The first real book I ever read was Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. I read it simply because, in the stubborn way of a 12-year-old, I wanted to read the longest book in the library. It was kind of the librarian to point me towards Mitchell rather than Tolstoy, because I found myself in Scarlett O’Hara in a way I didn’t even realise was possible in literature.
I was too young to understand some of the more controversial nuances of the representations of slavery, and I probably missed a lot of the political and historical critique, but I was not too young to know that Scarlett was a literary character of rarity. I was used to reading Baby-Sitters Club and the Star Wars expanded universe; this sort of character depth was breathtaking. A smart, ruthless, ambitious and passionate woman, who loved men but didn’t need them? I was in heaven. I felt that Mitchell knew me, knew us as women, knew our weaknesses and our strengths and our hard and soft places and wrote them for us to celebrate ourselves in.
The next time I fell in love with a book, it was for the work itself. I was 16 when I read On the Road. I fell for the words. The images. The energy in them. Kerouac wrote the text in three weeks, on a continuous reel of paper, single-spaced to save time. That energy is in the text – it grabs you and drags you along with it. You want to taste it, it’s so visceral.
I read more Kerouac, The Dharma Bums my favourite, and then I read Cassady and Ginsberg and Burroughs. I loved the beat generation and the men in it. I loved how they shared themselves with each other and their readers, generously. But I always had, and still have, the sneaking and sinking suspicion that there would have been no place for me in that world. There were no Scarlett O’Haras in the beat world. There were women, certainly, but they felt like cardboard cut-outs, something to move around, admire, shift gently out of the way when necessary. In fact, the only women Kerouac and Ginsberg seemed to genuinely respect were their mothers.
I looked. I looked hard. I read female beat writers Carolyn Cassady, Edie Parker and Hettie Jones and they felt more like watchers than participants; muses perhaps, facilitators maybe, but not respected equals. These talented women, some of whom wrote incredible and revolutionary prose, were “the wives”, barely acknowledged by their male peers. They wrote about their identities in relation to the men around them and I wanted more than that – I wanted to read them as writers. And I wanted them to write women. I found the beat women as outsiders in offside compendiums, as afterthoughts and even instigators, but rarely as the orchestrators and creators of their own place in literature.
It is quite a conflicted place to be – looking into a world you love and realising there isn’t really any space for you in it. It’s hard to be content in a place where you sense you aren’t respected, liked or loved. As a writer, I solved my dilemma by writing my own beatnik fiction, We Ate the Road Like Vultures, and writing myself into the world. I realise that Kerouac may well have been indifferent to my writing, but I have had to make my peace with that – and I’ve inserted myself in a way that works for me, with a female character that embodies the devil-may-care attitude of the beat way but with that unique and innate wildness that women have. My beatnik O’Hara.
I imagine it isn’t as easy for readers who aren’t writers. The Guardian’s own list of 100 greatest English language novels of all time had a mere 21 written by women. How many had strong female characters? How many had lead characters of colour? Or with a disability? Or who identified as anything other than cisgender and straight?
The literary world has evolved to be more inclusive – both in terms of the writers and the characters – but it is completely possible to fall in love with a world in which you cannot find a place for yourself? It is jarring to find yourself in love with a world that doesn’t seem to love you back, and this can be discouraging to readers and writers alike. Every reader deserves to find themselves in fascinating and difficult characters in genres they identify with. Reading should be pleasurable as well as challenging, immersive, not just standing outside a window looking in.
- Lynnette Lounsbury’s novel We Ate the Road Like Vultures is out now through Inkerman & Blunt