Writing Today: The Literary Feud is a Trap

once again, women are punished for doing what men were celebrated for

Late last year I half-heartedly thought about pitching an essay based on a simple claim: the literary feud is now almost exclusively a feminine phenomenon. For various reasons, which I would have laid out with taste, humor, and penetrating insight, it’s women writers who get pulled into the kind of fracases that once involved your Normans Mailer and Gores Vidal. (My preferred headline would have been “The Girls Are Fighting.”) I gave up pretty quickly, in part because I wasn’t likely to be successful in pitching; the list of fancier publications that have a readership and are willing to publish me grows thin, very very thin. But it would have been good. The world of books is now a world powered by woman readers, woman writers, woman editors, and woman publishers, and thus the fact that the world of literary takedown and literary rivalry is dominated by women should come as no surprise. But as is so often the case, as the literary feud has been feminized, it has become more and more of a ghetto.

Women have always participated in their fair share of writer feuds, and have been imagined into far more. Some say Gertrude Stain and Djuna Barnes hated each other. Mary McCarthy and Lillian Hellman’s mutual distaste led to a lawsuit that persisted until Hellman’s death. I’m aware of no evidence that Joan Didion and Susan Sontag were consciously enemies but, perhaps because both always wrote as though they spoke ex cathedra, they’re often contrasted with each other and anyway my brain wants them to be rivals. You’ve got Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror receiving a takedown from Lauren Oyler, which Tolentino publicly praised, a classic power move. (Respect.) That review helped contribute to Oyler’s reputation as the meanest mean girl in American letters, landing her a couple of book deals, which then prompted a takedown of her own from Anne Manov, part of an odd and often disingenuous communal hatred for Oyler’s essay collection. I await the inevitable woman-on-woman takedown of Manov.

You have your Caroline Calloway vs Natalie Beach feud, a postmodern affair which was colored by Calloway’s baggage and continuing uncertainty about the authorship of her work. (Both were fundamentally ill-treated by the buzzy thinkpiece-book publishing interface; hopefully both made a little money.) Going back a bit further, there’s Meghan Daum against Elizabeth Wurtzel both explicitly and allegedly. Emily Gould against Lena Dunham is, I suppose, more of a mixed media feud. You’ve got your Curtis Sittenfield vs. Nell Freudenberger, which could not have existed without the period of Freudenberger’s white-hot hype cycle. (I don’t need to tell you that those expectations were fundamentally unfair in their extravagance and thus unsurprisingly not lived up to.) Sally Rooney’s feuds are more implied than real, but all the more beguiling to readers for that reason, and fairly or not Zadie Smith and Sheila Heti have been suggested as her foils, or at least her rivals. Ottessa Moshfegh vs. all, that’s a good one. Jessa Crispin vs Roxane Gay has been a little one-sided, but Crispin’s open disdain is admirable in a world of euphemism. And of course we could say that feuding is a mode, a genre. My favorite living nonfiction author, Francine Prose, feuds with the world. So many wars.

The trouble with the takedown as a form is that it trains readers to cheer rather than to think. A takedown implies a binary outcome; either the target has been taken down or they haven’t been. That binarism in turn implies a finality where of course there is none. A truly demoralizing number of references to Pauline Kael imply that she has been permanently taken down by Renata Adler’s infamous “Perils of Pauline” essay, that Adler ended the story. But of course she didn’t, as Kael’s work remains available to be read and thus to prompt another new evaluation of her work and career; if she’s not still the most influential film critic of the modern era, it’s only because Roger Ebert had a much greater potential audience on TV and the internet. Meanwhile Adler’s own reputation has dimmed and brightened and dimmed again in the years since, as reputations do.

That’s the deeper irony: for all the finality a takedown is supposed to imply, its effects are nearly always temporary, contingent, overdetermined by vibes. People get back up, and thank goodness. But if the takedown is illusory in its permanence, its short-term consequences are real enough. Reputations suffer. Careers go sideways. And, more and more often, the literary takedown becomes a trap for the women who wield it. It becomes the only thing they’re known for, and it limits their subsequent work. As the feud has become feminized, it has lost the forward momentum it once gave to men. This is not a coincidence. In all manner of competitive elite fields, the spoils of the competition become noticeably less rewarding once women begin succeeding within them.

Male writers have of course been permitted all manner of bad behavior. Mailer stabbed his wife and still got invited on Dick Cavett; David Foster Wallace committed acts of violence against multiple women and still got a MacArthur; VS Naipaul essentially feuded with the entire continent of Africa and was rewarded with a knighthood and a Nobel Prize. It will not surprise you to hear that I don’t think this means we shouldn’t engage with, enjoy, or even champion their work. I am, as you are aware, someone who believes that there is literally no choice but to separate the art from the artist. (Besides, there’s plenty of other reasons to reject the work of any badly behaving male author, textual reasons, artistic reasons.) And you’ll note that those are all examples of actual bad behavior, not just literary feuding. Plenty of male authors of the modern era have feuded and seen their stars rise in spite of it, or because of it. You know Mailer and Vidal, and you could add Truman Capote and Vidal. (Vidal was very much better at being Gore Vidal than he was at being a writer, but being Gore Vidal was enough.) Faulkner fought with Hemingway, as did Wallace Stevens, John Updike battled Tom Wolfe, James Baldwin and Richard Wright had a classic mentor/mentee turned literary combatants thing…. None of these dudes were hurt by feuding.

In contrast, in the modern era, where feuds between male authors are rare (in part because men make up a much smaller part of the headspace of the reading public than they once did) I think a lot of women writers end up suffering a bit for participating in a feud. And, yeah, I think this is a disparity driven by gendered thinking. I’m not comparing the women above to those men morally or stylistically or in prominence or artistic value. I’m comparing the consequences. When men fought, it was treated as proof of their importance; they were seen as passionate, driven, genius-adjacent. The feuds padded their legends. They were occasionally regrettable but mostly sexy. When women fight, it’s evidence that they’re unserious, catty, hysterical. The meaning of the feud has inverted.

I look in particular at the Calloway and Beach drama and see two women who were badly served by the collision of media virality and whatever’s left of literary culture. The feud began in earnest with Beach’s 2019 tell-all essay in The Cut in which she claimed to have ghostwritten large portions of Calloway’s early Instagram captions and their failed book proposal. The piece was an instant sensation, an immaculately timed addition to the girlboss-to-grifter pipeline discourse, and a vicarious thrill for readers addicted to the spectacle of female friendship gone toxic. Beach framed herself as the bruised but clear-eyed survivor of a charismatic manipulator; Calloway responded, of course, with more posts, more drama, more self-mythology. The feud had everything: betrayal, projection, lost ambition, Adderall, ghostwriting, a canceled tour, and a ghosted book deal.

But the net result was stagnation. The virality of Beach’s essay gave her temporary cultural relevance, but little career momentum. I liked her debut essay collection Adult Drama well enough, but it definitely seemed both too close to the New York piece (in that her name still felt primarily attached to Calloway) and too far from it (in that it takes time to write and publish an essay collection that was sold on the back of an essay that went viral and thus had an expiration date). From where I’m sitting, the promise of Beach’s own literary voice has been mostly lost in the fog of mutual grievance. Calloway, meanwhile, spun the controversy in her usual way, extracting all she could from it with her monetized persona, just another in a series of low-budget scandals; that controversy, for her, culminated in the self-published memoir Scammer, which was sold largely as a curiosity, a dare. Neither woman emerged as a more respected writer; neither has successfully graduated from the scene of the crime. What was billed as a catty feud quickly became a parasocial ouroboros. The public came for the gossip, stayed for the schadenfreude, and forgot the writing entirely.

Calloway is a figure who has long been treated as a kind of amusing trainwreck, with her Instagram celebrity and her OnlyFans and her disastrous “creativity workshop,” but such things tend to look less humorous when a genuinely tragic end arrives, as I fear it might. (Drifting towards middle age is rarely a safe experience for people with her kind of public persona.) As she has essentially admitted to using ghostwriters extensively, I don’t know why anyone reviewed Scammer as though she wrote it, but either way the whole thing seems sad and gross to me. Beach certainly has every opportunity to do cool new shit, but Publisher’s Marketplace reports no new books sold since Adult Drama was published two years ago, and the publishing business loves to punish the young writers it blesses after a sudden splash in the economy of attention. (Have I mentioned that the essay collection is a ghetto?) As of right now, Beach and Calloway both lost their feud, despite the fact that both were ultimately playing the hands they were dealt in a sickly media industry and a fickle publishing world.

Sittenfeld poked holes in Freudenberger’s sudden literary celebrity, which with several decades of hindsight just seems petty and pointless to me. Both have worked steadily and had enviable careers, but there’s some sort of sadness that haunts the whole thing given that neither ever ascended again to the status that Sittenfeld mocked and envied in Freudenberger’s early success. Oyler’s willingness to go after the most popular woman in media brought her a good deal of instant virality, but also primed the very people who incessantly shared her review to root for her own downfall, which prompted similar excitement over Manov’s entry. Oyler too can rewrite her story, but there were a bruising couple of months there when her considerable talents were unfairly dismissed. Crispin’s forever war has given her a clear lane and a name in a business where both are essential but also, from my admittedly imperfect vantage point, limited her reach. Was it all worth it? I guess you’d have to ask any or all of them.

---

The arena has changed. Mailer got into it with Vidal on live TV and the whole world watched, or at least a respectable portion of it did. The stakes were clear: an argument between widely-read writers, in widely-read magazines, about ideas and books and power. Today’s literary feuds happen on Twitter and Substack and Letterboxd comments and dueling profiles in niche outlets. There’s no shared stage anymore, no common battlefield, just thousands of disaggregated skirmishes in an exhausted attention economy, and even the winners lose. Needless to say, I labor in the same diminished literary world, though I will go on saying that there are many underrated virtues about today’s reading culture.

Worse still for women writers, many of these feuds are compelled to disguise themselves as something nobler. The Mailer-Vidal fights were rarely about books, not really; they were pissing contests, lent a kind of goofy respectability by the fetish for overt displays of masculinity that had infected American literature at the time. (Today, male writers are much more likely to affect overt displays of femininity, showing again that we carom endlessly from one unfortunate extreme to the other.) That kind of naked ego is no longer in fashion. Women in today’s literary feuds must wrap their critiques up in the language of feminism, in the language of justice. Women writers need to have some sort of liberatory pretext for their feuds; men were always permitted to merely brawl, often for brawling’s sake. The move for a women in a feud is to say it’s all about “accountability,” or “reckoning,” some past slight made structurally significant. Men still get to say “he’s a hack” and call it a day. This rhetorical burden weighs down the genre. It warps honest criticism into something anxious and overdetermined, and it opens the critic up to blowback they never asked for.

None of this is to say that women shouldn’t critique one another’s work. Of course they should. Some of the most perceptive and lasting criticism of the last twenty years has been one woman writing thoughtfully, skeptically, sometimes harshly about another woman. But the market now seems to reward only that posture, only the sniping, only the teardown. Then it punishes the person who delivered it. The woman who swings first is remembered as a bitch; the woman who swings back is seen as petty; the woman who stays quiet is branded complicit. There is no clean win. There is no graceful exit. Like so many other elements of elite culture, once women have graduated to a level of status and attention in a competitive arena, the rewards of competing in it have dissolved.

It’s also just a bad deal economically. None of these feuds help anyone’s advance. They don’t move units. Nobody’s getting a Netflix option because they savaged some other millennial essayist. If you’re a woman and you deliver a legendary takedown in n+1, the only guaranteed result is that some asshole will bring it up in every interview you do for the next ten years. In so many ways, what once functioned as a forge for literary masculinity now functions as a glass trap. The feminized feud is no less vicious than its forebear, but far more isolating. It doesn’t make reputations, it freezes them. It doesn’t build careers, it arrests them. And in a culture where women writers are already structurally disadvantaged in a hundred small ways, the spectacle of them tearing each other down on a quarterly basis isn’t just unseemly; it’s cannibalism.

Of course I didn’t pitch that piece. Far too easy to be misunderstood. Too easy for someone to reduce it to “He thinks women are too emotional to fight.” I don’t. I think they’re being punished for being as emotional and combative as their male predecessors were celebrated for being. Maybe part of me just didn’t want to be caught in the crossfire. Take it from me: in media and publishing, it’s a bad time to be interesting for the wrong reasons. But here’s what I know. If we are what we fight about, and if we are who we fight, then today’s literary culture is adrift in self-suspicion, backbiting, and the compulsive need to perform detachment. It makes me wish for a new kind of feud, one about something real. The question is whether our literary culture can still see the feud as something elevating and edifying as well as entertaining, or whether such fights are now destined to always be seen as girl’s stuff.