The Books Briefing: Feminism, Womanhood, and Celebrity

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This week, Sophie Gilbert, a staff writer at The Atlantic, won the National Magazine Award for reviews and criticism (The Atlantic took home a bunch of other awards too). Sophie’s work has long circled the way women are depicted in pop culture, and her winning set of essays all explore the constraining categories that movies and television shows and celebrities propagate and, every once in a while, try to subvert. I’ll read anything by Sophie, but I particularly enjoyed her review of Mary Gabriel’s new biography of Madonna. The pop star’s life and changing persona have been “an exercise in reinventing female power,” Sophie writes. “That people are still arguing about her—over whether she’s too old, too brazen, too narcissistic, too sexual, too deluded, too Botoxed, too shameless—underscores the scope and endurance of Madonna’s oeuvre.”

The prize presented a good opportunity for me to chat with Sophie about what she’s reading and the books that she feels offer interesting pathways for thinking about feminism today.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic’s Books section:

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Gal Beckerman: Inspired by your winning essays, I’m curious if there are books about womanhood or girlhood and pop culture that you find to be particularly revealing.

Sophie Gilbert: So many! The gold standard, I think, is Melissa Febos’s 2021 book, Girlhood, which is part memoir, part cultural criticism, part historical analysis. We tend to romanticize girlhood and things that are “girly” as being somehow soft, cosseted, or frivolous, and yet the reality is that it’s often a time that is so much darker than that, filled with emotional violence and shock. Febos, who is somehow both a really poetic, lyrical writer and a bracing polemicist, makes the case that girlhood is when we learn to prioritize the feelings and beliefs of others over our own—a moment, for me at least, when so much of what I’m interested in begins. I also recently read, for the first time, Sheila Heti’s 2012 novel, How Should a Person Be?, which is a brilliant and slightly trollish work that replicates the constructed nature of reality television and parses 21st-century womanhood through The Hills, Dostoyevsky, and celebrity sex tapes.

Beckerman: How about biographies? Your Madonna essay managed to cover many eras of changing expectations for women and pop stars.

Gilbert: One of my all-time favorite autobiographies is Faithfull, Marianne Faithfull’s unflinching account of what it was like trying to make art as a woman whom virtually every single 1960s music icon wrote songs about. The muse trap is quite a pernicious one, I think. But for the Madonna essay, Mary Gabriel’s book was obviously an extraordinarily detailed, thorough, and persuasive work that also felt like a powerful defense of an artist who’s been hated since the absolute beginning. There was a book in 1991, The I Hate Madonna Handbook, that was prescient in terms of pointing to the future of celebrity discourse—it can’t decide if Madonna is a feminist or a slut, a wannabe “pop tart” or a shrewd self-marketer. And one of the books I really appreciated while thinking about the essay was The Madonna Connection, a 1993 book of academic essays on Madonna that identified her (correctly) as a political postmodern artist whose medium was power as much as it was music.

Beckerman: And are there any books you love that have helped you tap into a particular feminist perspective?

Gilbert: I absolutely adored Constructing a Nervous System, by Margo Jefferson, a memoir in which Jefferson looks at her own life through the lens of criticism. The project of both her life and her career as one of the few Black female cultural critics in the 20th century, she argues, has been the same: to identify the “center” of American culture and forcibly carve out space for other, dissenting perspectives. There’s a line I haven’t stopped thinking about since I read it: “Women’s anger needs to be honored—celebrated and protected—the way virginity used to be!” Can you imagine? It blows my whole brain up in such a satisfying way.

Beckerman: Finally, any one particular novel, new or old, that you find yourself lately pressing on friends and strangers?

Gilbert: I’ve mentioned this in the past, but a brilliant friend gave me Heartburn, by Nora Ephron, when I couldn’t read anymore after my twins were born, and it’s the perfect novel but also utterly radical in how determined Ephron is to get the last word. She was pilloried at the time for airing her family’s dirty laundry in public—ironic, because it was not her who dirtied it—and I’ve come to think of Heartburn since as forcing us to acknowledge that our entire canon of literature is missing half the story. It’s only relatively recently that women have had the ability to present their own narratives, and when they do, they’re critiqued in a way that men never are. (I just read a review of Rachel Cusk’s divorce memoir, Aftermath, that called her “a brittle little dominatrix and peerless narcissist,” and that was in 2012.) So I’m grateful, always, for all the women who refuse to be quiet, and who see the power in telling the story, as Ephron writes, and controlling the version of events that endures.

The Atlantic’s 2024 National Magazine Award Winners and Finalists

Read the stories that were recognized at this year’s ASMEs.

Read the full article.

What to Read

The Day the Earth Caved In: An American Mining Tragedy, by Joan Quigley

Quigley, the granddaughter of coal miners, grew up in Centralia, Pennsylvania, home of the nation’s worst mine fire. In her fascinating book, she returns as a trained journalist to investigate the origins of the still-ongoing burn, which began in 1962 after, some believe, a spark in a coal-mining shaft used as a makeshift garbage dump instigated an out-of-control blaze. For nearly two decades, Centralia’s residents seemed committed to collectively ignoring the fires, sulfurous steam, and fissures beneath their feet—until Valentine’s Day in 1981, when a 12-year-old was swallowed by an old tunnel that became a sinkhole in his grandmother’s backyard. The book exposes the background of the tragedy, taking in the perspectives of a local cook turned activist, a coal-magnate senator, and the handful of people who decide to remain while the town smolders. As an insider, Quigley can get the thorniest players talking while unpacking generations-old layers of working-class pride, corporate conspiracy, and the stakes of survival when an emergency becomes normalized. Ultimately, Quigley shows the collateral damage of living with a threat that is impossible to extinguish.  — Kelly McMasters

From our list: Seven books that will make you rethink your relationship to nature

Out Next Week

📚 Slouch: Posture Panic in Modern America, by Beth Linker

Your Weekend Read

Crying Myself to Sleep on the Biggest Cruise Ship Ever

By Gary Shteyngart

The ship makes no sense, vertically or horizontally. It makes no sense on sea, or on land, or in outer space. It looks like a hodgepodge of domes and minarets, tubes and canopies, like Istanbul had it been designed by idiots. Vibrant, oversignifying colors are stacked upon other such colors, decks perched over still more decks; the only comfort is a row of lifeboats ringing its perimeter. There is no imposed order, no cogent thought, and, for those who do not harbor a totalitarian sense of gigantomania, no visual mercy. This is the biggest cruise ship ever built, and I have been tasked with witnessing its inaugural voyage.

Read the full article.