sweet and sour

As I may have mentioned, while I'm a homekeeper at heart, I'm an academic by day and spend most of the year teaching and writing about women's literature. With academia comes highs and lows - as with any job, I suspect. This summer (so far), I've been on one long high (despite the revise and resubmit letter I received today for an article about Sylvia Plath that I have written), working on a new project about food writing, specifically the work of women food writers.

While I suspected this summer would be all about reading about eating, it started off with a reminder that I haven't left my old love of chick lit behind. In early May, I received an email from Joanne Rendell, whose written a new book entitled Crossing Washington Square. Her work, from what I gathered, was chick lit about academics, which, of course, immediately appealed to me. And, her new novel, which will be released in early fall, is about a chick lit scholar and a Sylvia Plath scholar who find themselves at odds and are forced to confront some misconceptions that they have about one another and the literature they love. Joanne contacted me to see if I'd be interested in reading an advanced copy. Of course! I replied.

You see Sylvia Plath was the author who really launched my whole graduate career. I had enrolled in graduate school in English only because I desperately wanted to complete a Museum Studies degree and work in the education department of a museum upon graduating. At the graduate school that I attended, you were only allowed to receive a certificate in Museum Studies if you were enrolled in a degree program. I picked English because I loved to read. Naive, I know.

Something curious happened, though, as I sat in on classes and began to teach. I found out that I really wanted to be a professor. And I found myself thinking critically about literature in a way that I never had before. I wrote a paper on Sylvia Plath and The Bell Jar (which I've since revised more times than I can count and which is the ill-fated essay that I spoke of earlier); I got interested in food and literature; and I discovered chick lit - a contemporary women's genre which is all about consumption (food, sex, shopping). Despite discouraging remarks from an older, female faculty member who noted I'd never get anywhere writing about "beach reading" (shame on her! bad feminist!), I wrote my dissertation on chick lit, looking at British and American novels - from Bridget Jones's Diary to The Cigarette Girl - and analyzing the way in which the books engaged with consumer culture, particularly women's advice manuals. So, I found it freaky when Joanne said her new novel was about a Plath scholar and a chick lit scholar - my self, split, it seemed. But, her book wasn't freaky at all. It's actually very, very good and speaks - on a fictional level - to a lot of the issues that I discuss in my own work.

So... how did I arrive at food memoirs this summer? In my disseration (which later turned into a book - out in paperback this month!), I had a chapter devoted to domestic-advice publications, like Martha Stewart's Living. My current project is slowly growing out of that chapter as I search for interesting food memoirs to read and write about. I've got a whole stack in my back room right now that I'm waiting to devour. It should prove to be quite a yummy summer.

Keep sweeping, Martha

Finished reading The Professors' Wives' Club and Crossing Washington Square by Joanne Rendell. Also read Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China by Fuschia Dunlop.