Then Came You - Jennifer Weiner [139]
The depressing part is that, even after bestselling female authors pointed out the issue, even after the numbers confirmed that, yes, Virginia, there is a problem, the Times hasn’t changed…in fact, the paper seems to have dug in its heels and gotten even worse (double reviews for Elmore Leonard and John le Carre, nothing at all for Terry McMillan; feature on guy who wrote dopey self-help book The Four-Hour Work Week, no profile of Karen Russell, whose Swamplandia! has been one of the most-praised novels this year). When Jennifer Egan won the National Book Award, the Los Angeles Times decided that big news wasn’t that she’d won but that Jonathan Franzen had lost. The paper illustrated its story about Egan’s victory with a shot of Franzen, later offering the explanation that it simply couldn’t find a current shot of Egan. Because…its Internet was broken?
It’s a bad situation and one that, I’m sorry to say, seems unlikely to improve in my lifetime. But I have daughters…and, because I have daughters, I don’t think I have the luxury that some of my chick-lit colleagues claimed, the privilege of sitting prettily on the sidelines and saying, “Oh, yes, well, it’s terrible, and of course girl books deserve as much attention as boy books, but I can’t fix it, so who wants to hear about my juice fast?” I’d like to leave the world a better place than I found it, and if one of my girls ends up a writer, I'd like to believe that things will be a little more fair—that there won’t be the immediate assumption that whatever they’ve written is less worthy than it would be if they were men.
Table of Contents
Part One: Sweet and Sour
Jules
Annie
Bettina
India
Jules
Annie
Bettina
India
Jules
Annie
Bettina
Part Two: Great Expectations
India
Jules
Annie
Bettina
India
Jules
Annie
India
Part Three: Then Came You
Bettina
Jules
India
Bettina
India
Jules
Annie
Bettina
2017
Acknowledgments