Studying creative writing at a tertiary level is something that hasn’t been around long, in comparison to say, studying literature in university. The difference in the prescribed reading seems to be that whilst literature subjects dictate their students become versed the great and famed writers of centuries gone, creative writing seeks to get it’s students into ‘niche’ writing. Which is why, at age 17 when I started a major in creative writing at Uni, I was plunged into a world of writers I had never heard of. These writers were most interested in the intricacies of words, the way sentences flowed on the page and the way one paragraph complimented the one before it. Many of these writers lived locally, were only just getting published, and weaved their way into the local writing scene through teaching, festivals, and local events. They were published often by the university itself, did public readings at local bookstores, and became known (I won’t say ‘famous’) by publishing a number of short stories and essays before finally producing their first novel. To be perfectly honest, most of these names have faded from my mind, other than the writers that tutored me personally. I was always a little excited to come across their published work in Borders, sitting unobtrusively on the shelf in accordance with their place in the alphabet.
As you might imagine, this kind of writing was the kind we were encouraged to produce. It was not the stuff of generic, topical fiction, but (what often seemed) a mystery of the power to wield words, weaving magical patterns with verbs, nouns and adjectives. It was the poetic more than the explanatory that mattered.
In creative writing classes, there were writers that were respected; Helen Garner, Annie Dillard, Jeanette Winterson, and writers that weren’t; John Grisham, Bryce Courtney, Jodi Picoult. And, like any niche area, there were unspoken rules of what you could and could not read, what was quality, and what was trash.
After plunging myself into this world for three and a half years, it’s no surprise that I came out somewhat of a ‘book snob’. I snubbed generic fiction, smiling politely when one of my friends told me what a great book they’d just read, like Memoirs of a Geisha or something else in the top 20 reads at Borders. I threw out all but a handful of my ‘chick lit’, bemoaning the days when I thought that Meg Cabot and Monica McInnerney were ‘good writers’. I worked my way through some middle ground in the years that followed, with books like Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye and Barbara Kingsolver’s Poisonwood Bible. Then, when I got depressed last year, at a point where things like what books I read where the last thing that mattered, I let my standards fall to the lowest of lows and read the entire Twilight series. It was mostly out of curiosity, but I won’t deny that although I’d never read anything by Stephenie Meyer for the quality of the writing, that didn’t mean that I didn’t enjoy them. A little.
Jodi Picoult, however, is one author that I had vowed I’d never read. Not after the number-one-best-seller-ever-second-person-is-reading My Sister’s Keeper, not even after several of my friends offered to lend me one of her books. That was until last week. One of my friends offered to lend me Sing You Home, prefacing it with the fact that it was a ‘gay book’ about a couple trying to have a baby via IVF. I glanced at it with some curiosity and thought why not? At least, if it was crap, I could honestly say that Jodi Picoult was a terrible writer, and I’d never read another one of her novels again.
Well, after a few pages I was hooked. I read around 50 pages a day, and finished it in just over a week. The first part of the story follows a couple, Max and Zoe, who have tried to have a baby for ten years via IVF and have two miscarriages and a stillborn. The next part of the novel details Max and Zoe’s divorce, and Zoe’s meeting and falling unexpectedly in love with Vanessa, a counselor at the local high school who hires Zoe (a music therapist) to help a suicidal teenager, Lucy. In the meantime, Max has moved in with his millionaire religious brother and his wife. After a car crash, Max becomes a born-again Christian and begins attending a conservative, right-wing church run by a rich, dominating pastor who dictates the lives of his ‘flock’. At the same time, Zoe and Vanessa get married in Massachusetts, the neighboring state to Rhode Island where the novel is set, which doesn’t recognized gay marriage. When they decide they want to have a baby, Zoe realizes that there are still three frozen embryos at the IVF clinic that they could use to attempt to have a child together. All she needs is Max’s permission to use the embryos. After discussing it with his pastor, Max is convinced that Zoe and Vanessa are unfit parents to parent a child since they are homosexuals who are ‘an abomination’ in God’s eyes and ‘living in sin’. Under the sway of his pastor, Max sues Zoe for custody of the ‘pre-born’ children, with the intention of giving them to his infertile brother and his wife to raise instead, in a ‘traditional Christian family’ with a mother and a father.
Let me say straight up; you don’t read Jodi Picoult for the flow of the words of the page, the sentence structure, the poetic nature of her writing. She is not that kind of writer. But upon thinking about this, I don’t think that that makes her any less of a writer than the niche writers I spent my Uni degree studying. It’s just writing for a different purpose. And Picoult can certainly tell a story. I didn’t read this novel because it was about gay rights, I read it because the characters and relationships and issues were so pressing and real that I couldn’t put it down. It was less important that Zoe and Vanessa were a lesbian couple than the relationships between and around them and the issues that flared up in the plot. It was central, of course, to the plot itself that Zoe and Vanessa be gay, or it would have been and entirely different story. But what I appreciated most about Sing You Home is how Picoult could write about a gay couple and gay rights without having it be a ‘gay book’, because it simply wasn’t. It was a book about relationships, gay, straight, or otherwise. Yet at the same time, it was nice to have Zoe and Vanessa’s relationship existent in the novel, amongst the others, amongst life, because that’s how I see gay relationships, or gay people in life in general. Not existing in their own little bubble, but as part of the world like everyone else.
As for the religious right vs. gay rights factor that took up a huge part of the novel, I find it difficult to really identify this with anything that I’ve seen in my own life. Maybe it’s because Australian’s simply are not as vocal as American’s seem to be, but I’ve never seen or heard of a church or people like the ones that represented Christianity in Sing You Home. They insisted that they weren’t ‘anti-gay’ and yet it was clear that they were (obviously Picoult intended to show them as hypocrites). Yet there was a small part of me that was angered by the ignorance and saddened by the way the character Max was twisted by people controlling his beliefs. Yet it didn’t really ring true with anybody that I’ve seen or heard of, other than one (American) man I once heard talk at church. I wonder, a lot, whether other than going to a gay church, whether gayness and Christianity can be reconciled. Can I go to church and be out without people praying the gay away? The church I sometimes go to is a far cry from the one in Picoult’s novel, and yet I still hear people talking against gay marriage. And yet on the same day, I’ll hear or see someone I know is a Christian advocating for gay marriage, and think ‘maybe not all is lost’. Most of my close Christian friends are pro same-sex marriage, which is incredibly heartening for me after struggling with this stuff for the last few years.
I’m not lining up for the next Jodi Picoult novel. I’m planning to move on and try and sample some different writer’s, like Joyce Carol Oates and Jonathan Safran Foer. But that certainly doesn’t mean that I don’t intend to read another Picoult down the track. Sing You Home wasn’t a Pulitzer prize winning novel, and it probably won’t be put on any university book lists (unless it’s a gender studies class), but it’s definitely shaken me out of my book snobbery. No longer will I shake my head at the next Anita Shreve I see being read on the train. I might even read one myself.
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