *

  Natalie Daher is a writer and journalist based in New York who’s appeared on Racked, The Daily Beast, Lapham’s Quarterly and City Lab. She co-authors a newsletter, Clipped, about women’s magazines.

  Editor: Dana Snitzky
  Posted by Natalie Daher on April 4, 2018
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• Bustle
  https://www.bustle.com/p/13-april-beauty-launches-that-will-keep-hope-alive-while-you-wait-for-warm-weather-to-come-8796412https://www.bustle.com/p/13-april-beauty-launches-that-will-keep-hope-alive-while-you-wait-for-warm-weather-to-come-8796412
  Word count: 1379

  'Sharp' By Michelle Dean Celebrates The Women Who Created A Professional Model Of Dissent
  BySadie Trombetta
  a day ago

  Ask any female politician, celebrity, writer, CEO — hell, ask any woman who has ever sat through a work meeting or a family dinner — and she can probably list of dozens of labels she's been given just for speaking up. Women with opinions are chastised for being catty or cruel, criticized for seeming difficult or rude, called out for being nasty or biting, and few people understand that better than the subjects at the heart of Michelle Dean's Sharp, a new book that celebrates the women who created a professional model of dissent.

  Out now from Grove Press, Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion explores the lives of 10 remarkable women whose criticism, fiction, poetry, and log-form journalism shaped 20th century cultural and intellectual thought. A well-researched and highly readable book that combines biography, literary criticism, and cultural history, Sharp celebrates pioneering writers who managed to make their voices heard, despite the culture of sexism and misogyny that actively worked to keep them silent.

  The 10 women Dean include in her book — Dorothy Parker, Rebecca West, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Pauline Kael, Joan Didion, Nora Ephron, Renata Adler, and Janet Malcolm — come from different backgrounds, fall into different political parties, and form vastly different artistic opinions, but each one share one critical thing: sharpness. “I gathered the women in this book under the sign of a compliment that every one of them received in their lives: they were called sharp,” explains Dean in the book's introduction, but that characterization refers to more than their acute intelligence and brilliant writing. It also captures just how scared and intimidated these women's male counterparts, and the male and female audiences who read their work, felt about their influence. "Sharpness, after all," Dean writes, "cuts."

  Not only were they brilliant and intrepid writers and critics, but the subjects in Sharp were, by the estimation of their male subjects and counterparts, wounding, unkind, and even, at times, menacing. From the Algonquin Round Table of the 1920s to the Partisan Review of the 1930s to The New Yorker in the 1980s, the intellectual culture throughout the 20th century was a boys' club, but with their pointed pens and sharp tongues, these women forced their way in, pushed past a culture of sexism and misogyny, and became the defining voices of American cultural and intellectual history.

  Sharp: The Women Who Made Art of Having an Opinion by Michelle Dean, $20.40, Amazon

  What makes these women remarkable isn't just their talent, but their perseverance and their ruthlessness. In a male-dominated field that rarely rewarded, let alone made room for, women's voices, writers like Dorothy Parker, Hannah Arendt, and Nora Ephron became the filters through which so many readers saw American culture through. They were, as Dean puts it, "participating in the great arguments of the twentieth century," and their opinions of art and music, war and workers' rights, feminism and film shaped the world around them.

  The subjects of Dean's book aren't just sharp, though. They are also loud, they were tough, and they knew how to wield their pens like swords and cut down. Whether it was through their criticism, journalism, or fiction, these women made a career out of dissenting from their male counterparts. They dismissed the status quo and insisted on having their voices heard, as Dean puts it, “in a world that was not eager to hear women’s opinions about anything.”

  Although they were paid for their opinions and for what was in their minds, more often than not, their work was judged in terms of their gender, sexuality, marital status, and appearance. Whether they were producing novels, nonfiction reporting, or critical reviews, each woman’s writing was inevitably filtered through a lens of sexism and misogyny, one that lead them to being labeled as harsh, nasty, and even malicious.

  Mary McCarthy frequently and quite unapologetically parodied her fellow intellectuals, and as a result, was labeled as catty, even cruel. Dorothy Parker, who reveled the chance to disagree with her male counterparts in her theater reviews, struggled to be taken seriously by readers and critics alike. Film critic Pauline Kael was often called rude and impolite for her no-holds-barred criticism, accusations male critics rarely had to deal with. Even Janet Malcolm faced harsh backlash after publishing an unpopular opinion about the practice of journalism. Writers, including her own colleagues, blamed her for tarnishing the pristine reputation of their noble profession. When male thinkers and critics hold an unpopular viewpoint, they’re labeled as brave and revolutionary. When women like the subjects of Sharp do it, they’re difficult and cruel. That didn’t stop them from writing, though, and it still doesn’t stop us from reading about them, flawed as they are against the backdrop of the 21st century women’s movement.

  They may have been groundbreaking in their day, but many of the writers in Sharp would bristle at the idea of being called feminist icons today. For that reasons, modern day feminist intellectuals and writers see them as problematic. "I ran into quite a lot of people who wanted to cut these women out of history precisely because they took advantage of their talents, and did so without turning those talents to the explicit support of feminism," Dean writes. "It is viewed as an unforgivable lapse.” But despite this unforgivable lapse, as Dean puts it, the progress these women made on behalf of women’s equality is undeniable. "These women openly defied gendered expectations before any organized feminist movement managed to make gains for women on the whole," writes Dean. "Through their exceptional talent, they were granted a kind of intellectual equality to men no other women had hope of."

  How were women like Rebecca West and Hannah Arendt able to break into the boys’ club and make a seat for themselves at the table? Their talent propelled them, but luck, connections, and privilege played a major role. The truth is, the 10 major writers featured in Dean's book share more than just sharpness: they also share a particular privilege granted to them because of their race and class. It's worth noting that every subject in Sharp is white, an issue Dean raises in her book's introduction. In a better world, Dean says, “a black writer like Zora Neale Hurston would have been more widely recognized as part of this cohort, but racism kept her writings at the margin of it.” So too does Sharp. While there is a brief section of the book devoted to Hurston and her writing, little attention is paid to other 20th century women writers who were not white, cisgender, and middle class. If anything, this flaw in the book only further demonstrates the utter lack of diversity in America’s artistic and intellectual culture, not just in the people who are creating it, but also in the people who are criticizing it.

  "What I really want to read next is a book about the diverse young critics — black, brown, queer, disabled — who are publishing now," Kate Tuttle writes in her review of Sharp for the Los Angeles Times, and I couldn't agree more. It’s crucial that, within the realm of arts and literature, we not only demand more diverse books from more diverse creators, but that we also insist on more diverse reviewers and critics. When the people responsible for choosing what becomes popular and what doesn’t all look the same, so too do the works they celebrate.

  In that way, Sharp shows readers why the 10 women writers were so important throughout the 20th century: their voices not only helped shape the world of art, culture, politics, and beyond, but they helped shaped women’s progress and the fight for equality, too. Whether they identified as feminists or rejected the label altogether, as many of them did, these influential writers and thinkers, as Dean writes, “cleared a path for other women to follow,” and that is certainly something worth celebrating.

• Los Angeles Times
  http://www.latimes.com/books/la-ca-jc-sharp-michelle-dean-20180405-story.html
  Word count: 1397

  QUOTED: "Dean's prose is mostly plainspoken, and often persuasive. The book is consistently entertaining and often truly provocative — especially for anyone who makes or loves art or literature."

  The women who wielded a pen like a weapon: Michelle Dean's 'Sharp'
  By Kate Tuttle
  Apr 05, 2018 | 8:00 AM
  The women who wielded a pen like a weapon: Michelle Dean's 'Sharp'
  Michelle Dean, author of "Sharp" (John Midgely)

  In the 1987 movie "Broadcast News," a male colleague, angry at having to admit that Holly Hunter's character, a television producer, is right about something, shoots this line at her: "It must be nice to always believe you know better, to always think you're the smartest person in the room." Hunter responds, huskily and urgently, a tear forming in her eye, "No, it's awful."

  It's a scene pretty much every woman I know holds dear; a little moment of truth that resonates with women in media and journalism especially, but one that any woman whose intelligence has been used as evidence against her will recognize. The dedication of Michelle Dean's timely new book "Sharp" — "For every person who's ever been told, 'you're too smart for your own good'" — could easily have been written for Hunter's character, and for all the women (and some men, I guess) who identify with her.

  "Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion" is a group biography of sorts, tracing a dozen female writers — from Dorothy Parker to Janet Malcolm — whose reviews, essays and other works compose a rough history of American thought from the 1920s to the '80s.

  "The forward march of American literature is usually chronicled by way of its male novelists," Dean points out. "There is little sense, in that version of the story, that women writers of those eras were doing much worth remembering." Dean, a contributing editor at the New Republic, is herself a gifted critic — her book reviews are often wickedly funny — and the women she writes about here are best known as critics, journalists and essayists (although some also wrote fiction or poetry). Besides Parker and Malcolm, they include Susan Sontag, Rebecca West, Zora Neale Hurston, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, Lillian Hellman, Pauline Kael, Joan Didion, Nora Ephron and Renata Adler.
  Dorothy Parker
  Dorothy Parker (Associated Press)

  Dean deftly and often elegantly traces these women's arguments about race, politics and gender, making a kind of narrative of the ideas at play in the pages of the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, the New York Review of Books, the Partisan Review and other publications. Along with their male colleagues and competitors, these women wrote about books and movies, wars and revolutions, culture and society; their work pondered the meaning of the Holocaust, the prospects of the civil rights movement, the complications of making art in a world often riven with brutality.

  But as Dean makes clear, these women lived different lives than the men they were published alongside. Their gender made them vulnerable to harassment and professional underestimation. Love, marriage and children complicated things (though they could provide good material, as in the case of Ephron using her divorce from philandering Carl Bernstein as the basis for her novel and film "Heartburn") — and their looks and sexual lives became a topic of conversation in a way that male writers seldom encountered. "It is difficult to overstate how much writing about Sontag is concerned with her appearance," Dean notes. "Even in the most serious essays about her there is usually some remark about her looks."
  Susan Sontag in 1959
  Susan Sontag in 1959 (Duane Michals)

  Some of their male counterparts were friends, lovers and supporters — Edmund Wilson seems to have had a connection with nearly every woman in the book — while others appear as dirty old men or just plain hecklers (as when Norman Mailer, apparently blind to irony, panned McCarthy's "The Group" as a failure due to the author's vanity).
  Mary McCarthy
  Mary McCarthy (Los Angeles Times)

  All of these women confronted sexism, both individual and institutional. But their attitudes toward feminism varied, as did their place in its history. British writer West worked to win votes for women, but, Dean writes, "found the suffragettes both admirably ferocious and unforgivably prudish." Sontag, Ephron and Malcolm all wrote critically of second-wave feminism. Many of them attacked one another in print on issues of feminism but also aesthetic differences — notably, Adler's savaging of Kael's film criticism. But there is also genuine connection among many of these women — Malcolm's note of appreciation to a dying Sontag strikes a note of grace and respect, as does Arendt's tender treatment of a young Adler.
  Janet Malcolm
  Janet Malcolm (Kevin Sturman / Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Feminism can be more than merely a political stance; as Dean examines the art of criticism plied by these writers, she identifies those whose approach to social and cultural events took on a more human, personal cast. In answering Isaiah Berlin, Diana Trilling and others who slammed McCarthy for what they saw as political unorthodoxy, Dean admits that "McCarthy was not a thinker of the type of John Stuart Mill, or Berlin himself. She did not spend her time articulating a full system of rights, or expound on the nature of justice. But insight into humanity is still a valuable skill for political analysis." Later, still regarding McCarthy, she adds, "[i]deas were all fine and good, but they were lived out in the world, and were tethered to the humanity of those who had them."

  Dean's prose is mostly plainspoken, and often persuasive. The book is consistently entertaining and often truly provocative — especially for anyone who makes or loves art or literature. Not every figure in it is equally compelling of course; some seem simply unlikable, but that too is a feminist stance (how many unlikable literary men do we read about?).

  One complaint is inevitable: Because these women wrote for mainstream and highbrow publications in midcentury America, they are mostly all white (with the exception of Hurston, whom I wanted more of). It would have been nice to see Dean include more critics of color, but the world she's writing about was even less diverse than publishing and journalism are now (and they're still overwhelmingly white). There are other women I wish Dean had written about: Elizabeth Hardwick (who is one degree of separation from nearly everyone), Jessica Mitford, Joan Acocella, Ellen Willis, Margo Jefferson. What I really want to read next is a book about the diverse young critics — black, brown, queer, disabled — who are publishing now.
  Zora Neale Hurston circa 1938
  Zora Neale Hurston circa 1938 (Carl Van Vechten / Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

  But that's not to diminish this book, which feels urgent in its own right. "I gathered the women in this book under the sign of a compliment that every one of them received in their lives: they were called sharp," Dean writes in the book's preface. The word isn't always complimentary. It implies intelligence and perception, but also danger and even violence, as in the blade of a knife. All of these women could wield a pen like a weapon, and one of the book's most delicious pleasures is in reading about battles between critics. These days, book reviewers tend to avoid negativity or controversy — whether because we fear being ostracized on social media or worry about losing future freelance assignments. But the women Dean profiles here were willing to be unpopular. That made them not only sharp, but brave.

  Tuttle is president of the National Book Critics Circle. She writes a weekly column on books for the Boston Globe and her reviews, essays and profiles have been published widely.
  “Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion” by Michelle Dean
  “Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion” by Michelle Dean (Grove Press)

  "Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion"

  Michelle Dean

  Grove Press: 384 pp, $26

  Michelle Dean will be at the Festival of Books on Sunday, April 22, at noon on the panel "Badass Women Changing Culture" with Viv Albertine, Carina Chocano and Joy Press.

• Library of America
  https://www.loa.org/news-and-views/1400-michelle-deans-_sharp_-celebrates-ten-women-writers-who-did-it-their-way
  Word count: 1179

  Michelle Dean’s Sharp celebrates ten women writers who did it their way

  Arriving this week from Grove Press, Michelle Dean’s Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion is a survey of ten women writers who left their mark on twentieth-century culture, from Rebecca West and Dorothy Parker in the 1920s and ’30s to Renata Adler and Janet Malcolm at the turn of the millennium. Library of America authors Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, and Pauline Kael enjoy prominent roles, as do their peers Hannah Arendt, Joan Didion, and Nora Ephron.
  Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion by Michelle Dean (Grove Press, 2018).

  What distinguishes all of these writers, in Dean’s telling, are traits encapsulated by the title adjective: wit, verbal precision, and a kind of polemical fearlessness that made all ten women stand out in a culture very much dominated by men. Skillfully braiding critical insight with lively anecdote and biographical detail, Sharp doubles as a history of American literary-intellectual life in the twentieth century—and will undoubtedly leave readers pondering why the work of these writers has aged better than that of many of their contemporaries. It’s a timely book that exemplifies the same qualities Dean finds in her subjects.

  Critic and journalist Michelle Dean won the 2016 Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle. Via email, she answered our questions about Sharp just prior to the book’s publication.

  Library of America: The decision to interweave biographical passages with literary analysis makes Sharp something of a page-turner. Was it always your intention to integrate the material this way, or did the form of the book come together in the course of your research?

  Michelle Dean: It was more or less the plan from the beginning. One of the challenges with a book like this is to keep it from sounding like a dissertation. And biography helps give things a narrative shape, that way, that they might not otherwise have. I had to pull people through the twentieth century, and the biographical passages gave them characters to follow.
  Susan Sontag in front of shelves holding her record collection on January 20, 1989. (Edward Hausner/New York Times Co./Getty Images)

  LOA: From the perspective of fifty years later, it seems fair to argue that a part of Sontag and Kael’s legacies is how they made it acceptable to acknowledge popular culture (or even “trash,” in Kael’s term) both as a source of pleasure—plain and simple—and as a subject worthy of serious attention. How did two critical minds that were so different from each other arrive in somewhat similar territory?

  Dean: I admit I think they were actually very similar, though it might not always have seemed that way on the surface. Sontag’s “Against Interpretation” has some philosophical similarities with “Circles and Squares,” Kael’s manifesto against auteurism: Broadly speaking, both were cautioning about getting too abstract in articulating your love of art. They were opposing the tendency to over-intellectualize things (which seems a funny thing to say about Sontag, but I genuinely believe it was her aim). And that, actually, I think, is the key to how they both got to the same place on popular culture, too: They relied on their own reactions without regard to philosophical consistency. They were not system-building, they were recording reactions. Which left them able to just consume what interested them rather than what they “ought” to like.

  LOA: A recurring theme in the book is the complicated relationships many of these writers had with second-wave feminism, relationships which you parse in careful detail. Are there lessons applicable to the era of #MeToo?

  Dean: I’m not sure there are lessons, exactly. But I tried to chronicle some of the ambivalence these writers felt when confronted with something both as chaotic and as dogmatic as a political movement because I think there’s something worth knowing there: That ambivalence with movement politics is part of the deal of being a writer! And that, say in Nora Ephron’s case, your dissatisfaction with and critiques of the movement aren’t really equivalent to a disagreement with feminism.
  Michelle Dean. (John Midgely)

  LOA: Several of the careers you trace in Sharp were nurtured and sustained by illustrious print publications like the old Partisan Review and William Shawn’s New Yorker. Given the evident decline of print culture today, are you ever apprehensive about how the next generation will find its voice, or is the web providing compensations?

  Dean: I think there are lots of reasons to worry about the decline of literary culture, but that has less to do with a print/web divide than it does with the fact that the internet has been colonized by large companies like Facebook and Twitter. Those companies chopped up the web in such a way that it’s difficult to find the attention span for a sustained, intelligent piece of writing even if you are the kind of person inclined to seek them out.
  Explore Further

  Sanford Schwartz on the “emotional rightness and believability” of Pauline Kael’s film criticism

  David Rieff: Susan Sontag lived as “a citizen of the Republic of Letters”

  Maverick morality and intellectual passion: Thomas Mallon on Mary McCarthy’s fictions
  Related Writers:
  Susan Sontag Mary McCarthy Zora Neale Hurston
  Related Volumes:
  Zora Neale Hurston: Folklore, Memoirs, & Other Writings
  Susan Sontag: Essays of the 1960s & 70s
  American Movie Critics: An Anthology From the Silents Until Now (paperback)
  Mary McCarthy: The Complete Fiction (boxed set)
  The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael (paperback)
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• New York Times
  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/11/books/review/michelle-dean-sharp.html
  Word count: 1965

  QUOTED: "Dean’s own writing, direct and lively, can get too loosely conversational—too wordy and imprecise. Her chatty approach to these formidable women makes them seem accessible, and that’s a good thing. But a blue pencil is as strong as a sword, and more cut and thrust would have made this book sharper."

  Ten Women Whose Tongues and Pens Were as ‘Sharp’ as Knives

  By LAURA JACOBSAPRIL 11, 2018
  Slide Show
  Slide Show
  The Women of ‘Sharp’

  CreditAssociated Press

  SHARP
  The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion
  By Michelle Dean
  362 pp. Grove Press. $26.

  “One must have a mind of winter,” Wallace Stevens writes in his poem “The Snow Man.” It’s the cold eye that beholds, without sentimentality or fear, “Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” In “Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion,” the journalist Michelle Dean has rounded up 10 minds of winter, all of them female, all of them prominent writers whose criticism, long-form reporting, fiction and satire have shaped thinking on world events and cultural dramas: Dorothy Parker, Rebecca West, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Pauline Kael, Joan Didion, Nora Ephron, Renata Adler and Janet Malcolm. Dean gathered these women together, she says in her preface, “under the sign of a compliment that every one of them received in their lives: They were called sharp.”

  It is, of course, a compliment with an edge. Call a man “sharp” and he’s stylish, incisive, smart. Apply it to a woman, Dean writes, and there’s a “sense of terror underlying it. Sharpness, after all, cuts.” A virtue of her book is that it shows how each woman, by wielding a pen as if it were a scalpel or a scimitar, confounded the gender norm of niceness and placed her analytical prowess front and center. Among 20th-century intellectuals, “men might have outnumbered women, demographically,” Dean writes, but “in the arguably more crucial matter of producing work worth remembering, the work that defined the terms of their scene, the women were right up to par — and often beyond it.” I agree with her.

  Dean has arranged her book as a series of biographical portraits, one woman to a chapter, in chronological order. She also includes shorter segue chapters — entr’actes — in which two or three of the women intersect. (These include cameo appearances by the African-American novelist Zora Neale Hurston and the combative playwright Lillian Hellman.) As with all such lineups, Dean’s raises questions about who is there and who isn’t. Would she have been better off beginning with Virginia Woolf rather than Dorothy Parker? Woolf was a consummate artist and pioneering feminist, arguably greater than any of Dean’s 10, while Parker, who could be harder on herself than she was on her victims — self-regarding writers (whom she parodied), forgettable plays, bad books — wouldn’t dream of calling her writing “art.”

  By stressing “opinion” in the book’s subtitle, however, Dean has framed sharpness as a barbed pulpit in which the public intellectual or critic-as-virtuoso resides. Where the mysterious interiority of Woolf’s novels was never going to grab the masses, Parker’s brittle, witty verse (“If I’m in bed each night by 10, I may get back my looks again”) had real cultural currency in the late 1920s, with its partied-out flappers and collapsing economy. I do wonder, though, why Camille Paglia, the queen Hippolyte of 1990s cultural criticism, isn’t here.
  Continue reading the main story
  Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion Michelle Dean

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  Well, it’s Dean’s party and she’s invited the sharps she most admires, even if they don’t always admire one another. Positioning herself not as a scholar breaking new ground (many of these women have been well covered in biographies, memoirs and academic studies) but as a missionary championing her subjects’ “oppositional spirit,” Dean artfully shepherds the reader through the professional and personal ups and downs of each life, keeping an eye on the affinities — a taste for battle, an ethic of intellectual honesty — that made some of them allies (McCarthy and Arendt, Arendt and Adler) and drove others apart (McCarthy and Sontag, Adler and Kael).
  Photo

  A leitmotif — at least until Didion, Ephron and Malcolm come along — is that of being “the only woman at the table.” Parker embodied this as a member of the Algonquin Round Table, a charmed lunch club in which writers jousted with quips and witticisms. She wasn’t the only woman at this table, but she was the one who memorably bested the men — her pun on “horticulture” is by far the most quoted piece of Algonquin wordplay. Indeed, two themes run through this book: the hard-won autonomy of the one girl in the boys’ club and her ambivalence toward the feminist movement. Though McCarthy once characterized her heroine in a short story — a clear alter ego — as “a princess among the trolls,” and Sontag complained about being the only woman on countless panels, both accepted elevated status as their due and neither felt obliged to lower the ladder for other women. (A story went around that McCarthy baited the younger Sontag, who was suddenly turning heads, by saying, “I hear you’re the new me.”) The political philosopher Arendt “was steadfastly against feminism until her dying day,” Dean writes. She didn’t think it was a serious use of brainpower. And Didion called some of the movement’s methods “Stalinist.”

  Dean teases out the tangled intramural politics, which in many cases trace back to a shared stance against groupthink — including the groupthink of some schools of feminism. “I ran into quite a lot of people who wanted to cut these women out of history,” Dean writes, “precisely because they took advantage of their talents, and did so without turning those talents to the explicit support of feminism. It is viewed as an unforgivable lapse.” This is shocking, and it would have been interesting to know if the unforgiving are activists, academics or what.

  For readers unfamiliar with the work of these women, “Sharp” should be eye-opening. Dean traverses the intellectual landscape of the 20th century at an easy gallop — the boozy cocktail parties; the plotting of editors in their offices; the literary and political trench wars, aggressive essays thrown across the breach like grenades. She is frank, giving us the skinny. She admits that much of Parker’s verse doesn’t hold up (“It seems clichéd, overwrought”), and owns that Kael, the brilliant film critic of The New Yorker, was less than authoritative on subjects requiring sustained research. (In her book on “Citizen Kane,” Kael lined up opinions that supported her thesis yet never interviewed Orson Welles, the film’s director, who was very much alive.) Writing about Adler, the critic and novelist, Dean shows how a relentless need to attack can shade into self-sabotage: It’s one thing to go ferociously at your subjects, backed by a nurturing editor, and quite another to launch an Electra-like offensive against that editor’s replacement.

  For those who have lived with these writers for years, Dean can come up short. When she writes that Adler, in her famous New York Review of Books hatchet job on Kael’s criticism, “made a decent case,” it’s not enough. Adler was lawyerly, certainly, running down Kael’s every repeated trope and overused word, but her attack was as humorless as Kael’s reviews are pleasurable. You can be so right that you’re wrong, and I wondered what Dean really thinks.
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  And what of Ephron, the comic writer and filmmaker whose motto, tattooed on her psyche by her alcoholic mother, was “everything is copy” — a phrase that could have been coined by Parker, for whom nothing was sacred and with whom Ephron identified early on. Sure, she wrote “Heartburn,” which shocked the mediacracy by broadcasting raw details from her failed marriage to Carl Bernstein. But what was oppositional about Ephron’s work in Hollywood? Her rom-coms “You’ve Got Mail” and “Sleepless in Seattle” are formulaic films that pander, with none of the vicious wit her friends enjoyed. (It’s been said that at parties one didn’t want to be the first to leave a conversation that included Ephron, lest she entertain those who remained with a zinger about you.) Did Ephron sell out? Or did she find another way to be the only woman at the table, this time in Tinseltown, where she got to be as trite as the men? Dean doesn’t say.

  Then there’s Malcolm, who at The New Yorker has made a specialty of reportage that stubbornly hovers in the zone where truth, story, presumption and the law merge into mist. She herself, like the Cheshire Cat, appears and disappears, which brings yet another dimension to writing on subjects such as psychoanalysis, crime, and ethics in journalism and biography. Over a long career, an oppositional sensibility can become a default strategy that subtly or not so subtly distorts the picture, and Malcolm’s ineffable calculation sometimes leaves one queasy about her motives. “The experience of reading a Malcolm text,” Dean writes, “is always to linger in that sense of uncertainty, both about the nominal subject … and about exactly what new kind of sly trick the narrator might be pulling on us.” Is this the art of opinion? Or something else?

  One is also curious to know where Dean stands on Arendt’s “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” a 1963 meditation on war crimes that was incendiary because of its problematic phrase “the banality of evil,” and a tone so cold that Arendt’s friend the Jewish historian Gershom Scholem thought it flippant (some used the word cruel). Dean lays out this controversy, and many others, with a deft hand, but sometimes skips ahead just when we want her to deliver her own view.

  I was struck, as well, by the number of sloppy sentences. Dean knows that clarity doesn’t exist without precision; Ephron’s meandering style, for instance, is so controlled it’s practically pointillist. And yet Dean’s own writing, direct and lively, can get too loosely conversational — too wordy and imprecise. Her chatty approach to these formidable women makes them seem accessible, and that’s a good thing. But a blue pencil is as strong as a sword, and more cut and thrust would have made this book sharper.

  Laura Jacobs’s latest book, “Celestial Bodies: How to Look at Ballet,” will be published in May.

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• NPR
  https://www.npr.org/2018/04/10/599841857/sharp-is-a-dinner-party-you-want-to-be-at
  Word count: 980

  QUOTED: "Dean's literary bash is as stimulating and insightful as its roster of guests."

  'Sharp' Is A Dinner Party You Want To Be At

  April 10, 20187:00 AM ET

  Heller McAlpin
  Sharp
  Sharp

  The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion

  by Michelle Dean

  Hardcover, 384 pages
  purchase

  What do I love about this book? For starters: Dorothy Parker. Rebecca West. Hannah Arendt. Mary McCarthy. Nora Ephron. Janet Malcolm. With Sharp, Michelle Dean has essentially gathered ten 20th century literary lodestars for an all-female intellectual history party thrown between the covers of a single book. The price of admission to this critical gala: "the ability to write unforgettably," and being labeled "sharp."

  Dean's literary bash is as stimulating and insightful as its roster of guests. She not only encapsulates their biographies and achievements with remarkable concision, but also connects the dots between them. Her survey charts a through-line between these trailblazing writers who "openly defied gendered expectations" and "came up in a world that was not eager to hear women's opinions about anything." She flags intriguing points of connection and friction in their attitudes towards feminism, communism, and various male artists, including J.D. Salinger and Woody Allen. Revisiting the ugly lawsuit between Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy, she provides a contrast with the uncommonly close friendship between McCarthy and Arendt. Several notable contemporaries — like Zora Neale Hurston, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Doris Lessing — don't get their due, but Dean manages to shoehorn in a few mentions.

  Like Elif Batuman's The Possessed, Sharp makes literary criticism accessible and lively. The book's topicality, combined with Dean's astute analyses of her subjects' lives and vinegar-sharp wit, should appeal to more than literary wonks. Unlike Batuman, Dean — winner of the National Book Critics Circle's 2016 Balakian citation for excellence in reviewing — stays out of the picture. And while she appreciates the cleverness of lines like Parker's memorable caption for Vogue — "Brevity is the soul of lingerie" — there's nothing jocular in her general approach.
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  Striking similarities emerge among Dean's chosen ten. Seven were at least part Jewish (including McCarthy, through her maternal grandmother). Four were born abroad, four in California. Four studied philosophy. Six had multiple marriages (McCarthy leading the pack with four husbands). Several, including Susan Sontag, gave birth at a young age or raised only children as single mothers. Another common driver: Five lost their fathers early. When West's dissolute dad left his wife and three adolescent daughters broke, "It taught her an unforgettable lesson about the necessity of self-sufficiency," Dean writes. "You could not depend on men."

  Though seven of these women ended up writing fiction, many broke into print by reviewing books, theatre, movies — and other reviewers. They were fearlessly, caustically outspoken. Nineteen-year-old West, who "had a knack for choosing targets," went after H.G. Wells in a scathing review of his novel, Marriage. Dean comments wryly: "The episode marked possibly the only time in history that future lovers have met when one gave the other an abysmal book review." McCarthy, too, tested "the conventions of reviewing propriety" with a "note of wickedness" in her takedowns, which often came across as harsh or haughty. Pauline Kael, supporting herself and her daughter, "was brash, but she was also precise," Dean writes, "insisting that the only principle worth defending was pleasure."

  Dean, no wimp at strong assertions herself, makes it clear that these women didn't make their names by pussy-footing or pandering. Kael, she says, "knew that to write with authority entailed projecting extreme, even superhuman confidence." Arendt was "relentlessly self-confident," to the point where she was attacked — by male critics, in particular — as "Hannah Arrogant" after the publication of her groundbreaking 1951 manifesto, The Origins of Totalitarianism.

  Dean, no wimp at strong assertions herself, makes it clear that these women didn't make their names by pussy-footing or pandering.

  In Parker's case, insecurity was her bête-noir. Renata Adler, on the other hand, "a relentlessly analytical writer," was seemingly born with an "ability to offer an opinion with godlike certainty." And Ephron, Dean notes, was frequently ferocious to the point of malevolence: "Over the years, her willingness to anger the people she knew, to attack them the same way Kael or West or any of her predecessors had, would become a professional asset."

  Along with questions about self-confidence, niceness versus meanness, and where these writers stood on feminism and sisterhood (not surprisingly, being congenital outsiders and adamant individualists, they were mostly on the sidelines), Dean considers the thorny ethics and ramifications of this sort of outspoken gonzo journalism. Ephron lived by her screenwriter mother's credo, "Everything is copy." Didion put it somewhat differently: "Writers are always selling somebody out." Malcolm was attacked for impugning the honor of journalists in the opening line of her fascinating 1989 book, The Journalist and the Murderer: "Any journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself knows that what he does is morally indefensible."

  All of which puts me in mind of Nietzsche's famous declaration: "A common error: having the courage of one's convictions. Rather, it is a matter of having the courage for an attack on one's convictions." Sharp is a wonderful celebration of some truly gutsy, brilliant women.

• The Rumpus
  http://therumpus.net/2018/04/the-rumpus-interview-with-michelle-dean/
  Word count: 2942

  QUOTED: "Although the book is sometimes described as a series of profiles, the structure of the book is actually chronological. One progresses through various parts of their lives. But there is some personal stuff in there, because I don’t think that writers write in isolation from their personal lives. I know there’s a vogue for novelists to complain that they’re asked if their novels are autobiography."
  "And I’m not trying to be that person that thinks there’s this one-to-one correlation, but I think obviously your experience of being a writer is, among other things, an interpersonal experience that you have with other people that you end up either explicitly, or indirectly, writing about."

  Reading Other People’s Mail: Talking with Michelle Dean

  By Elon Green

  April 4th, 2018

  Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion, Michelle Dean’s debut book, forthcoming in April from Grove Press, is a sort of fantasy: it’s a chronicle of literary history, from the early 1900s to the latter years of the century, that more or less precludes men.

  The Y chromosomes are certainly scattered throughout Sharp—it’s not as if one can avoid them entirely—but Dorothy Parker, Hannah Arendt, Susan Sontag, Nora Ephron, and others are the stars of the show.

  There’s no one way to create history; the stories we tell are dependent on where we choose to train our sights. So, in era in which men still hold the most sway over public opinion, whether it be on television or newspaper opinion pages, being immersed in the world of Sharp—Parker at Vanity Fair, Arendt at Partisan Review, Ephron at Esquire—is refreshing.

  Not long ago, she and I talked about the pleasures of research, the early work of literary legends, and the absence of Black writers from the narrative.

  ***

  The Rumpus: In Sharp’s Notes On Sources, you mention that Renata Adler attended a presentation you gave in 2015. That must’ve been nerve-wracking!

  Michelle Dean: Adler had not been responding to my queries. But then I got invited to give a talk to the New York Institute for the Humanities, which is a bunch of people, mostly arts writers of one stripe or another, who have lunches where they discuss either recent or forthcoming research projects. And you give a presentation. I heard, not too long after I’d been booked to do this, that Adler had RSVP’d.

  I was kind of thrilled. Well, I guess I’ll get to meet her. She was one of the first people there, and I think she rather liked the presentation. It was focused on the first half of the book because that’s where I was with the work, at that time. But towards the end, people started asking her questions about the book’s subject matter.

  Rumpus: Did you get a sense of why Adler didn’t want to talk to you?

  Dean: I think it’s tough to be written about. I can only speculate, really.

  It’s tricky, because the book lives somewhere between criticism and journalism and biography. And people weren’t sure how much I wanted to know about their personal lives.

  Rumpus: Ultimately, there is a fair amount in Sharp about their personal lives.

  Dean: In part, that’s just glue to stitch the whole thing together. Although the book is sometimes described as a series of profiles, the structure of the book is actually chronological. One progresses through various parts of their lives. But there is some personal stuff in there, because I don’t think that writers write in isolation from their personal lives. I know there’s a vogue for novelists to complain that they’re asked if their novels are autobiography. And I’m not trying to be that person that thinks there’s this one-to-one correlation, but I think obviously your experience of being a writer is, among other things, an interpersonal experience that you have with other people that you end up either explicitly, or indirectly, writing about.

  I think this most relates to Mary McCarthy and Rebecca West. Their romances are very much tangled up with their achievements as writers.

  Rumpus: You do an excellent job of laying out the relationships these writers had with each other. They had real connections, and they’d wend into and out of each other’s lives in large and small ways. For example, Janet Winn, before she’d become Janet Malcolm, writing for The New Republic about a Dorothy Parker TV appearance.

  Dean: It’s true, though Janet is the one person who would say she was held quite apart from everyone, except for Nora.

  They were connected and they were forced, more or less, to reckon with each other, whether they liked it or not. And they were all identified, at one point or another, as somehow exceptional. It’s a bit of a double-edged sword, which I think is a point I was trying to make.

  Rumpus: These women kept having to shoehorn themselves into less-than-natural spaces in order to have a career. Parker writing about theater for Vanity Fair, for instance.

  Dean: All of them did it. I like Sontag’s puff pieces for Vogue, where it was obvious that she did it for money, so I’m not criticizing in the least. But yeah, you sort of had to. One of my interests is how much they wrote for money, which is something we don’t typically talk about, especially in literary biography. There tends to be this idea that every piece and every assignment and every gig is always something speaking from the soul. We think that about great writers, that they’re incapable of doing hackwork. But having marinated in literary biographies for several years now, I literally can’t think of anybody who didn’t do some hackwork. I mean in the ‘70s, Adrienne Rich helped a professor write a book on schlock horror movies.

  Everyone does work for money, even if it didn’t look like it on the page.

  Rumpus: What was the most surprising thing you found out about one of your subjects?

  Dean: I wasn’t really writing the kind of biography, or any kind of biography, where I’d be surprised. I mean, there’s whole swaths of their work I don’t talk about.

  Rumpus: But you did a lot of research.

  Dean: I did do a ton of research. I have an enormous file on my computer of all the archival stuff and all the press clippings. It’s huge. I think the most surprising stuff I found was Janet Malcolm’s early work, which I don’t think I knew existed. Or I’m pretty sure most people didn’t know it existed before this. Most people think of Janet as just starting at the New Yorker, and don’t realize that she had this whole body of work at The New Republic.

  Rumpus: How did you find it?

  Dean: I was looking at that article about Parker being on TV with Mailer one day. I had looked at it before, but at some point in the process I realized the byline was “Janet Winn.” And I thought, Oh, that’s funny, that would have been Janet’s maiden name. There was a whole drama about getting access to The New Republic database. I didn’t have access to it, and then I did. Eventually I pulled up Janet Winn’s work and there, in the middle of it, was Janet Winn Malcolm. And I was like, Oh, it is the same person.

  I’m not sure why she doesn’t talk about it. You ask her about how she begins her career and she always starts with Mr. Shawn saying, Hey, why don’t you write this thing about children’s books?

  Rumpus: It’s a better story.

  Dean: It is a better story. But I love when Norman Mailer writes in to the letters pages to flirt with her. Like, he just cannot stay out of this book. Typical.

  I was definitely more interested in the beginnings of careers than the ends, mostly because the beginning is the point at which you cut into the conversation. And that takes some particular skill or particular wit, and I was interested in how one came to possess that.

  Rumpus: In the preface, you note that these writers were largely from similar backgrounds—white, Jewish, middle class. Hurston notwithstanding, to what extent did Black writers and editors factor into these women’s lives?

  Dean: They didn’t, and that was the problem. When Hannah Arendt came out against school desegregation, she had these dialogues with [James] Baldwin and [Ralph] Ellison. The nature of the dialogues suggests, to me, that there were no Black people in her immediate circle. She was solicitous towards them, and somewhat humble in a way she wasn’t towards Jewish writers who criticized “Eichmann.” Eventually, she seemed to recognize that there was a gap in her experience that was worth exploring or talking about.

  But yeah, to a large extent, Black writers were not in the circles these women traveled in. It’s a question and a problem that troubled me as I put together the book, because I think about issues of diversity a lot, and about how you articulate the past. But what I couldn’t do was make this into a history that was properly multicultural. I mean, the presence of Zora Neale Hurston in the book is brief, and the reason that she is there is to make sure the reader knew that this exclusion was going on, that they didn’t get caught up totally in the natural triumphal narrative of the book. I want them to understood that I was describing something that was limited, a club that was not available for everyone to join.

  I think there’s a whole other book to be written about the history of Black women writers and critics. It would have been a disservice to them to simply put them into this tradition, as though the world would receive, read, and react to Black women writers in the same way as they received these white women writers.

  Rumpus: I’m embarrassed that, last year, when you mentioned Rebecca West as a great influence, I had not heard of her. Would you mind telling readers why she’s so important?

  Dean: West, almost as much as Parker, was important for the women of the mid-century. She was this feminist writer who did actually write in a fairly explicit feminist vein, who managed to break through. And there are lots of reasons why that was, and why she was able to command such an audience. Partially—and people don’t like talking about men in the lives of these women—it was because H.G. Wells really promoted her work as part of their affair. When The New Republic launched, it had a piece from West called “The Duty of Harsh Criticism.” And there was an ad that called her “the woman H.G. Wells calls ‘the best man in England.’”

  Because of that, she was a very visible public figure. She is sort of remembered now. By and large, she’s famous for writing something called Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, a huge book about Yugoslavia. It’s a thousand-page book, you know? West was very loquacious. “The Duty of Harsh Criticism” comes up often enough, often wielded by people who are on the side of Criticism should be screaming all the time at the mediocrities of life, which I guess is one way to do it.

  She’s also known for her remark, “I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me, from the doormat or a prostitute.” I love her because she was sort of crazy.

  She pops up in Virginia Woolf’s diaries all the time. One thing I expect to be asked, and you haven’t asked it, is where’s Virginia Woolf in this book? The truth is that Woolf was not the kind of public phenomenon in her own time that these women were. Which is not to say that she wasn’t writing some of the most brilliant criticism of the time and that people weren’t aware of her. But because Woolf’s reputation was so heavily resurrected by feminist scholars in the 1970s, we tend to have an outsized view of her [contemporaneous] reputation.

  Rumpus: As you researched, did you have a favorite source of information?

  Dean: Archives, obviously. People underestimate the romance of reading other people’s letters. I mean, that’s a line I’m stealing from Janet in The Silent Woman. But reading other people’s mail is actually really fun, much as it can also be kind of prurient. There is a romance to it, right? There’s a romance to opening a book that hasn’t been opened in twenty years, but you’re curious about the marginalia somebody wrote. I think I only have one mention of marginalia in the book, and it’s probably Sontag’s marginalia in an Arendt book because she thought it was really funny, which I think is hilarious.

  Rumpus: There are a lot of wonderful, often funny biographical asides in Sharp. I particularly love the one about William Shawn promising Pauline Kael that, if only she’d come work for him, he would keep his fingers off her copy. And then he immediately reneges on his promise.

  Dean: You get a sense of their personality. That’s why their personal lives come into it, too. It’s a personality thing, more for critics than for fiction writers. It’s becomes more of a performative art, a construction of yourself in a more direct way than it would if you’re writing fiction that you want people to believe is not connected to you.

  Rumpus: Did the process of the research and the writing radically change the way you felt about any of your subjects?

  Dean: I feel like I know them, which is dumb, in a way that I didn’t know them before. But it certainly made me think about them differently.

  Certain things about the way in which their careers developed were revelations to me, in that I had a picture of them coming more or less fully formed to the table. Which was always a very pernicious supposition that I had about writers, and probably why I personally started writing relatively late in life. I just sort of assume that if I didn’t already feel like I had, like, Alice Munro capabilities or Dorothy Parker capabilities, I shouldn’t be writing anything at all. And there is something sort of empowering, dare I say it, to read this early stuff and realize it hadn’t been that way for these women, at all. I think that’s true for literally every one of them. And it changed how I felt about them because of that. That said, Didion and Adler are the closest things to immediate geniuses.

  Rumpus: Who had to work the hardest?

  Dean: Probably Parker and West. They were churning out copy at a rate that web writers now claim has never been churned out. They weren’t writing eight blog posts a day, but they were writing, say, three times a week. Parker less so than the West, actually. West seems to have been more productive, generally, or more able to settle down to work. Parker had trouble with that sometimes, especially after she more or less gave up on it.

  Rumpus: Janet Malcolm looked over her section of the book and offered some corrections. Did you have any mixed feelings about that?

  Dean: Who wouldn’t?

  Rumpus: What convinced you to do it?

  Dean: I wanted it to be accurate. And I wasn’t writing a biography where I was inquiring into their personal lives.

  The book was supposed to be about their work, about documented evidence. I wanted to work with paper. If I had tried to report this, I would have died. It’s ten lives, and negotiating full access to ten lives would have been impossible. It’s hard enough for a biographer, typically, to get full access to even one.

  The error terrors are real, anyway. I still have it about the book, frankly, all the time, because it’s such a fact-intensive book, which I didn’t even realize I was signing up for.

  ***

  Author photograph © John Midgely.

  Elon Green is a journalist in Port Washington, New York, and an editor at Longform. He is Interviews Editor here at The Rumpus. More from this author →

• Newsday
  https://www.newsday.com/entertainment/books/michelle-dean-sharp-review-1.18110547
  Word count: 766

  Sharp’ review: Michelle Dean on the women writers who held their own in the boys’ club of American letters

  "Sharp," by Michelle Dean. Photo Credit: Grove Press
  By Matthew Price
  Special to Newsday
  Updated April 17, 2018 1:55 PM
  Print Share

  SHARP: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion, by Michelle Dean. Grove Press, 362 pp., $26.

  The 10 writers Michelle Dean surveys in her new book — Dorothy Parker, Mary McCarthy, Joan Didion, Hannah Arendt, Susan Sontag and Nora Ephron among them — were variously called “sharp” throughout their lives. The epithet described a forceful mode of speaking and writing. But it was also used as a rebuke: “Sharp” implied speaking and writing out of turn; behaving improperly, even rudely.

  But these women more than held their own in the boys’ club of American letters. They wrote books and articles for The New Yorker and other prestigious outlets and made argument a way of life. “Through their exceptional talent, they were granted a kind of intellectual equality to men other women had no hope of,” Dean writes at the beginning of “Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion.”

  Combining biography and criticism, Dean is often shrewd in her judgments. If early chapters on Parker and English journalist Rebecca West feel thin, Dean does show that these figures were nobody’s victims. The book picks up steam with Arendt and the debate over totalitarianism and the Holocaust. (Arendt covered the trial of Nazi Adolf Eichmann and wrote “The Origins of Totalitarianism.”)
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  Arendt found an unlikely ally in novelist and critic Mary McCarthy, a central figure here. McCarthy’s fiction (“The Group,” “Cannibals and Missionaries”) has not aged terribly well, but she wrote memorable sentences and literary criticism still worth reading. She was a notorious talker who shined in social settings yet had to put up with being called catty. Her critics, Dean writes, “did not like what she saw when she looked at the world, or at least they found her somehow impolite for recording it in prose.”

  Film critic Pauline Kael, who got up everybody’s nose, was also accused of impoliteness. It’s a silly charge, of course — an instance of a woman being called out for behavior that would go unremarked upon in a man. In the New York literary world where most of these figures circulated, writing criticism meant pulling no punches.

  Central to the arguments of their time, these writers are canonical figures, whose writing endures, period. Dean could stress this more robustly. Sontag’s musings on high culture were passionately discussed, while Joan Didion brought a cool touch to her reportage about California and elsewhere. Janet Malcolm’s controversial writings have called into question the very nature of journalistic practice.

  Others, like Renata Adler, who famously eviscerated Kael in a New York Review of Books takedown, suffered a decline in reputation — though she is now enjoying a much-deserved revival with reissues of her nonfiction and the cult novels “Speedboat” and “Pitch Dark.”
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  Dean is sometimes at pains to place these figures in relationship to the feminist movement of the late 1960s and early ’70s. “I ran into quite a lot of people who wanted to cut these women out of history precisely because they took advantage of their talents, and did so without turning those talents to the explicit support of feminism,” Dean writes.

  None were cause joiners in the conventional sense. Spectators and commentators, yes; sloganeers, no. Didion took on the politics of feminism in a 1972 essay. She found much what she heard to be childish if not naive. “These are converts who want not a revolution but ‘romance,’ ” Didion wrote. Here was another example of the sharpness that Dean finds in her subjects: a certain ruthlessness.

  Dean hardly underplays the sexism and the condescension meted out to Kael and Co. “But sisters argue, sometimes to the point of estrangement,” she observes. The strength of “Sharp” lies in the way Dean stands up for the “individual personality” of each of her subjects. And they were individuals, all.
  By Matthew Price
  Special to Newsday

• Los Angeles Review of Books
  https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/sharp-but-narrow/
  Word count: 1728

  QUOTED: "Dean tells the stories she chooses to tell well, and Sharp is an accessible and smart introduction to some of the most interesting prose writers of the 20th century. The legacies of writers such as Dorothy Parker and Joan Didion are safe in Dean’s hands, and she has done important work by illuminating the biographical and social continuities between her subjects."
  "But it is a shame that a book with so much potential and ambition, a book that seeks to define a century of American literary and intellectual history formed by women, is so narrow in its sense of that history."

  Sharp but Narrow

  By Jacquelyn Ardam

  APRIL 19, 2018

  MICHELLE DEAN’S Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion is an ambitious book. It tells the stories of 10 women known for their influential writing on politics, literature, film, philosophy, theater, and culture. These are women with wit, skill, and drive, women who shaped the cultural conversations of their time, women whose writing we still read. Dorothy Parker, Rebecca West, Mary McCarthy, Hannah Arendt, Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, Janet Malcolm, Renata Adler, Pauline Kael, and Nora Ephron: these names will likely be familiar to LARB readers. While some of these writers were friends (Arendt and McCarthy) and some were foes (Kael and Adler), they indisputably have much in common, and Dean makes a strong case for reading their lives and careers alongside one another. They were bold, smart, and opinionated fellow travelers in “a world that was not eager to hear women’s opinions about anything.”

  Sharp’s dramatis personae is substantially similar to Deborah Nelson’s in her recent Tough Enough (which I reviewed for LARB last year): Arendt, McCarthy, Didion, and Sontag appear in both books. But while Nelson’s book is a rigorous academic study of these writers’ work, Dean’s is an overview, pitched to a more general audience. She is as interested in the lives of its subjects as she is in their writing, and provides a useful introduction not just to her writers’ careers but to the legendary literary establishments and institutions of the 20th century that they worked within and against: the Algonquin Round Table of the 1920s, the Partisan Review of the 1930 and ’40s, The New Yorker in the 1970s and ’80s. The downside to Dean’s focus on the lives of her subjects is that their writing sometimes takes a backseat to their lives. I would have appreciated more time devoted to careful readings of West’s journalism and less to her relationship with H. G. Wells, more analysis of McCarthy’s best-selling novel The Group and less of her marriage to Edmund Wilson.

  When Dean does get down in the weeds and engage with what these writers actually wrote, she often does it quite well, and the book’s strength is in its accounts of debates among public intellectuals. For example, she handily sketches the cultural conversations surrounding Hannah Arendt’s 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem, carefully parsing Arendt’s complex argument about “the banality of evil” as well as the arguments of prominent figures, including Norman Podhoretz and Gershom Scholem, who opposed it. She also catalogs, with great zeal, Pauline Kael’s many debates with male film critics, from Siegfried Kracauer, who she felt “turned [his] own preferences into a monomaniac theory,” to Andrew Sarris, whose auteur theory she eviscerated in her infamous essay “Circles and Squares.” Instead of reading film narrowly through the lens of its director, Kael argued for a pluralistic approach to her subject:

  I believe that we respond most and best to work in any art form […] if we are pluralistic, flexible, relative in our judgments, if we are eclectic. […] Eclecticism is not the same as lack of scruple; eclecticism is the selection of the best standards and principles from various systems of ideas. It requires more care, more orderliness to be a pluralist than to apply a single theory.

  Dean shares Kael’s talent for writing clearly and forcefully. In glossing “Fantasies of the Art-House Audience,” first published in Sight and Sound in 1961, Dean describes Kael’s “deepest insight as a critic”: “[S]he believed that those who insisted on watching foreign films, who believed themselves to thus be watching a higher and better sort of art when they eschewed the popular movie houses, were full of it.” This sentence’s careful assemblage of subordinate clauses, which collapses with the snap of the phrase “were full of it,” is delightful: Dean can deliver a zinger as sharp as those of her any of her subjects.

  But Sharp is, in many ways, a missed opportunity. Dean opens with the claim that she has “gathered the women in this book under the sign of a compliment that every one of them received in their lives: they were called sharp.” In the next sentence, she elaborates: “The precise nature of their gifts varied, but the had in common the ability to write unforgettably.” Dean goes on to position her writers as “proof positive that women were every bit as qualified to weigh in on art, on ideas, and on politics as men,” and writes that “[t]he longer I looked at the work of these women laid out before me, the more puzzling I found it that anyone could look at the literary and intellectual history of the twentieth century and not center women in it.” I agree with Dean on this point. However, the book ultimately offers an exceedingly narrow view of what the “literary and intellectual history of the twentieth century” actually looked like.

  Dean acknowledges in her introduction that many of the women she writes about “came from similar backgrounds: white, and often Jewish, and middle-class.” Ultimately she is not very interested in investigating the way that these similarities affected and enabled their writing, and fair enough: the book is focused on gender rather than race, religion, or class. But the effect of this choice is that Dean repeats the same injustices she professes to despise. She laments that, “[i]n a more perfect world, […] a black writer like Zora Neale Hurston would have been more widely recognized as part of this cohort, but racism kept her writings at the margin of it.” But this seems disingenuous, given that Dean herself has the power to recognize Hurston — along with a number of other women writers of color — as part of this cohort, to write her into the canon from which she’s been excluded.

  True, Dean does devote a few hurried pages to Hurston, focusing on a series of articles that she wrote during the 1950s about the trial of Ruby McCollum, a black woman on trial for murdering a white man. But instead of devoting serious time to Hurston, she praises and then dispenses with her quickly, claiming that she might have been, under different circumstances, thought of as a precursor to the writers of the New Journalism movement. But what if Dean did the work of restoring Hurston’s nonfiction legacy, well known and documented by academics, to a wider audience? What if she forcefully made this claim about Hurston’s connection to New Journalism herself? In addition to writing several novels and book-length anthropological studies, Hurston wrote for a number of national magazines, including the widely circulated Saturday Evening Post. Why not devote the same amount of attention to Hurston’s coverage of the Ruby McCollum trial as she does to Janet Malcolm’s coverage of the murder trial of Jeffrey MacDonald later in the book?

  Instead of breaking new ground and making previously unexplored connections between women authors, Dean elects to tell the same stories of elite, white, New York–based writers that have been told many times before. As I was reading Sharp, I made a list of the all of the women of color whose stories Dean might have told. Why not include a chapter on the pioneering journalist Ida B. Wells? Or, if Dean wanted to keep her focus on the 20th century, a chapter on Jessie Fauset, editor and writer at the influential NAACP magazine The Crisis? Or journalist Marvel Cooke, who was the first woman writer at the New York Amsterdam News in the 1920s, and the first African American to work at the Daily Compass in the 1940s? Why not bell hooks? Audre Lorde? Toni Morrison? Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga, whose anthology This Bridge Called My Back helped define a generation of women writers? Or Michiko Kakutani, whose sharpness is so legendary that her book reviews were the subject of a Sex and the City episode?

  Dean tells the stories she chooses to tell well, and Sharp is an accessible and smart introduction to some of the most interesting prose writers of the 20th century. The legacies of writers such as Dorothy Parker and Joan Didion are safe in Dean’s hands, and she has done important work by illuminating the biographical and social continuities between her subjects. But it is a shame that a book with so much potential and ambition, a book that seeks to define a century of American literary and intellectual history formed by women, is so narrow in its sense of that history.

  ¤

  Jacquelyn Ardam is a visiting assistant professor in English at Colby College.

  Sharp

  The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion

  By Michelle Dean

  Published 04.10.2018
  Grove Press
  384 Pages

  BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY GENDER & SEXUALITY

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