Sara Paretsky’s Writing in an Age of Silence

This nonfiction collection of essays, each related to the theme of freedom, fascinates and challenges thought.

Freedom as a theme seems to have dominated Sara Paretsky’s life, judging from her Introduction, a memoir of childhood and education, which impressed me with admiration, perhaps awe, of her courage and intelligence. As a child within her family she fought for herself with rare determination and skill.

And she won through to a (state) college education, though not attendance at the first rate eastern university she wished for. She didn’t win her father’s respect or approval and she may not have won his affection; he seems not to have won hers. The consequences of this channeled her into the woman’s movement, with which the second chapter deals. She’s still angry, and she still blames men for holding women in exploitation, sexually and economically, and politically.

I don’t. I blame our genes—the kind of animal we humans evolved to be. And I feel that human males are as much the victims—prisoners—of that evolution as we women. Ants and honey bees evolved a system of life organization in which females operate their society, males being used exclusively for breeding. Are female ants dominating male ants, or are they and male ants dominated by their evolution?

But surely in western civilization we are seeing women struggling, in part successfully, to override their evolutionary impulses by taking control of their lives. The struggle costs the freedom fighters in exhaustion, punishment from the group—often from their own families—that sometimes includes assault, rape, and poverty. Paretsky’s first chapter, “Wild Women Out of Control or How I became a Writer,” movingly deals with that struggle and its consequences.

In her second chapter (or essay), “The King and I,” she moves on to social freedom: the civil rights movement as she encountered it in Chicago. She was young, young and inexperienced enough to be surprised as well as shocked by the racial hatred and rage she saw. This was the Chicago of the civil rights explosion, the king of the chapter’s title referring to Martin Lewis King, Jr. Paretsky poured her personal rage and her youthful strength into the battle, and learned from her efforts:

The children from our day camp were often anxious; outings to the beach started with black children throwing stones as we waited at Ashland Avenue for the bus, and often ended with an emergency dash home before the next round of riots began. The first time we took the children to Wrigley Field to see a baseball game, they wouldn’t sit next to a black person on the train, standing for the hour-long ride while half the seats on the car were empty. We told the kids they would forfeit the right to go on outings if they did it again, and, eyes wide with fear, they would perch on the edge of a seat, terrified of being assaulted by the tired middle-aged women next to them….That summer changed my life forever.

Paretsky’s women’s rights issues, beginning with the near-death of her roommate from a “coat hanger” abortion layers with the memoir of her mystery reading that helped push her into writing in chapter three, “Not Angel, not Monster, Just Human.” She writes of her series’ protagonist:

V I’s emotional involvements do sometimes cloud her judgments. That is a fact of life for men and women both. V I has lovers, but her sexuality does not prohibit her from making clear moral decisions and acting on them. V I isn’t flawless. Merely she is an adult, with the same freedoms that men have to act, to move, to make decisions, to fall in love, experience sex, even to be wrong, without any of those things making her a monster.

Religion in American public life and our mythic love of independent self-sufficiency occupy her fourth chapter, “The iPod and Sam Spade.” Her view of the perennial, perhaps unresolvable conflict between the human impulse to attend to personal needs against the impulse to care others is worth reading.

All contemporary American writers owe it to themselves to read “Truth, Lies, and Duct Tape, the book’s fifth and final chapter dealing with free speech and the state of oppression produced by current publishing practices. Hey, gang, this is you she’s writing about.

Her chapter end notes cite specific cases, and are a delight.

I particularly recommend reading this book in tandem with the recently republished first novel in her series (originally published in 1982), titled Indemnity Only. Its introduction is valuable reading and the novel itself great fun and a provocative glimpse of how she practices her theories and ideals.