Author Interview: Andi Buchanan on "It's A Boy"

By Sarah

Before I became pregnant, I wanted to have a boy. I can’t say that I envisioned myself the mother of a boy, I just couldn’t see myself as the mother of a girl. Boys are wholly other in so many ways and for me that was attractive. When I became pregnant, and as everyone told me day after day, month after month, that I was carrying a boy, my confidence in the idea of parenting a little boy lessened. I was surprised and happy when my husband told me, “It’s a girl!” Now, I can hardly imagine having a boy at all.

So, in reading the new collection of essays, “It’s A Boy: Women Writers on Raising Sons,” I felt a bit like a tourist. These essays, edited by Andrea J. Buchanan, are sometimes funny, sometimes bittersweet and always poignant, thoughtful and honest. From cultural assumptions (“boys love their mothers better than girls”) to maternal expectations (“how will I relate to a boy?) these well-written essays cover rearing sons pregnancy to adolescence.

I interviewed Andi about the book and about blogging and writing.

Sarah Egelman: This is a collection about sons; what would the parents of daughters find to interest them? What about non-parents? In other words, what does this book say, if anything, about parenting in general or womanhood in general?

Andi Buchanan: That's a great question. And actually, a fellow blogger (and someone who has an essay in the Girl book coming out next spring) answered that really nicely the other day as part of the blog book tour. I'll quote here from Becca at NotQuiteSure (http://not-quite-sure.blogspot.com). She writes:

"I thought that reading 'It's a Boy' was going to be a fascinating excursion into alien territory, an experience in readerly disidentification, as it were. I know nothing about raising boys: about penises and turning sticks into guns and teenagers with hair on their faces, God forbid. And I learned about those things from reading the book, and it was fascinating. But what I also realized is how much of all motherhood is about figuring out these alien little beings we are stuck with, who are at once as familiar as our own bodies and as bizarrely unknown as prehistoric giraffes. If you have a boy, you have a certain framework for understanding him as alien: he is not like you. But that only takes you so far, and then you have to account for him as himself. Just as I have to account for [my daughters] as themselves ... In other words, even as 'It's a Boy' set me up for disidentification, it also inspired a more meta-identification, and a realization that of course I could have mothered a boy, for it all comes down to mothering, and that I know something about."

SE: What, do you think, all the contributors have in common besides being mothers of boys?

AB: Well, they are all writers, and I think there's a certain commonality in terms of the way writers think (or overthink!) about issues of personhood and personality.

SE: Were you surprised by some of the cultural assumptions the writers in the collection were so honest about confronting (i.e. boys love their mothers in different ways than daughters or that boys are easier to toilet train than girls)?

AB: Was I surprised about the cultural assumptions? Or about the writers' willingness to confront them? I think I was mostly surprised by the assumptions about boys that really hit home when I was pregnant with my son -- that, and the conversations I had with people about the things I'd heard, was really what inspired the book. I wasn't surprised at all by the writers digging in to the topics they chose -- I had so many impassioned conversations with women about boys and girls and the difference between them, I knew it was a great vein of inspiration! It's like the old nature vs. nurture question -- the debate could go on forever!

SE: Why do you think motherhood (and specifically the personal essay written by mothers) has become such a hot genre?

AB: I don't know that I'd describe it as "hot" or even popular -- it's still *such* a hard sell these days. But I do understand what you're getting at -- there's a real proliferation of writing about motherhood, especially in the last 5 or 6 years, that's a refreshing change from the advice books and expert guides that dominated the parenting shelves for years.

Why is it happening now, as opposed to before? I think in a lot of ways our cultural notions about public and private experience have been changing, and now it's not so shocking to talk about the grittier aspects of child-rearing -- and about the very human experience of the women who do most of it. So we're a bit freer now to explore what was once more personal, private, even taboo to talk about in mixed company.

But this isn't really all that new -- there have been women writing about motherhood before, in the '70s, in the '50s and '60s, even well before the 1900s. We've just forgotten about them, or our culture has, and each new generation of women confronting womanhood and motherhood must rewrite her own personal narrative instead of being able to draw on those of the past.

Amy Hudock and I write about this in the introduction to "Literary Mama: Reading for the Maternally Inclined," which comes out next January from Seal Press. Our hope is that this most recent generation of mother-writers won't be dismissed as a fad, or fall out of publication, or otherwise be forgotten.

SE: In what ways do you see blogging as enhancing or contributing to this genre?

AB: With the immediacy and the intense personal nature of blogging, it seems like blogs are a natural outlet for women, especially, to construct a narrative for their maternal lives. I did a whole presentation on this at the Association for Research on Mothering's conference on motherhood and feminism last fall -- my keynote address was titled "The Secret Life of Mothers: Maternal Narrative, Momoir, and the Rise of the Blog." I see blogs as powerful vehicles for women to share their stories -- and to create a community among other bloggers who are trying to make meaning of the events of their lives.

SE: In selecting essays for "It's A Boy" what types of things were you looking for?

AB: Excellent writing. Insight. A confident, compelling, unique voice. A writer in control of her subject. I like the reader to feel as though she is being led by a writer who knows exactly where she is going and has suprises in store along the way -- not that whatever happens in the course of the essay is accidental and surprises the writer and reader both. A story -- and not just the old "Woman expects baby girl, has baby boy, learns that baby boys aren't so bad after all" or "Woman thinks boys are like X, then she has one and finds they're more like Y, zippy moral lesson, the end." It had to be more than that.

SE: The companion to this book, "It's A Girl" is coming out soon: after editing both collections, and after having a boy and a girl yourself, do you think there is an essential difference to parenting a boy rather than a girl?

AB: As I wrote in the intro to the Girl book, after working on these two collections, I can't really tell you if the stereotypes are true about girls and boys. But I can tell you something about the parents of girls and boys. For both the Boy book and the Girl book, I received many essay submissions from writers who were conflicted about the sex of their baby, something I came to call "prenatal gender apprehension." But the concerns of writers in "It's a Boy" were about the otherness of the male gender: What the heck do you do with a boy? Some of the writers in "It's a Girl" ask a similar question about raising their daughters, but what prompts that question is not the fear of an unknown gender, but of knowing it all too well.

It seemed like, at least from the essays I got for these books, mothering a girl was more... personal, in a way. Mothering a boy was about a different kind of confrontation, confronting the "alien" world of boys and men from a different perspective than the women had previously experienced as daughters or sisters or employees or lovers or partners with the males in their lives. Mothering a girl, though, seemed to force the writers to confront their own girlhoods, and face the experiences they'd thought they'd left behind, seeing all again this time through the eyes of their daughters.

Also, in Boy, writers talked about the act of separation -- letting go of teenagers and a mother's changing role as her child becomes an adult. This separation, though, was mainly about adolescents. But in "It's a Girl," writers wrestled with letting go of daughters who were five, eight, nine, teenagers, grown women. Clearly -- in these collections, at least -- identification and separation between mothers and daughters is a different terrain from that of mothers and sons.

SE: How much time per day do you spend writing? Blogging? Revising?

AB: I have three hours a day when both my kids are in school -- my daughter is in first grade and goes until 3 each day, but my son is just in preschool. So I have from about 9 to about 12 to get my work in. That's when I write, edit, revise, work on Literary Mama, blog, do interviews, work on PR stuff for my books, etc. Sometimes I'm also able to work in more time once the kids are asleep, but since I stopped my caffeine habit, that's harder and harder to do.

SE: How long do you spend reading blogs?

AB: Not long -- but luckily I'm a fast reader. I check in with a few favorites a few times a week, but gone are the days when I could be leisurely about my blog surfing!

SE: Which blogs are the most well-written? How much of a factor is the writing style in whether you read a weblog?

AB: Whether or not a blog is well-written is definitely a factor in whether or not I read it. I have such limited time -- and my work is all about reading and writing -- that I just don't have much patience for something that isn't compelling. I'm not talking about content -- I mean voice. The best writers can write about the most commonplace subjects and make them interesting.

SE: How has blogging affected your writing?

AB: My blog is a bunch of different things -- a place to write about my work and what I'm working on (right now I'm writing a bit about each of the essays in the "It's a Boy" book), a sketchpad for things I might write about in essays or longer projects eventually, a place to share anecdotes that aren't "essay-ready" yet, a way to keep in touch with readers who are interested in following up on me post-Mother Shock. The tricky thing about blogging is that if it was my only writing work, I'd do it a lot more. But because I'm writing for publication elsewhere, working on book projects, etc. -- and because I have such limited time to work -- I have to be conscious of not using up all my writing time on the blog. I actually think of blogging and writing as two separate things -- one I do for pleasure, one I do for work. (Though of course there is some overlap both ways.)

SE: What have you learned about writing from blogs?

AB: At the most basic level, I guess, what it's taught me is that writing can be accomplished in fleeting moments, without the perfect setting, on the fly. Sometimes I get myself convinced that I can only write when things are perfect -- when I'm alone, when I have more than a half-hour, when the planets are aligned, etc. The immediacy of blogging has shown me that those things, while perfectly nice requirements, are mostly unnecessary: I can get a thing written in five minutes, standing up, while the kids scream at each other over who had something first. And that's a good lesson to take with me to my other writing work, when I'm tempted to stop myself from getting something down because I "only" have a few minutes or because the setting isn't "right" or because it might not be any good.

SE: Is good writing for blogs different from other forms of good writing? How?

AB: I think so -- maybe. Good writing is good writing. But when you're writing for a blog, you're writing for a very particular medium. I think part of what's compelling about blogs and the blogging community is how everything is interlinked. I think a good blog entry is one that is not only well-written but also acknowledges its interconnectedness -- even if it's just a one-word link to a shared topic. I think about those entries I've read that have not only been moving in their own right, but also had this meta-text created by the links embedded therein -- by clicking and following the links you're are able to read an entire backstory to the post, a collection of referents and articles and all the interesting things that informed the primary text. It's fascinating -- and it's the kind of thing you can't do as effectively on paper.

Sarah Rachel Egelman is a community college instructor and free-lance book reviewer who lives in New Mexico with her husband and daughter.

Comments

[Ann D]

"At the most basic level, I guess, what it's taught me is that writing can be accomplished in fleeting moments, without the perfect setting, on the fly. Sometimes I get myself convinced that I can only write when things are perfect -- when I'm alone, when I have more than a half-hour, when the planets are aligned, etc. The immediacy of blogging has shown me that those things, while perfectly nice requirements, are mostly unnecessary: I can get a thing written in five minutes, standing up, while the kids scream at each other over who had something first. And that's a good lesson to take with me to my other writing work, when I'm tempted to stop myself from getting something down because I "only" have a few minutes or because the setting isn't "right" or because it might not be any good."

I think this is a really important lesson that carries over into all areas of our lives as bloggers, writers, and mothers. I posted a list on my blog today on "the reasons I blog" and I think this point makes an excellent addition. I'm going to link to your post.

Ann

[amy h]

The blog book tour is such a fabulous idea...it has given me ideas about new books I want to read, information about the inside workings of writer's minds and an enjoyable read. Thank you!!

[kelly]

Sarah, this is a great interview. I enjoyed the questions and answers so much! I participated in the blog book tour as well today, and found your interview made me dive down even deeper into the subject in my own thinking.