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la_marquise) wrote2012-07-11 10:23 am
la_marquise) wrote2012-07-11 10:23 am
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Ms Cellophane
As I said last week, this is a good summer for new books, and for books that have become available outside their first place of publication. ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
gillpolack's Ms Cellophane was first published in her native Australia, and has been very hard to get elsewhere. Now, it's available to the rest of us in e-book form.
Gillian is a writer I admire hugely, and a writer who is not afraid to confront challenging issues. Ms Cellophane is a book about a challenge that many of us face: ageing while female. Western culture insists on eliding and disappearing women from the age of about 40 onwards, on treating us as less important, less visible, less valuable. Not because of any loss of ability, but simply on grounds of what we look like: we aren't as appealing, therefore we should be good and not impose.
It drives me insane, seeing so many intelligent people thrown away. It drives Gillian crazy too, so she wrote about it. Here she is, talking about her book:
Cellophane Time
Why did I write cellophane time into a fantasy novel? I was past that bizarre and unnerving period of my life by the time I wrote it. People had stopped walking past me and had returned to occasionally remembering I enjoyed dining with them. I was employable and visible. I had dealt successfully and rather unorthodoxly with my own cellophane issues, partly through my fiction, partly through teaching, partly through agitating on committees, and partly through the careful application of chocolate to those in need. When I reached forty it mattered that my job prospects had taken a giant dive and that I was single and that I couldn't get served in shops. By the time I reached forty-two, I had found my solutions.
I had my solutions, but the tendency of our society to demand a significantly lower and far less visible status for women over forty still annoyed me. Some of this annoyance was because I never seem to read main characters who are remotely like me in any of my favourite novels. Forty-two ought to be known for more than Douglas Adams' joke. Redoubtable women surrounded me at forty-two and still surround me now. Also redoubtable men. Some of the redoubtable men made it into novels: the redoubtable women never did.
I adore reading. I love books that are varied and tell many different stories. I don't mind if the vast majority of the people I read about have nothing in common with the people I know, but just sometimes it's nice to discover oneself in a piece of fiction. Or to see familiar scraps of lives. Or to experience through the written word challenges that are close to home and not all about someone else's life, with that someone else set at a perpetual twenty years younger.
I resolved to write a novel that was all about a woman in her early forties, entering her cellophane time. She discovers that Australian society sees through her, that most of the wonderful freedom and job satisfaction and being part of a community vanish from her daily existence. She is more vulnerable to bullying and to loneliness. She has to manufacture her own identity. I gave this experience to the protagonist quite intentionally. All the things we don't talk about. All the things we don't write about. I wanted to create a narrative from sequential silencings.
It happens to so many of us. It happens earlier and longer and differently to visible minorities or those with visible disabilities. Those who don't get to experience cellophane time at all are privileged and are seldom aware of their privilege. They need to have the opportunity to read about middle-aged women, too.
Most people seem to read Ms Cellophane as a charming light horror, rather suburban, with a touch of romance (today I'm describing novels like vintage wines - I ought to apologise for this, but I remain unrepentant). I find it delightful that readers love it and that it was a Ditmar finalist. I like this. It means writers don't always have to centre our stories on young men and women of majority culture. It means that not all fantasy has to be high adventure or include quest objects and kingship potential and dragons. A small fantasy set mainly in a single household, with a rather interesting mirror and other threats that readers may themselves have experienced can work.
Ms Cellophane will never be a standard novel. (None of mine are: I am usually non-standard in sneakier ways, though.) It will push boundaries and alert people to privilege very gently, for that's what it's intended to do. It won't do it by shouting in anyone's face or by winning prizes for unconventional thinking. This is because I'm tired of the half-hearted social change that's created through shock tactics, just as I was tired of novels that leave me on the sidelines, forever doomed to be boring.
Other people will win prizes for changing the world, but I'm very happy that readers take my novel as intense and as immersive and as something very much for them. The bottom line isn't my writing. The bottom line is that I was one of many, many readers who want to see fragments of their own lives occasionally reflected in their speculative fiction.
You can buy Ms Cellophane here.
gillpolack's Ms Cellophane was first published in her native Australia, and has been very hard to get elsewhere. Now, it's available to the rest of us in e-book form.Gillian is a writer I admire hugely, and a writer who is not afraid to confront challenging issues. Ms Cellophane is a book about a challenge that many of us face: ageing while female. Western culture insists on eliding and disappearing women from the age of about 40 onwards, on treating us as less important, less visible, less valuable. Not because of any loss of ability, but simply on grounds of what we look like: we aren't as appealing, therefore we should be good and not impose.
It drives me insane, seeing so many intelligent people thrown away. It drives Gillian crazy too, so she wrote about it. Here she is, talking about her book:
Cellophane Time
Why did I write cellophane time into a fantasy novel? I was past that bizarre and unnerving period of my life by the time I wrote it. People had stopped walking past me and had returned to occasionally remembering I enjoyed dining with them. I was employable and visible. I had dealt successfully and rather unorthodoxly with my own cellophane issues, partly through my fiction, partly through teaching, partly through agitating on committees, and partly through the careful application of chocolate to those in need. When I reached forty it mattered that my job prospects had taken a giant dive and that I was single and that I couldn't get served in shops. By the time I reached forty-two, I had found my solutions.
I had my solutions, but the tendency of our society to demand a significantly lower and far less visible status for women over forty still annoyed me. Some of this annoyance was because I never seem to read main characters who are remotely like me in any of my favourite novels. Forty-two ought to be known for more than Douglas Adams' joke. Redoubtable women surrounded me at forty-two and still surround me now. Also redoubtable men. Some of the redoubtable men made it into novels: the redoubtable women never did.
I adore reading. I love books that are varied and tell many different stories. I don't mind if the vast majority of the people I read about have nothing in common with the people I know, but just sometimes it's nice to discover oneself in a piece of fiction. Or to see familiar scraps of lives. Or to experience through the written word challenges that are close to home and not all about someone else's life, with that someone else set at a perpetual twenty years younger.
I resolved to write a novel that was all about a woman in her early forties, entering her cellophane time. She discovers that Australian society sees through her, that most of the wonderful freedom and job satisfaction and being part of a community vanish from her daily existence. She is more vulnerable to bullying and to loneliness. She has to manufacture her own identity. I gave this experience to the protagonist quite intentionally. All the things we don't talk about. All the things we don't write about. I wanted to create a narrative from sequential silencings.
It happens to so many of us. It happens earlier and longer and differently to visible minorities or those with visible disabilities. Those who don't get to experience cellophane time at all are privileged and are seldom aware of their privilege. They need to have the opportunity to read about middle-aged women, too.
Most people seem to read Ms Cellophane as a charming light horror, rather suburban, with a touch of romance (today I'm describing novels like vintage wines - I ought to apologise for this, but I remain unrepentant). I find it delightful that readers love it and that it was a Ditmar finalist. I like this. It means writers don't always have to centre our stories on young men and women of majority culture. It means that not all fantasy has to be high adventure or include quest objects and kingship potential and dragons. A small fantasy set mainly in a single household, with a rather interesting mirror and other threats that readers may themselves have experienced can work.
Ms Cellophane will never be a standard novel. (None of mine are: I am usually non-standard in sneakier ways, though.) It will push boundaries and alert people to privilege very gently, for that's what it's intended to do. It won't do it by shouting in anyone's face or by winning prizes for unconventional thinking. This is because I'm tired of the half-hearted social change that's created through shock tactics, just as I was tired of novels that leave me on the sidelines, forever doomed to be boring.
Other people will win prizes for changing the world, but I'm very happy that readers take my novel as intense and as immersive and as something very much for them. The bottom line isn't my writing. The bottom line is that I was one of many, many readers who want to see fragments of their own lives occasionally reflected in their speculative fiction.
You can buy Ms Cellophane here.
no subject
You know what makes me cross? The assumption that being young and female means you're good looking enough to get noticed and this then fades. Some of us never were, and got passed by before we even started to age visibly. From the level of not getting attention when trying to make a point in a social situation and then having some young bright thing make the exact same point to much appreciation, to the angry tuts that people offer when they walk into you while walking down the road - because apparently, if you are not good looking or otherwise unusual enough to stand out, it's up to you to be the one who ALWAYS takes evasive action, even if they aren't paying attention to where they're going. (I have noted that carrying a broom, or a larp weapon makes me noticeable enough to be worth avoiding).
Oh sure, I could have spent hours working out how the hell foundation cream works and exercising really hard to get a better figure, while wearing clothes that make me feel uncomfortable because they "flatter your figure" better but... why should I? It shouldn't BE this way.
Excuse me if I don't exhibit sympathy for the women who start to get overlooked or verbally abused when I've been facing since I was about 12.
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I have been walked into and glared at my whole life. I was too small, too skinny, too plain, too badly dressed, too female. It was always my fault. If I was noticed, it was all too often to be subjected to harassment. I don't want this for my god-daughter (now 21), my niece (8), my mother (81) or any woman I know.
That's why we need to write about it, about the ways in which being female is denigrated and undermined and damaged at all ages, in all races, whatever we look or sound like, whatever we do.
Common goal: that every woman should not be treated as you have been, or I have been, or Gillian has been. That we all get treated as people with a right to breathe.
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I'm interested and will check out the book. Thanks.
Anon
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And they hang out together.
Love, C.
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I FEEL my age, though, in the onslaught of media and societal attention to youth and beauty. I was always short but never small, never 'pretty enough' (thanks mom, for that bucket of insecurity). I was never noticed in THAT way, but now I notice it all around me. And I carry the fact of it with me and wonder what will become of me when I start to age more and more rapidly, when I finish my degree and am suddenly trying to get a job up against 20-somethings.
I suppose what I'm saying is, yes. YES to fighting the status quo and what society expects of us. YES to standing up and being heard.