Isaacs is aware of and gratified by the influence she has but wishes she kept up more with current fiction. “I was at a Fourth of July party this summer and met two completely disparate people. One was a whiskey distributor and one was a former Mossad agent. The three of us started talking about mysteries we were reading, and both said how much they loved reading Kate Atkinson. I said, ‘Who’s that?’ One of them looked at me, teasingly, and said, ‘You, of all people.’” (She has since read, and loved, the first two books in Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie series.)
Near the end of our conversation, I ask Isaacs about her one book of nonfiction, Brave Dames and Wimpettes (1999), which argued that women in fiction, film, and television were generally too passive. That characters ranging from Ally McBeal to Thelma and Louise blamed their problems on men (with a not-subtle affirmation that her own heroines did not). Did her conclusions still stand 20 years later, or had things changed?
“They’ve definitely changed,” she says, and generally for the better. But she wishes women, in general, would fight back more under duress. She brings up Christine Blasey Ford, who testified against now Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Isaacs found herself wondering why Blasey Ford was at the house party that day. And why any woman wouldn’t just knee a would-be perpetrator in the balls, or eviscerate him for putting a hand on her.
It’s not some great shock to hear Isaacs speak like this, but it does deflate me. Generational divides are stubborn and tend towards calcification. She wouldn’t be the first to resist the world’s evolution and with it a new set of standards that can feel like a threat to one’s internal order. As I listen to her, flummoxed at first as to how I might respond, I opt for kindness. I don’t want to get upset, or to argue. I’m reminded of how I deal with my mother during disagreements.
Instead I tell Isaacs of my own experiences of being touched inappropriately in public settings, with photographers lurking nearby, and freezing up. Of women in situations where the mood shifts from safe to dangerous before their next blink. And of women liberated from the baggage of earlier generations, who weren’t going to stand for behavior once tolerated.
“I agree with you,” Isaacs says. She can, clearly, see where I was coming from. But her critique also helps me understand why Corie Geller, who is supposed to be 38 in Takes One to Know One, feels more distant from me now than Judith Singer—four years younger, two generations removed—did in Compromising Positions.
Isaacs’s car is waiting. She says it was a pleasure to meet me, and I genuinely feel likewise. You don’t have to agree with your heroes about everything. You can even be a little disappointed in them. But I always prefer my heroes be flawed, messy, real. A Susan Isaacs heroine, come to life.
Sarah Weinman is the author of The Real Lolita and editor of Women Crime Writers and Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives.
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