The New Yorker
February 7, 2011
Last fall, the Rumpus’ online book club was searching for a book. They wanted, according to Elissa Bassist, who writes and edits the Funny Women column on the site, “an edgy, honest, and literary book,” by a woman—“the kind of writing women contribute to the Rumpus week after week.” When they couldn’t decide on a book, the editors had an idea: “We thought, ‘Wow, this is a great opportunity,’” Bassist said. “‘We publish these kinds of essays every day. Why don’t we make a book?’”
So they did. “Rumpus Women: Personal Essays by Women, Volume I” was prepared and ready to sign within three weeks, and published last November by the Rumpus Paper Internets, just in time for the book club’s December selection. “Our deadline was our only constriction,” write co-editors Elissa Bassist and Julie Greicius in the book’s introduction. “Our contributors were free to write what they wanted and keep it to any word count they liked. The authors—their words, confessions, and timeliness—would shape the book.” “Rumpus Women” is comprised of twenty personal essays by women whose prose is sincere and original and contains the kind of truth that is funny precisely because it is true.
In Justine Hope Blau’s “At Large,” we follow Blau and her “intellectual and impoverished family” around the streets of Manhattan as they sleep on benches in Central Park, sneak into movies, and eat raw egg yolks for lunch. “Can’t you ever do anything normal?” Blau wonders of her relations. The answer, her story makes clear, is no.
In “The Walker,” Jami Attenberg contemplates, over wine and “nine million cigarettes,” whether or not to spend an extra night in Florence with her waiter. Diana Spechler’s “Conversions” documents a college cocaine binge. (At a reading of the book at Book Court in Cobble Hill, Diana prefaced the story by saying, “If you’re a cop this isn’t real.”) And Elissa’s very own Funny Women column #15: “How to Move to San Francisco,” shows us the psychological difficulties of living the “writer’s life” in that city: “You get back to your room, which is separated from your roommate’s by a glass door that allows her to hear you cry; in the privacy of your room, she talks to you through the wall as if there were no wall at all. She suggests you get a real job.” There is even a sneak peak of the Rumpus’ advice column, “Dear Sugar,” whose editorial #48: “Write Like a Motherfucker,” is reprinted in “Rumpus Women.” (This popular letter-turned-column-turned-Rumpus slogan has reinvented itself as a T-shirt and can be purchased here.)
At the Cobble Hill reading, I asked Elissa what it was like to meet the book’s contributors in person for the first time. The writers, as well as audience members, were swarming around her, buying books and requesting signatures. “The thing that really struck me was, ‘Wow, the last time I read your piece was in a Microsoft Word document,’” she said. “‘And now you are reading from a book we published to an audience who is buying the book, and you are making me laugh at times when I was reading and crying.’ There is such a power in that dual experience.”
She added, “I love that a Web site published a book! We’re undoing the demise of book publishing, a demise that began mostly because of the Internet.”
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