Howdy folks, and welcome to this week’s Letters from Home and Away. Each Tuesday, Kate and I share some thoughts about a book we’re reading. Kate is reading contemporary literature. I’m reading the classics. (Kate has several degrees from Ivy League universities including an MFA in Creative Writing. I was educated in dusty North Texas. The only thing I learned was how to sneak a flask into a football game.) Regardless, we like to catch up about what we’re reading.
This week, my letter to Kate is written from my hometown of Austin, Texas.
Dear Kate,
How are you? It’s hot in Austin. Flies buzz around the garbage can at my Airbnb. They sound angry. I think they’re hot too.
I spent this Saturday reading Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. It was a quick read. It’s only 127 pages. Each sentence in the book is as precise as a scalpel. I finished it between the last bite of a bagel and my first hankerings for dinner.
After I finished, I gave myself a pat on the back. Good job. One work of classic fiction, done. I checked the mirror: yes, a short bout of reading Hemingway does make a person look more sophisticated.
But 20 minutes later, I paced my one-room living quarters. I felt irritable. I poked at the thermostat. It’s so hot. I used the book to swat a fly.
Hemingway stirred up questions I didn't have answers to. Namely this one: Who gets to be a hero?
The Old Man and the Sea is Hemingway’s last novel. It’s about a Cuban fisherman who hasn’t caught a fish in 84 days. The fisherman is old, alone, and destitute. He sleeps on a pile of yellow newspapers. Still, he wakes up early each day and sets out on his boat. One morning, a young boy who loves the fisherman brings him hot coffee, lunch, and pails of sardines, fresh baits the fisherman couldn’t afford for himself.
With these gifts, the fisherman decides to sail out past his usual waters. He dangles the sardines off the back of his boat and pushes out to sea. It pays off. He soon hooks a giant marlin. It’s the biggest fish he’s ever seen.
But the work has just begun. The fisherman—an expert craftsman despite his age—must battle the marlin for several days and several nights as his boat is tugged farther and farther out to sea. It’s a treacherous back-and-forth. The fisherman and the fish are equally matched. The fisherman’s spirit is renewed by the promise of a worthy competitor. A real fight.
“Fish,” he said softly, aloud, “I will stay with you until I am dead.”
Eventually, the fisherman reels the marlin in close enough to stab it with a harpoon. The battle is won. But the marlin is so big that it cannot be brought into the fisherman’s sailboat. It must be lashed beside it. The fisherman uses the remainder of his fishing line to tie up the marlin and points the boat back toward shore. The marlin’s sword sails next to the fisherman’s bow—as equals.
Then, tragedy strikes. Sharks smell the bloody harpoon wound. The old fisherman fights two sharks off, but cannot fight them all. The sharks eat the marlin.
Late at night, the fisherman returns to the town’s shore with nothing but a skeleton roped to his boat. He falls asleep on his pile of newspapers, alone and hungry, again.
The townspeople and the young boy wake to news of the massive skeleton. They praise the fisherman. The impoverished outcast is now a respected hero. The young boy—whose family told him to stop hanging around this weird old fisherman who hadn’t even caught a fish for 84 days—now has permission to sail with him as an apprentice. The fisherman is redeemed.
It’s a beautiful book. It won Hemingway a Pulitzer in 1953. It is cited in Hemingway’s Nobel Prize.
It’s a classic “Hero’s Journey” framework. The hero’s journey is a narrative arc as old as time: a hero goes on a quest, faces trials, digs deep to find inner strength, slays the dragon, and returns home as a complete and worthy person.
This framework was first studied by Joseph Campbell in the 1940s and later popularized by Christopher Vogler, a Hollywood filmmaker and Disney executive. Vogler wrote a seven-page memo distilling Campbell’s book The Hero with a Thousand Faces into actionable bullet points for movie producers. It lit Hollywood on fire.
“I heard young executives buzzing about it, telling their friends about it,” Vogler later wrote about the memo. “It became the ‘I have to have it’ document of the season at talent agencies and in studio executive suites.”
Campbell and Vogler codified a story everyone knows. The Star Wars movies, The Odyssey, even Moses’s trek up Mount Sinai are examples of heroes’ journeys. (You can read an outline of the ten-part hero’s journey framework in Vogler’s memo here.)
The ultimate goal of a hero’s journey is self-discovery. Heroes risk it all to learn their worth. Heroes reach enlightenment by braving fear.
“The hero is the man of self-achieved submission,” Campbell writes in The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
I love heroes’ journeys. They inspire us to ask more of ourselves.
But here’s a troublesome question: Who gets to be a hero? Who gets the opportunity to go on a quest? Who gets to return a victor, showered with rose petals and embraced by the arms of a virgin?
Usually, dudes.
“That’s a big oversight,” author Elizabeth Gilbert pointed out in a recent interview. “The most important human story that has ever existed doesn’t include women—except as side characters. You can be the hero’s mom, you can be the helpless virgin, you can be the old crow, but you can’t be the hero.”
“Joseph Campbell got challenged on that a lot. Young women would ask, ‘Can you please give us some examples of the female hero’s journey?’ He would say, ‘No. It doesn’t exist.’ He would say that the reason women don’t need to go on the hero’s journey is because the hero’s journey is all about the process by which a broken person becomes whole, and women don’t need to do that process because women aren’t broken. Women are totally whole already, because women possess this extraordinary power. They’re the life-givers, they’re the womb, they’re the only ones who can generate life on Earth. Therefore their purpose is obvious; which is to have babies.”
I haven’t studied Campbell’s work enough to verify Gilbert’s claim, but I certainly raised an eyebrow at this passage in The Hero with a Thousand Faces:
The life energy released from the toils of the tyrant is symbolized as a woman. She is the maiden of the innumerable dragon slayings, the bride abducted from the jealous father, the virgin rescued from the unholy lover. She is the other portion of the hero himself—for each is both: if his stature is that of the world monarch she is the world, and if he is a warrior she is fame. She is the image of his destiny which he is to release from the prison of enveloping circumstance.
Here’s (just one) of the troubles with that: heroes’ journeys—as the title implies—are all about the journey. It may have been Odysseus’s destiny to return to Ithaca as king, but it took him quite a bit of time (10 years) to figure out how to do that.
He was allowed time for the journey.
In Gilbert’s summation of Campbell’s work, women don’t need to go on a journey. Their destiny is pre-set. They don’t need time to figure things out.
The implications of this aren’t pretty: Have you seen this chart from the New York Times?
Whether they themselves are 20 or 50, most men think the ideal woman to date is 22 years old, according to data from OkCupid. A second set of online dating data from the NYT suggests the ideal woman is actually just 18.
How has she had time to figure out anything by then?!
Without the opportunity for self-discovery, without a quest to test her strength, without the time required to pursue all 10 steps of the hero’s journey, how could a woman possibly understand her destiny? (Regardless of whether that destiny includes motherhood—the hardest job in the world—or not.)
Women are broken. Just as much as men. They deserve their own chance to set sail, journey deep into the ocean, slay a giant marlin, and understand their self worth anew.
It just doesn’t happen often in literature.
I think women are so frequently left out of the hero’s journey because they’re busy. They have things to do. This is where that time gets spent: someone needs to pick up a birthday gift for your nephew. Someone needs to bake a casserole for the funeral next week. Someone has to call your grandfather back. Someone needs to fold the towels.
This all takes up time. (Check out this hilarious satire from McSweeney’s about what happens if you dare take a week off to go on a lady hero’s journey. I chuckled.)
For some women, a hero’s journey might look different than The Odyssey, or The Old Man and the Sea. It might not entail fighting mystical creatures. It might just look like hard work.
Hemingway won a Nobel Prize sipping Cuban rum on a beach. Toni Morrison did it as the single mother of two children while working full-time as an editor at Random House.
Morrison wrote in the mornings at 5:00 AM. She wrote while stuck in traffic. She wrote in line at the grocery store. She spent nine hours a day at work in a Midtown Manhattan skyscraper fixing other people’s writing, coaxing books out of icons like Angela Davis and Muhammad Ali. Then she went home, cooked dinner for her kids, and wrote some more.
“I remember sitting in my office at Random House with a pad,” Morrison said in the 2019 documentary The Pieces I Am. “I wrote down on the left side everything I had to do: mother your children, go to the store, pay the bills, edit this, write this. It covered the page. Then I said ‘Of that number, what do you have to do?’ There were only two things: Mother my children and write. Anything that didn’t do that, I struck out.”
She wrote The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, and Sula this way, giant works of literature.
Morrison did this as a Black woman in the 1960s and 70s. She emerged as a powerful counter to the prevailing “big boys” of the 1950s: Hemingway, Salinger, Bradbury, Tolkien, Kerouac.
“Navigating a white male world was not threatening. It wasn’t even interesting,” Morrison said. “I was more interesting than they were. I knew more than they did. And I wasn’t afraid to show it. You have to be a little tough and rely on yourself. ”
Now that’s a hero’s journey.
This week’s works
Some other fun things I read this week:
1. Elizabeth Gilbert is best known for writing Eat Pray Love: which really is a classic female hero’s journey! And surprise, everyone criticizes it—but she’s also written a million other things. This week, I read the 1997 Esquire article by Gilbert that inspired the film Coyote Ugly. I loved it.
2. This profile of writer and actress Michaela Coel is stunning. Coel had the fortitude to negotiate for the rights to a show THAT SHE WROTE, and Netflix negotiated her down to 0.5%.
“Coel recalls one clarifying moment when she spoke with a senior-level development executive at Netflix and asked if she could retain at least 5 percent of her rights. “There was just silence on the phone,” she says. “And she said, ‘It’s not how we do things here. Nobody does that, it’s not a big deal.’ I said, ‘If it’s not a big deal, then I’d really like to have 5 percent of my rights.’ ” Silence. She bargained down to 2 percent, 1 percent, and finally 0.5 percent. The woman said she’d have to run it up the chain. Then she paused and said, “Michaela? I just want you to know I’m really proud of you. You’re doing the right thing.” And she hung up.
“I remember thinking, I’ve been going down rabbit holes in my head, like people thinking I’m paranoid, I’m acting sketchy, I’m killing off all my agents,” Coel says. “And then she said those words to me, and I finally realized — I’m not crazy. This is crazy.’”
3. I. am. loving. the energy of this profile of The Chicks about their new album Gaslighter. (Related: nothing has ever made me so proud to be a Texan woman as this performance by The Chicks and Beyonce. I cried a little bit.)
Adios my pal. Be well until next week.
Cheers,
Ali
"Usually, dudes."
I died! 😆 Amazing line. Wonderful debut!
Excellent first piece! Can't wait to keep reading.