Today I ran across this interesting article about Jennifer Weiner’s dust-up with a bookstore in Boston. Apparently, the bookstore owners asked her to give a reading without any curse words. It’s not like Jennifer is Richard Pryor. Her work reflects a sort of average diction. The work “fuck” comes up here or there, but not generally as a transitive verb—if you know what I mean. Anyway, Jennifer is now #1 on the NYT list, so obvs this didn’t hurt her, but it’s still something worth blogging about. I was once told to tone down the language. It took place at the public library in Phoenix. I won’t say that I was scarred for life by the incident, but I still remember the moment.
If you know my work, you’ll know that there are probably a grand total of seventeen curse words in my whole oeuvre. But about three of them occur in one of my favorite readings from The Untelling. I am speaking of the scene when the girls come home to find their crazy mom has locked them out of the house. The rebellious older sister curses up a tiny storm over this. But, I like to read the scene because it has a lot of dialogue and it’s kinda funny.
After I read this scene, a woman raised her hand. “Why did you put so many curse words in your book. Are you that kind of person or did your editor force you to be obscene to try and sell a book?” I was shocked. Obscene? A little naughty, maybe.. but obscene?
Despite the fact that I knew I wasn’t in the wrong, I felt oddly ashamed. The closest I can come to describing it is to say that I felt the way you do when you are all dressed up looking cute and someone tells you that you are showing too much cleavage or your dress is too short. I use this example because her criticism felt very gendered. I have been to so many readings by men who curse like they invented profanity. But when it comes to women writers, people are way more likely to try and make you reign it in.
After that experience at the library, I started feeling weird reading that section. I often ask my host before I go on the mike, “Is this place conservative? Can I say ‘fuck’ here?” That one woman in Phoenix with her bitter-orange complexion hsd given me a complex. She somehow tapped into the residue of my conservative southern upbringing. I spent so much of my life trying not to be a pretty little girl, living in pretty little box, and I had let a judgemental stranger stuff me back in.
About a year or two ago, I gave a reading in Atlanta. For the theme of the reading, it made sense to read the scene when Aria gets into a fight with her crack-addict neighbor in the front yard. And, you can bet there’s some spicy language there. I started my worrying about saying “motherfucker” in a public place and a friend said, “Listen. They invited you here as a writer. They didn’t ask you here to be a nice girl.” He was right. If I am woman enough to write the book, I am woman enough to read it out loud.

I have heard back from many of the members of Team T and now it’s time to figure out what to do with their feedback. This is something that lots of writers deal with, particularly those who work in workshop settings. Of course, the big difference between Team T and a typical workshop is that I had the luxury of choosing the members of Team T and there is no one on the team whose opinions I don’t value. Below is a sort of guide to how I process feedback. (It’s applicable to the workshop setting if you first weed out the people who you don’t value.)