In the summer of 2012, I was on holiday in Montauk, the sea-sprayed town at the tip of Long Island in the US. I had just finished checking the proofs of my first novel and, in need of a break, I got up, made myself a cup of tea, and rooted around a sparse bookshelf for something to read. Caught in the hinge at the back was a dog-eared, coverless copy of Atlantic Magazine. I retrieved it, flicked through and found a long article that someone before me had taken a red pen to, vigorously underlining sentences and excitedly scribbling exclamation points in the margin beside certain paragraphs. Curious, I sat down to read.
This was my first sight of Anne-Marie Slaughter's now famous article, Why women still can't have it all. In personal, thoughtful and analytical prose, Slaughter articulated the challenges facing women who want a career and a family. She described how the demands of her life had become overwhelming, and in doing so she voiced the feelings of innumerable other women. Women who had come to the conclusion they didn't want to live that way. And, more likely, they didn't think they could.
Why women still can't have it all went viral and a storm of debate ensued. As I followed the controversy, I was surprised by the intensity and inaccuracy of some of the reactions to it. It is not, for example, a polemic against women who choose not to have children. Or a set of excuses for why some women give up work. It is an attempt to articulate the complexity of the issues surrounding work and motherhood, including the emotional ones, in a rigorous but humane way.
The following year Lean In arrived. Sheryl Sandberg's book is a powerful and challenging piece of work. I recognise its importance for women, perhaps particularly for younger women. But being in my forties at the time I read it, having a career and a family myself, having seen several of my brilliant friends have to adapt to (and their careers suffer because of) the demands of divorce, or children with problems, not enough money, or simply not enough sleep, I felt uncomfortable with, and a bit scared by, the emphasis on self-confidence and ambition rather than institutional change. I found myself to be Team Anne-Marie Slaughter all the way.
(Subsequently, after the tragic events in her life, Sandberg contributed further to the conversation, writing a very authentic and moving post on this Mother’s Day, 2016, including the line, “I did not really get how hard it is to succeed at work when you are overwhelmed at home.”)
Although I resist the generalisation that women’s fiction is always somehow autobiographical, it is true that my two novels have been inspired by events or ideas from my own life. I had thought about the issues debated by Slaughter and Sandberg a great deal so, when I met my editor to talk about a new book, I said, spontaneously as I recall, that I wanted to write something about a woman “who leaned in so far she fell over”. We laughed. She loved the line and, before I could point out that I didn’t have any more than that, she told me to get started. And that’s where things got tricky.
The wonderful writer, Katie Roiphe, makes a fascinating point in her review of Siri Hustvedt's novel, The Blazing World, that "the most provocative work on feminism might come in novels". While I agree that stories are often the most powerful way to dramatise an issue, an idea, however interesting or compelling, is not a story, just as a character who is a cipher for that idea may well not be believable. And so for months I stared at the computer screen and felt paralysed because I thought my book had to have a "message" I agreed with.
You see, although the dilemmas about career v family for women had planted a seed that would eventually grow into my heroine, Liddy James, it took many re-writes for me to put my own feelings aside and create a compelling story that was true to her. In fact, it was only by writing certain scenes and seeing how she behaved that she became clear to me. And her choices were not my choices! It started to be fun again. For, in the end, my book, The Real Liddy James, had to be written for pleasure, not politics.
The Real Liddy James by Anne-Marie Casey is published in the UK and Ireland by Hodder on August 25th and in the US by Putnam on September 20th, 2016
