So consider this cozy scene: It's 10 o'clock at night, my bedside lamp is glowing deep yellow, my dog is curled up on his bed by my bed, and he is ever so lightly snoring.I prop up two pillows just so (one horizontal, one vertical, if you must know) and then I climb into bed between light blue bamboo sheets, soft as what I imagine clouds might feel like. On top of the sheets is a cream-colored bamboo bedspread; on top of the bedspread is a down quilt encased in a floral-print, silk duvet cover; and on top of the down quilt are my hands holding a book, May Sarton's "Journal of a Solitude," which I am reading with exquisite pleasure. Why? Well, because she's a terrific writer, for one thing, a woman whose habit of noticing -- and feeling -- informs and enriches every line she puts down on paper. She's a woman who finds the notable in the ordinary, the sublime in the simple, a woman who insists on pushing past the superficial and into the depths. But mostly I love reading May Sarton because the thoughts she shares are so often the thoughts of a woman, unambivalently and intimately expressed. She is not afraid to be what she is. She prizes our species. What May Sarton does in her nonfiction is what I aspire to do in my fiction, i.e. give weight to the things that concern us as women (and as fully investable members of the human race), and in so doing, give worth to those things, too. I want to be another writer with a teacup at her elbow, flowers on her desk, and a burning need to say it.

The yang to the yin

I am often asked if I consider myself a "woman's writer," and most times the question seems suspect to me, if not downright pejorative. Because in spite of the hard-won gains of the women's movement, we still haven't sunk our flags into that many captured hilltops; we are still belittled and treated as less than. You don't have to walk far or read much or spend much time in the working world to know that this is so. But why should it be so, when the truth is that women are so interesting, so intelligent, so vibrant, so necessary? And I don't mean necessary in the biological sense; I mean it in the practical sense of being the yang to the yin of men.

I don't know why, is my answer. And anyway, I'm not interested in writing a polemic here. I just want to note the fact that I feel a sub-agenda when I'm asked about being a woman's writer, as though it is a distinctly separate classification from being a literary writer. Can't I be both?

When I wrote my latest novel, "Once Upon a Time, There Was You," I included a scene where two older women, longtime friends, sit sipping martinis in a kitchen. The character Irene is morose because she's just messed up yet another relationship, some chump she met online; and she's telling her friend, Val, that she thinks he was turned off to her because "I'm worn out. Used up. My body is a freak show." No, no, says her friend, your body is not a freak show. "Yes, it is," says Irene. "And so is yours." "My body is not a freak show!" says Val. Irene decides it would be a good idea to see Val's body, so she can know if she herself is normal. An exasperated (and wee bit drunk) Val undresses to her underwear, but Irene implores her to get fully naked so she can see the important stuff, "Like if you'd trip over your boobs without your fancy bra, or if you're thinned out down there. You know? I mean, I look positively denuded."

Intimacy, friendship

Is this a silly scene? Absolutely. Is it, dare I say ... chick lit-ish? Yes. But it's kind of fun, it might make you laugh, and most important, there is an element of uniquely female truth to it. (Not, I rush to add, that men don't care about their bodies. But I doubt they'd ever have a scene quite like this. A scene like this requires a vulnerability and honesty and intimacy that most men would run screaming from.) But this scene is not all there is to the book. There are serious issues explored: the frustration and fragility of love, the tenability of marriage, questions about why people come together and come apart, the complex relationship between mother and daughter, opposing views of aging, what the prospect of death means to someone not even grown up yet.

What I aim to do in this book is what I've tried to do in every novel I've written: to present women as the complicated and capable (and fun!) beings that we are. To suggest that there's more to us than is normally understood or revealed. A woman at a book signing on my last tour came up to me and said, "I just want to thank you for writing about women like us." I think what she meant by "women like us" is women who are thinking, feeling people who appreciate being seen and heard and respected, because they are deserving of it. To paraphrase the title of a famous short story, I think "women like us" are the only women here. And I am proud to represent.

  • Elizabeth Berg is the author of "Talk Before Sleep" and many other novels.