My New Theory On Respect
Eloisa James (aka Mary Bly) is a NYT bestseller, a highly regarded romance writer and a Shakespeare scholar and professor. She’s married to a professor. She is the daughter of an award-winning poet father and a literary writer mother. When she originally wanted to expose her secret life and let her academic colleagues at Fordham University and the rest of the world know she wrote romance, in addition to all those really interesting academic papers, the head of her department begged her not to talk.
In her recent self-outing in the NYT Op-Ed page she lobbied for respect for the romance genre. She won the gratitude of some and the ire of others. Many folks were upset, and continue to be, of what they sensed was a feeling of shame hidden behind her words. One strong voice in the ire camp is a fellow professor who now refuses to speak with her. At the start of her career, her husband was embarrassed by her writing choice. Even after she hit the NYT list, her mother told her she wrote trash.
Whether you like her work or not - hell, if you don’t like her as a person for some reason - you have to admire her accomplishments and feel a twinge of sympathy for the barriers she’s had to jump over to get what she wants. After hearing her speak - twice - over the weekend what is clear is that she isn’t perfect and doesn’t pretend to be. She didn’t ask to be the poster child for romance. She’s even comes off a bit shy and uncomfortable with her spotlight role the media have given her.
My new theory is this - let’s stop asking for respect or complaining about the lack of it. Let’s just decide we’ve earned it, or should have by now, and move on. Enough whining. Enough of the "it’s not fair" mentality and anything that sounds like it. Eloisa James somehow rose above all of this and is quite successful. The rest of us can too. Write the best book you can and ignore the rest. And, for heaven’s sake, stop all the bitching or maybe, just maybe, we haven’t earned it after all.
May 25th, 2005 at 7:16 pm
Nodding and applauding. Maybe you should go to retreats more often.
May 26th, 2005 at 8:19 am
I never really paid attention to the whole dust up when she “came out” so to speak. But I did get the chance to meet her, sit with her at several meals, and hear her speak at Celebrate Romance and I was nothing but impressed with her sincerity, love for the genre, and apparent lack of overwhelming ego. I have nothing but respect for her and I don’t get (at all) why people were so upset over the whole thing. It’s not as though she said- or even acted- that she was better than anyone else. She just presented who she was and how it all came about. This is such a petty industry sometimes.
May 26th, 2005 at 8:37 am
Angie - I’m starting to wonder if it’s a petty indsutry all the time. But, when it comes to James there was a sense, before she came out, that she was ashamed of what she wrote. That her background in literary made her feel “bad” for writing romance. If you listen to her and the battles she fought in her family and in her self, those general thoughts people had might be true. Whatever her views in the past, she clearly is a strong advocate now and I admire her. I was, however, very jealous of how tiny she was.
May 27th, 2005 at 5:34 am
It’s a nice change to see a post praising someone, and showing that this isn’t always a petty genre.
Thanks!
May 27th, 2005 at 1:06 pm
Hmmm…I guess I didn’t get the sense that it was shame so much as self-preservation that kept her from “coming out” I mean, she was pretty much told that if it became public knowledge, she wouldn’t get tenure. And who can fault her for wanting to succeed in the academic world? But then again, with her family background, I guess it would be surprising if she didn’t feel a touch of shame about the whole thing. But again, who can fault her for that. How many romance readers out there have used a book cover to disguise what they’re reading at some point in their lives? Or when asked what they’re reading have laughed and said “oh some smut book I picked up” I think that people find it easy to cast stones at her because her “unveiling” happened in such a public manner but I firmly believe that most romance readers have been embarassed about it at some point in their reading lives.