Sarah Waters’ Lesbianless Book
Tags: Sarah Waters Shock and horror, ladies! Sarah Waters’ next book will be without lesbians. “What is the world coming to?” I hear you ask, “has she suffered from the literal version of lesbian bed death, no longer feeling the attraction of the fairer sex?” No, actually “It’s just the way the story turned out,” she explained in an interview with the Times, recently. Oh, ok then.
She goes on to say, “There was an angry letter to the UK lesbian magazine, Diva, from a reader who thought I’d betrayed lesbians. She said she wasn’t going to buy my books, and neither were her friends. Which was a bit depressing and made me feel a bit crap.”
“Betrayed lesbians”? That’s a bit harsh, but not untypical let’s be honest.
There are, arguably, only two really great lesbian writers around at the moment; Waters and Emma Donoghue. What they write is up to them, we’ve just been spoiled by them and their attention to all things lesbian. Should they choose to write about monkeys in space, that’s their right/write (geddit??).
More important is that she has a book coming out in the Summer. I’ve researched and surfed until I’m blue in the face and can find nothing about the lesbianless tale.
Regardless, I’ll be chomping at the bit to enjoy Waters’unmatched writing ability.
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I can’t believe someone took the time and effort to write a letter to Diva expressing such a childish sentiment! Poor Sarah Waters. In fact, this could give rise to a new game: Take any book ever, and replace one male romantic-lead-type character’s name with a woman’s name… and see how the story turns out }:D
I remember a similar fuss when Jeannette Winterson’s book Written on the Body was released and the central character was ‘gender ambiguous’ … Grrrr…For the love of… Writers should be allowed write whatever the hell they want… fair play to Sarah Waters for taking that -marketplace- risk! The problem is not of Sarah Waters’ making… it is that the hetrosexual agenda has us so bombarded with straight fiction that we are all yearning for lesbian characters… and then, because there are so few, they’d better be happy in their sexuality and express it vigorously or else we are falling back down the hill again… invisible, repressed or psychotic, take your pick! We need more lesbian writers… unleashing their imaginations and producing a body of work we can love or loath.. and not to torment two writers with the overbearing responsibiity to tell all ‘our’ stories!
Jeanette Winterson had this too, but then again she had also gone off by then on a tangent all of her own. That said, she is still a beautiful writer, and neither Waters nor Winterson should have to write only lesbian focussed books.
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