Dear Naomi, Thanks for getting back so quickly! So, in answer to your question: I don’t know if I have to be suggesting that everyone lied.
For one thing, of course, we don’t have original manuscripts dating back more than a thousand years. All the books we have from before the Cataclysm have been re-copied hundreds of times. That’s a lot of occasions for errors to be introduced. And not just errors. All of the copyists would have had their own agendas. For more than two thousand years, the only people re-copying were nuns in convents. I don’t think it’s at all a stretch to suggest that they picked works to copy that supported their viewpoint and just let the rest moulder into flakes of parchment. I mean, why would they re-copy works that said that men used to be stronger and women weaker? That would be heresy, and they’d be damned for it.
This is the trouble with history. You can’t see what’s not there. You can look at an empty space and see that something’s missing, but there’s no way to know what it was. I’m just … drawing in the blank spaces. It’s not an attack.
Love,
Neil
Dearest Neil, I don’t think it’s an attack. It’s hard for me to see women portrayed as they are at times in this book. We’ve talked about this often. How much ‘what it means to be a woman’ is bound up with strength and not feeling fear or pain. I’ve been grateful for our honest conversations. I know you’ve sometimes found it difficult to form relationships with women; and I understand why. I’m so grateful that we’ve preserved a friendship out of what we had, though. It was so important to me that you listened when I said things that I’d never have been able to tell Selim or the children. The scene of the skein-removal was very hard to read.
Love,
Naomi
Dear Naomi, Thank you for that. I know you’re trying. You’re one of the good ones.
I really want this book to make something better, N. I think we can be better than this. This thing isn’t ‘natural’ to us, you know? Some of the worst excesses against men were never – in my opinion anyway – perpetrated against women in the time before the Cataclysm. Three or four thousand years ago, it was considered normal to cull nine in ten boy babies. Fuck, there are still places today where boy babies are routinely aborted, or have their dicks ‘curbed’. This can’t have happened to women in the time before the Cataclysm. We talked about evolutionary psychology before – it would have made no evolutionary sense for cultures to abort female babies on a large scale or to fuck about with their reproductive organs! So it’s not ‘natural’ to us to live like this. It can’t be. I can’t believe it is. We can choose differently.
The world is the way it is now because of five thousand years of ingrained structures of power based on darker times when things were much more violent and the only important thing was – could you and your kin jolt harder? But we don’t have to act that way now. We can think and imagine ourselves differently once we understand what we’ve based our ideas on.
Gender is a shell game. What is a man? Whatever a woman isn’t. What is a woman? Whatever a man is not. Tap on it and it’s hollow. Look under the shells: it’s not there.
xx
Neil
Dearest Neil, Have been pondering this all weekend. There’s a lot to think about and discuss, and I think it’s best if we meet to talk it over. I worry that I might write something that you’ll interpret in the wrong way, and I don’t want that. I know it’s a sensitive topic for you. I’ll ask my assistant if he’ll sort out some dates for us to have lunch.
This is not to say that I’m not behind the book. I really am. I want to make sure it reaches the widest possible audience.
I have one suggestion now. You’ve explained to me how anything you do is framed by your gender, that the frame is as inescapable as it is nonsensical. Every book you write is assessed as part of ‘men’s literature’. So what I’m suggesting is just a response to that, really, nothing more. But there’s a long tradition of men who’ve found a way out of that particular bind. You’d be in good company.
Neil, I know this might be very distasteful to you, but have you considered publishing this book under a woman’s name?
Best love, Naomi
Acknowledgements
More thanks than can be made to Margaret Atwood, who believed in this book when it was barely a glimmer, and told me when I faltered that it was still definitely alive, not dead. Thanks for illuminating conversation to Karen Joy Fowler and to Ursula Le Guin.
Thanks to Jill Morrison of Rolex and to Allegra McIlroy of the BBC for making it possible for these conversations to happen.
Thanks to Arts Council England and to the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative, whose financial support helped me write the book. Thanks to my editor at Penguin, Mary Mount, and to my agent, Veronique Baxter. Thanks to my editor at Little, Brown in the US, Asya Muchnick.
Thanks to a good coven, who saved this book one midwinter: Samantha Ellis, Francesca Segal and Mathilda Gregory. And thanks to Rebecca Levene, who knows how to make things happen in a story and made some exciting stuff happen in this one. Thanks to Claire Berliner and Oliver Meek for helping get it started again. Thanks to readers and commenters who gave me courage and confidence: especially Gillian Stern, Bim Adewunmi, Andrea Phillips and Sarah Perry.
Thanks for masculinity chat to Bill Thompson, Ekow Eshun, Mark Brown, Dr Benjamin Ellis, Alex Macmillan, Marsh Davies. Thanks for early discussions to Seb Emina and to Adrian Hon, who knows the future like I used to know God: as immanent and shining.
Thanks to Peter Watts for walking me through the marine biology and helping me work out where to put electro-plaques in the human body. And thanks to the BBC Science Unit, and in particular Deborah Cohen, Al Mansfield and Anna Buckley, for allowing me to pursue my curiosity about the electric eel to a fuller extent than I could ever have hoped.
Thanks to my parents, and to Esther and Russell Donoff, Daniella, Benjy and Zara.
The illustrations are by Marsh Davies. Two of them – the ‘Serving Boy’ and ‘Priestess Queen’ – are based on actual archaeological finds from the ancient city of Mohenjo-Daro in the Indus Valley (although obviously without bits of iPad attached). We don’t know much about the culture of Mohenjo-Daro – there are some findings that suggest that they may have been fairly egalitarian in some interesting ways. But despite the lack of context, the archaeologists who unearthed them called the soapstone head illustrated ‘Priest King’, while they named the bronze female figure ‘Dancing Girl’. They’re still called by those names. Sometimes I think the whole of this book could be communicated with just this set of facts and illustrations.