Books&writers

There’s something of a self-effacing has-been humour to Crosley’s latest batch, acknowledging the middling decade that’s passed since her bestselling debut collection. That’s hardly to say the New York author’s life has been silent the last while – her second collection followed Cake by only a couple of years, and Crosley’s first fiction effort was optioned for film in 2016 – but both subsequent releases buckled a little under their sophomoric pressure, met with less enthusiasm from critics and readers alike. Look Alive Out There follows the pattern, unfortunately, and those who’ve spent a decade waiting for another cut from Crosley’s first slab will be left wanting.

It’s hard to fault an author for lacking enough drama in their day-to-day life to fill a riveting essay collection. Actually, as a longtime fan, I draw some comfort in knowing Crosley has arrived at a mostly pleasant point – the good-but-maybe-boring sunsoaked late morning that is a contented late-30s life. Either way, Crosley has a true knack for capturing humdrum, and essay format is just right for relaying her clever vignettes – brief peeks at personhood that should prove general enough for wide access. But Crosley caps the collection with its best piece: “The Doctor is a Woman,” her firsthand account of navigating modern fertility medicine. Now that I think about it, I wonder if we’ve landed on a bigger point here.

Top-down, a lot has happened in the last three years, and one deft way of ducking broad sociopolitical description is by looking for its telltale trickle-down instead – book publishing has always lapped at the run-off of civil unrest, and recent sales show that holds true today. There was the not-yet-sated ravenous taste for dystopian fiction that accompanied America electing its 45th president: Orwell flew from shelves and Atwood got a global bump care of The Handmaid’s Tale’s TV retelling; Huxley and Hunger Games and their all-too-imaginable monsters bought widely and beloved as well. Finally, speaking on all manner of records, we saw women. We saw so many women that I wonder if we can now finally retire “Women’s Writing” as its own genre: it seems silly to cast any net over so large and diverse a bounty now.

Every bookstore on Bloor had its own display: some such version of a spotlight table overflowing with the brightly covered, boldly titled tidal wave of women’s writers, and not just that – women’s essays. First-person dispatches from the female mystique that forged unity among our stock, a disheartening commonality born out of shared slights growing to include readership who could relate, and shocking the rest who just didn’t know it was still going on.

And so I find myself criticizing my criticism of Crosley, finding it almost impossible to focus a review of female essays that hasn’t been coloured by the last three years of the genre’s heyday – more of a renaissance, really, and inextricable from the resistance it’s built to bolster. Turning Look Alive Out There over in my hands, I realize this: at a time when so many women have been writing to change their world, Crosley wrote simply to catalogue hers.

Don’t get me wrong: any time a woman documents her daily reality, she is – whether it’s purposeful or the ultimate aim – also writing a compendium of daily affronts endured, so constant they can’t be separated from most any public interaction. You might hope that alone holds some ability to change the status quo. (Alas.) But any- way, more to the point, when and why and how the hell did we get permission?

For a long while the Didions and de Beauvoirs stood out because they’d gone and spoken loudly without any such approval or agreement; Atwood and Munro, too, on their side of the bookshelf, and Angelou & Christie & Woolf & Plath – names known well enough to fill one of those cool Helvetica listicle tshirts you see on every second person these days. If they formed the first front, these last several years have seen a second emergence – one more colourful, too, and crasser because we can be.

I spoke with Scaachi Koul last year, fresh off a press tour for her debut book of essays, One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter. Koul’s a hell of writer – raw and wry and gut-busting – but her collection had company. Waiting in her Toronto publisher’s lobby for our chat, I lost count of the number of just-released female essay collections I saw shining under spotlights in Penguin Random House reception.

We talked about that for a bit, neither shy to acknowledge that Koul had gone and published her debut when the book would, no matter its brilliance, be lobbed along with a glut. We couldn’t settle on who’d unhinged the floodgate, but the pointy-tongued Toronto writer had a good answer why:

“Suddenly it seems less navel-gazey to talk about yourself,” Koul said (and I’ll interject to remind that in this context “yourself ” is to say herself; a rather important distinction here). “Not that it should ever have been.”

Koul’s quote helps give a sense as to why women are writing, but the essay itself seems deserving of separate study. Perhaps there’s something to be derived from the pseudo-science landscape of the last decade or so, each new Facebook post bearing further proof our collective attention spans have dwindled to the size of a small rodent’s.

There’s that too, then: the timing thing; the way essays are parsed just right for filling our free moments. Crosley’s latest collection has a knack for fitting those sweet