"Why Isn't Jennifer Weiner Complaining More?" (VIDEO)
Tuesday, November 8(video by Laura Zigman)
Last summer, Jennifer Weiner and Jodi Picoult coined the word "Franzenfreude" on Twitter to question to describe the media's treatment of male literary novelists. Because Franzen was on the cover of Time magazine and received multiple New York Times write-ups and reviews, he became the de facto face of the male literary establishment. Their concerns were well-grounded: A later study turned up considerable bias against female authors in the media (although the New York Times Book Review's ratio of 1.9 men reviewed for every woman was amongst the least sexist in the business).
Skip to this year. Nothing much has changed in the literary world in terms of gender bias, or if it has it's too early to tell. On Monday, the website Book Riot ran an article asking the question, "Why aren't Jennifer Weiner and Jodi Picoult pissed at Jeffrey Eugenides?" Although he hasn't received quite the same level of attention in the literary world as Franzen did last year (excluding this Times Square billboard, paid for by his publisher), Eugenides's The Marriage Plot is this fall's big white male literary buzz book. So where's the outrage?
A mini-fracas erupted on Twitter, as Weiner (and later Picoult) questioned why Book Riot had not asked them for comments directly. "99 percent of the time I keep quiet about the lies and the insults," Weiner tweeted. "But not today." Weiner countered that she had talked about Eugenides on Twitter. Over the past year, she talked about many of the male literary darlings that the New York Times gave two reviews to (presumably pushing out space that could have been devoted to a female author). Someone asked if there wasn't any outrage because they didn't have their own books to promote right now -- but that clearly couldn't be the case, since Weiner put out a new book on October 31st and Picoult released a book in paperback this week.
The conversation on Twitter, unfortunately, quickly devolved into "Jennifer Weiner is complaining again!" Except that what she was complaining about this time was someone complaining that she wasn't complaining.
