The XX Factor: What women really think.

The Real Atticus Finch and Laura Ingalls Wilder

The latest issue of The New Yorker is full of myth busting, and the targets are two cherished classics of children's literature. Malcolm Gladwell argues that Atticus Finch, star father and lawyer of To Kill a Mockingbird, is not a brave reformer, but an accomodationist .... (Read more in Double X.)

"All I Think About Is Money"

I keep meaning to try to enter the Sugar Daddy/Cinderella Complex discussion, and then somebody keeps posting and saying what I was going to say, only better, so at the risk of being repetitive, I agree with (most recently) Nina. The way I read it, Abby Ellin's quote and subsequent confessions of similar fantasies are more an expression of the ancient writer's wish—for a financial bailout—than a scary new anti-feminist expression of wanting and expecting a man to support you. (I mean, having freelance writers contribute a bunch of the essays in a book on women and money is bound to skew the sample in favor of acute need, and hardly seems representative.)

And it is an ancient writer's wish: Worthwhile writing is notoriously nonremunerative, as evidenced (in the unlikely event any of us need evidence) by the fact that Edmund Wilson wrote one bit of his prose on the back of an eviction notice. And I do think that historically, male writers have been perfectly willing to accept venture capital from wives and girlfriends, not to mention parents, patrons, friends, ski resorts (Hemingway was lured to Ketchum, Idaho, because the Sun Valley Lodge offered him a room of his own there, hoping his outdoorsman persona would lure summer tourists) and anybody else willing to bankroll their genius. Virginia Woolf notwithstanding, I think it's fair to say that historically, the sort of person who believes in a writer's potential unconditionally, and is willing to work to support it, often tends to be somebody like ... a wife. The late Studs Terkel relied on his wife's income when he was getting started in broadcasting: "I borrowed 20 bucks from her for our first date," he happily recalled, "I never paid her back." More recently, in Malcolm Gladwell's New Yorker piece about late bloomers, he discusses writer Ben Fountain, who quit practicing law to write fiction, and for many years was supported by his attorney wife, Sharon, to whom he is appealingly grateful. (I think one experience modern male writers may be enjoying is that the wives who support them now have more lucrative jobs than they once could have.) My own favorite, albeit fictional, example is the playwright-actor played by the playwright-actor Wallace Shawn in My Dinner With Andre. Back when he was a rich kid living on the Upper East Side, the Wally character marvels, "all I thought about was art and music," and in this he was strikingly like Ellin and her cohort, or really any writer who grew up in upper-middle-class comfort. But now that he's a middle-aged writer and knows how hard it is to keep the lifestyle to which he'd become accustomed, "all I think about is money." In the movie, Wally's girlfriend has taken a waitressing job to support the household.  "After all, somebody had to bring in a little money." (These quotes are based on a transcript I found on the Internet and hopefully are reliable—they exactly tally with my 20-year-old memory of the movie.)

Back when I was on book leave and had run through my advance, all I could think about was Wally's insight.

Really, there's nothing new, for a writer, in feeling desperate about money and wishing somebody would go out and earn some for you. There's nothing new about wanting and needing a patron. The dream of being supported, literally, may be a fantasy, sometimes, but sometimes it is a real need and results in, for example, a major piece of work. I don't worry that Abby Ellin's secret fantasy is representative of her generation; I do think it's representative of her profession. But it's interesting how hard it can be to determine whether the idea of a woman wanting a man to support her, in today's world, represents a retrograde arrangement or a bold new paradigm, and how much anxiety we feel about making that determination.