Marge Piercy

[chanaleh]

Going around right now is this "top 15 authors that have affected you" meme, but I'm not doing that today. All I have for you on the topic of authors is this:

I just reread Marge Piercy's 1993 novel He, She, and It (I'm proud to say that my copy was sent to me by Ira Wood when I was doing some typesetting work for the Leapfrog Press, back in around 1998-2000... but anyway).

I'd forgotten how good it was. Really. I inhale books; but as a result, very often a book can move me greatly and then within a few years I have only the vaguest notion left, or none at all, of what lived and breathed between its pages. (Though I have to wonder if I so vividly cast Yod as Brent Spiner the last time. I can only assume that I would have.)

Then, I picked up my copy of Woman on the Edge of Time (published 13 years earlier, in 1985).

Again, I had retained zero memory of what it was even about. At first I found it woefully unpleasant, to the point of thinking to myself "Yeah, I'm giving this away after I finish, 'cause who needs to read this again?" But by last night, a good third of the way into the book, I was engrossed. So if you read it and hate it at first, give it time; it has more to say.

The thing that gets me is how similar, in a way, some of the themes/motifs are (well, except for the cyborg bit... and the Jewishness...) -- but they're handled very differently. I could say more about this if I had time (sorry if that's what you came here for! maybe later!), but I will just say this for now: While WOTEOT is still a fine book, it's very, very much an earlier book. The way her style and storytelling matured from one to the other is just... startling.

Which produced the further insight that I, personally, had damn well better get cranking on writing my first novel, so that I can eventually write my tenth. X-)

That is all.

Comments

[lillibet.livejournal.com]

I really love when you can see how an author's craft and thinking have changed over time. My favorite of these is how LeGuin's conception of death changed from The Farthest Shore, written when she was about forty, to The Other Wind, written thirty years later.

I've never read any Piercy--do you have any recommendations on where to start?

[chanaleh.livejournal.com]

I really think He, She and It is a fine place to start.

I haven't actually read many of her other novels (full list here). I did just read City of Darkness, City of Light (about the French Revolution) and found it... unfortunately really dull reading. :-/ Go figure!

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

*cheers you on* :)
*makes note of this book*

I want to say something more profound but work insists I do some.

[besamim.livejournal.com]

I enjoyed He, She and It too. To be sure, the golem-as-SF-motif had been done before, but I found this a fresh perspective on the idea, and more Jewishly-informed than most. I was also impressed with how Piercy was able to juggle so many SF and other literary motifs and genres--cyberpunk, post-apocalypse, utopia, la Résistance, folklore, romance--and somehow render all of it not only coherent, but also engrossing and satisfying.

As a side note: I was amused to find on Amazon, many years back, a customer review that lambasted the novel as the "logical end" of "radical feminism," in that "feminists have finally arrived with the creation of a 'programmable man' that will do their bidding." He (I'm reasonably sure "A Customer" is a "he") appears not to have read very closely, given that Yod, as a true A.I., is hardly confined to doing only others' bidding; the conclusion certainly makes that clear.

[infinitehotel.livejournal.com]

I'm always surprised more people don't reference her book Summer People. It's one of the most honest portrayals of poly I've seen in fiction.

[ladymondegreen.livejournal.com]

I love Marge Piercy. My mother handed me He, She, and It when I was about 15. I've recently enjoyed her Sex Wars, even if she did make me empathize with someone in a very sneaky way.

I've enjoyed just about everything of hers that I've read, and I frequently point people at her books and poems.

[davidfcooper.livejournal.com]

Her selected poems (http://www.amazon.com/Hunger-Moon-Selected-Poems-1980-2010/dp/0307594106/ref=rsl_mainw_dpl?ie=UTF8&m=ATVPDKIKX0DER) will be published in March 2011. I've asked my editors to get me a review copy.