There is a paradox at the heart of Adrienne Miller’s memoir, In the Land of Men. On the one hand, it’s an account of her becoming the first female literary editor of US Esquire at the end of the 90s. On the other, it’s really about her relationship with David Foster Wallace, then arguably the pre-eminent American novelist of his generation until his death in 2008. The paradox (for a feminist reader, anyway) is that, while you want to celebrate the story of a woman carving out a space in a culture of male entitlement, there’s no escaping the guilty sense that the book becomes a great deal more lively once the famous male writer takes centre stage.
Miller is well aware of this, of course. Much of the book is about the gradual formation of her feminist awareness and the tensions inherent in her professional position (a male colleague tells her “everyone wondered” whom she had slept with to get the job). Suddenly, at 25, she finds herself with a certain amount of power in the literary world – “Esquire had been the chief platform for American short fiction from the 40s through the 70s” – while on the other side of the equation are male writers who can’t even comprehend the notion of taking editorial suggestions from a woman. One of “the most famous and successful authors in the world” responds to her edits via his agent: “WHY is this person bothering me with this? Tell her the story is FINISHED.”
“Now, my sensitivity about the ways in which male writers represented female characters – or, in the case of male journalists who wrote for men’s magazines, how they represented actual women – was ever increasing,” she writes of her early tenure at the magazine, weighing up her aesthetic versus her ideological responsibility. “It was not my job to be a censor. But I also knew that I needed the women in what I read to be as clever and as dumb, as noble and as wicked, as any man.” This may seem glaringly obvious now, but it’s easy to forget how far the literary culture of the late 90s lionised certain male voices, and how much character it must have taken for a young woman to assert her independence of thought against men who barely believed such a thing could exist. Wallace tells her his favourite Updike line is: “You never know for sure how girls’ minds work (do you really think it’s a mind in there or just a little buzz like a bee in a glass jar?)”
This is not the first nor the last abhorrently sexist thing Wallace says to her. He begins stalking Miller (there’s no other way to describe it) when she accepts a story of his for the magazine. He calls her several times a day to discuss his work, then asks for her home number so he can call her at the weekends. He consistently puts her down and patronises her; he is deliberately cruel and simultaneously needy.
In the book, she is curiously reticent about the shift in their relationship from professional to personal. Miller tries at times to confront his behaviour, but she offers frustratingly vague analyses of why her younger self found ways to excuse it every time. “Was I along for the ride? Yes, I guess you could say that I was.”
Ironically, it was Wallace who coined the phrase “great male narcissists” in a takedown of Updike, and Miller notes that most essays Wallace wrote about other writers were really “notes to self”. But too often she finds a way to blame herself for his narcissism; when he breaks up with her (and behaves like a spoilt brat), she thinks: “His life is worth more than mine.”
Her relationship with him comes to seem one more manifestation of the way men treated her professionally (“The truth: my career had been built around protecting male egos”). In one section she lists examples of the things men said or did to her in a professional context, ranging from creepy innuendos to putting their hands down her trousers – a reminder, in these post-#MeToo days, that there was a time when sexual harassment was so pervasive that women didn’t know how to recognise it. Wallace even jokingly suggests that “Is It Sexual Harassment Yet?” should be the title of her memoir.
“Had I actually been involved in an abusive relationship with David?” she wonders, towards the end of the book, but stops short of answering with the unequivocal “Yes!” that the reader is by now shouting, while rolling their eyes. Her tone is more often one of adulation: “David was an artist rare and true, and we needed him to write. We needed him to hold a mirror up to ourselves and tell us who we were.” But when she holds a mirror up to him, the appeal is difficult to see at this distance. “Who looks to the artist’s life for moral guidance anyway?” she asks, rhetorically, naming a number of brilliant men who turned out to be monsters, but it sounds like an ambivalent defence of that tired cliche, the troubled male genius.
Whether the book brings us closer to understanding Wallace or his work is debatable, but it is disappointing that in a memoir about a woman’s progress in a man’s world, it is his presence that dominates.
• In the Land of Men by Adrienne Miller is published by Ecco (£20)
