I have a confession to make: I'm not a fan of anthologies, especially ones that ask one gender to approach a single issue. Generally, I find the kind of collection that solicits (usually women) writers on some topic—Money or Sex or Marriage, say—to be simultaneously too much and too little. Do I really need 20 perspectives on, say, the mother-daughter relationship by writers with no more perspective than the rest of us laypeople on this obviously complicated relationship?
I say this with some trepidation and guilt, because I have contributed to several of these books, as have many writers I like and admire. (I also liked 2002's The Bitch in the House, which sold so well—46,000 according to Nielsen BookScan—that it launched dozens of imitators. Its secret: being first and a great title.) And I also know that writers like to write—and that a good essay in a good anthology can bring a previously under-known writer accolades and even, at least in their dreams, a “real” book contract.
And yet, in spite of myself, I was interested in HarperCollins's recently released Thirty Ways of Looking at Hillary, a compendium of essays about an opinionated, polarizing baby boom woman by a number of writers who could be called the same. No surprise, some essays—Daphne Merkin's, Katha Pollitt's, Susan Cheever's—are better than others, and even I, an opinionated, baby boom, etc., etc., admit to some skipping and skimming to prevent Clinton overload (enough about the cookie recipe). But frankly, the quality of the writing was less the point than the fact that every Hillary argument, pro or con, was there, under one set of covers. Put another way: while I wouldn't say I came away from the collection humming the prose, it did help me make up my very conflicted mind at the polls on Super Tuesday.
Whether the book will sell big, of course, remains to be seen—but early numbers are not encouraging (1,000 copies in its first three weeks, according to Nielsen.) But since anthologies almost never sell, and political anthologies probably even less so, Susan Morrison and her editor—another opinionated, baby boom woman named Gial Winston—might have had another kind of success in mind.
Ordinarily, anthologies of essays are not meant to be prescriptive; they're not lifestyle guides, let alone voting aids. But these are not ordinary times. The Democratic electorate is more engaged—and more divided—than it has been in about 40 years, and even people who were too young to use the term “gender politics” the first time around are using it now. So what if Thirty Ways of Looking at Hillary is, like most anthologies, uneven and sometimes repetitive? So what if, like most anthologies, it does not become a blockbuster? It is, unlike most anthologies, an important book because it is so much more than “just” a book. It stands out, like anthologies almost never do, as more than just the sum of its parts. And it just might make a difference.
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