BISPACEDOTCOM

Androgynous statuette (KLQ2). Between circa 1st century BC and circa 1st century. Bone. 10,1 x 2,5 x 1,2 cm. Babylonia, Mesopotamia.

"Capitalism is temporary. Dykes are forever"

It has been said of me, in the pages of this newspaper, that I am a predator. The author of those words was hardly alone in her assessment. In 1998, nearly 20 years before the #MeToo movement, I published a book about my relationship with a famous and revered writer who sought me out when he was 53 and I was 18.

I won’t catalog here all the epithets — “stalker,” “leech woman,” “opportunistic onetime nymphet” — of which I and my work (“a tawdry boudoir confession”) were the objects that season. The story I told in my book, “At Home in the World,” was received in the literary press with near universal condemnation. This did not destroy my career or my emotional well-being, but it came close.

My crime — which earned me the dubious distinction of being, in the opinion of one prominent critic, the author of possibly “the worst book ever written” — lay in my decision, after 25 years of silence, to write a memoir in which I told the story of my relationship with a powerful older man.

…

Last fall, when word of Harvey Weinstein’s abuses of women in the entertainment industry overtook the press, followed by near daily revelations about other prominent and respected men accused of similar violations, I supposed this was the moment when my own experience might be seen in a new light. I thought my phone would ring.

The call never came. And though I believe that if the book I wrote 20 years ago were published today it would be received differently, it does not appear that enlightenment concerning the abuses of men in power extends retroactively to women who chose to speak long ago, and were shamed and humiliated for doing so. As recently as last fall — on the occasion of my having published a memoir about the death of my second husband, a book in which Salinger never appears — I was referred to as “the queen of oversharing.”

Oversharing. What does it say about us that a woman who speaks the truth of her experience should be dismissed for telling more than the world feels comfortable hearing? (And it is always a woman who will be accused of this; when a male writer confesses intimate details of his life, he’s brave, fearless, even brilliant. Consider, just for starters, Norman Mailer. Or, more recently, Karl Ove Knausgaard.)

…

I have also received letters and emails from women around my age, with a more familiar story to tell: of having received a letter long ago, around the age of 18 — an absolutely captivating letter, magical, even — composed in a voice they recognized as that of Holden Caulfield, though bearing an even more familiar name at the bottom of the page and containing words I could recite, I know them so well. It turns out that at least one of the recipients of these letters was carrying on her correspondence with Salinger during the very winter when I was living with him, so careful never to disturb his writing.