Author2Author: E. Lockhart & Megan Crane, pt. 3

The conversation continues, as E. opens Megan up on the subject of their mutual backgrounds in academia before pursuing careers in commercial fiction...

E. Lockhart: Back to hegemony, blah blah blah. We both got doctorates in literature (you at the University of York, me at Columbia), and then turned to writing commercial fiction for women and girls. To use terms from the Jennifer Weiner/Meg Wolitzer discussion, we are "pink ladies" who were trained to be "gray" ones--or at least, to analyze the gray ones. In English as a Second Language, which follows your protagonist through a year in a graduate literature program, your heroine argues that literary theory is "obtuse, circuitous, impossible stuff" that poisons a grad student's love of books. "It's the tragedy of higher education!" she yells. And when she completes her masters thesis, she feels empty--but the next moment feels amazed at herself: "I did this." She decides to pursue the doctorate.

So: tell me where you stand on the benefits of your scholarly training. And then, how you moved from academia to commercial fiction. Give me the drama, the angst, the horror, the triumph, the regret.

Megan Crane: The truth is that I was a dreadful graduate student--like the protagonist in my book, I hated literary theory. I hated the pulling apart of books, the close reading of them. What I loved about books was getting lost in them, not locating myself by ranting about this or that scholarly theory. Obviously, with this attitude, I was never really meant to be an academic. So I think everything worked out for the best!

The "gray" and "pink" ladies have been duking it out in my brain since the seventh grade. Seventh grade was when I discovered my first romance novel and so it was also when I started to realize that there were certain books one was supposed to apologize for reading. I doubt I'm the only college grad who, because it was so important to her to be viewed as smart and interesting, hid all her paperbacks in her bedroom and proudly displayed the Riverside Shakespeare and collected works of whoever in the living room. Graduate school was in a very real sense an extension of this battle. I think I wanted to prove to myself that I could make it on the "highbrow" road, despite the fact my heart was very much on the "lowbrow" path.

I'm so conflicted about even using these terms, of course-- pink/gray or lowbrow/highbrow are just ways of dismissing a primarily female body of literature. And while I applaud when the Jennifer Weiners of this world defend commercial fiction, I know that I internalized that same snobbery a long time ago. Family members have referred to my writing career as the "frivolous" thing I was doing on the side while pursuing the (presumably) more important doctorate; at a party once, I was told that while my book might make for good beach reading the reader generally preferred "real" books. There's the sense that publishing pink doesn't count as much as publishing gray, and as much as I might rage against that idea, there's the part of me who was scolded for reading "that kind of book" in the seventh grade who kind of agrees. After all, I wrote my book when I was supposed to be working on chapters for my dissertation--it was my own, personal guilty pleasure. And everyone knows that you ought to be ashamed of your guilty pleasures, right?