This is one of those conversations that made my brain go all jiffy pop with bunches of ideas. I hope you enjoy it as well!
You can find Avidly Reads: Guilty Pleasures wherever you get your books, and I’ve got links in the show notes, too.
…
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You can find Arielle Zibrak, her CV, and links to all her writing at her website, Arielle Zibrak.com.
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Transcript
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[music]
Sarah Wendell: Hello there. Thank you for inviting me into your eardrums! This is episode number 464 of Smart Podcast, Trashy Books. I’m your host Sarah Wendell, and my guest today is Arielle Zibrak. She is the author of Guilty Pleasures, which is a new book in the Avidly Reads series from New York University Press. Her book is an academic look at popular culture and the concept of the guilty pleasure, which, as you may imagine, is relevant to my interests. This is one of those conversations that my, made my brain go all Jiffy Pop with so many different ideas, and I hope you enjoy it as well.
You can find Avidly Reads: Guilty Pleasures wherever you get your books, and of course I’ve got links in the show notes. I will also link to all of the books we talk about and where you can find Arielle, her CV, and links to all of her writing.
Hello and thank you to our Patreon community. If you have supported the show with a monthly pledge, you are making sure that every episode is transcribed, and you keep the show going! Hello to our newest patrons, Tessa, Susan, and Sol. Thank you for joining the community! If you’d like to have a look at our Patreon, it is patreon.com/SmartBitches.
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I am so excited to share this conversation with you. On with my conversation with Arielle Zibrak about guilty pleasures.
[music]
Dr. Arielle Zibrak: First off, thank you so much for having me. It is really a pleasure to be here. My name is Arielle Zibrak. I am a writer and an English professor. In my writerly life I’ve published humor pieces at places like McSweeney’s and The Toast and more think-piece-y type stuff in the LA Review of Books and The Baffler and some other places. I usually write about gender, sexuality, and popular culture. As an English professor, my training is in the literature of the American 19th century, and I also, in that vein, focus on women’s popular culture and sexuality. And I teach students! I teach classes in 19th century literature, gender and sexuality theory, African-American literature, and women’s literature.
Sarah: So you personally – before we get to your book – by the way, congratulations on your book!
Dr. Zibrak: Thank you!
Sarah: You have a very thorough history in romance that I did not know about, and I, I, I am always curious to talk about the examination of romance from an academic perspective. It –
Dr. Zibrak: Mm-hmm.
Sarah: – there’s a lot to interrogate, and there’s a lot to really examine in the different portrayals of many different aspects of human experience inside romances, but often I will come across criticism from someone who I can tell almost immediately has no fluency in the genre. They’re looking at it from a very outside perspective, and you have a very deep knowledge of romance – no pun intended –
Dr. Zibrak: [Laughs]
Sarah: – from several different perspectives! You were an editor, and then you moved to academics!
Dr. Zibrak: Yes.
Sarah: Wow!
Dr. Zibrak: [Laughs]
Sarah: How did you move from editing to academia?
Dr. Zibrak: It’s a very funny story, that, and it’s also funny, like, how I got into romance publishing, which is – so I was an English major as an undergrad, and I was a very, very snobby, unenlightened kind of English major, where I really believed in the canon and thought that these books that I was told were the most valuable and best books ever written in the world were the most valuable and best books written in the world, and it never occurred to me that the things that I read for pleasure were, like, worthy of being objects of serious inquiry.
Sarah: Oh yeah!
Dr. Zibrak: And so when I graduated, I mostly wanted to move to New York because I wanted to move to New York, and so I thought, what can an English major do in New York but work in publishing? And I wanted to work at, like, a highbrow literary imprint like Knopf or Viking and find, like, the next great literary novelist; that was sort of my dream. And I interviewed all over publishing. I kept getting rejected, kept getting rejected, and it’s funny because the reason I kept getting rejected, I kept getting the same feedback: they were like, I don’t think you really want this job.
Sarah: Ooh, ouch!
Dr. Zibrak: And I, I thought that that was funny, because I was like, no, I really need a job!
Sarah: Yeah!
Dr. Zibrak: But in retrospect, I think they were right that that was not what, what I was cut out for. And then I got to this interview with this really incredible romance editor at Ballantine named Linda Marrow, and we immediately clicked, and I said to her – because I had been reading, I liked a lot of, like, YA, like, women’s fiction, real classics; like, I read a lot of L. M. Montgomery, The Baby-Sitters Club, Judy Blume, all of that stuff – and I told her in the, in the interview, I don’t really know a lot about romance, and she said, I just, I think you’d be a perfect person for this job. So we became very, very close; she hired me. She handed me a copy of Whitney, My Love by Judith McNaught and said, read this.
Sarah: Oh, that’s a good start. Whoo! Oh damn!
Dr. Zibrak: Yeah! [Laughs]
Sarah: Wait, was it the original version, or was it the edited version?
Dr. Zibrak: No, it, with the riding crop contained therein.
[Laughter]
Dr. Zibrak: It was all there, and I was like, yes! I love this because it really is just like grown-up versions of those books that I loved and also of the 19th-century novels that I loved. It, it’s like, it is the same; it just has the sex in instead of taken out.
Sarah: Behind the door. Right, yeah.
Dr. Zibrak: Right! So I was like, what could be better than this? And then, you know, for three years I felt that I was sort of living a dream because I was reading romance novels all the time and I was going out to fancy lunches and learning a ton about the industry and meeting really super lovely people and going to RWA, and it was great! But then I think I sort of realized that I wanted to be a writer myself and that working in publishing was not – it takes up so much of your time. Because you don’t –
Sarah: There’s not a lot of extra time, no.
Dr. Zibrak: Yeah! You, you don’t do the reading and the editing part in the office. You take that home and you do that after hours, so it’s really like your entire life is consumed by this job.
Sarah: Yeah.
Dr. Zibrak: So I thought that it would really be a change of pace to go to grad school. Which is also not – [laughs] – not a good decision in that way. But –
Sarah: Well, that’s like –
Dr. Zibrak: Yeah!
Sarah: – that’s like just, you’re still eating pie; you just changed flavors.
Dr. Zibrak: Exactly.
Sarah: Yeah.
Dr. Zibrak: So I went to grad school to study, of all things, modern poetry. And then I had this really incredible female mentor who studied 19th-century women’s fiction and taught me about all of these authors I never knew about before, and I was like, no, I want to study that! And then it just, it’s so funny to me that I ended up writing this book, and, and this became my area of interest, because in some ways I’ve been trying to, like, push it away my whole adult life, but it’s what I want, and it keeps, it keeps coming back to me.
Sarah: And there’s a repeated message that, that, like – and you talk about this in the introduction of your book – that if you enjoy these things, there’s something wrong with you. You are –
Dr. Zibrak: Right.
Sarah: – the things that you consume, especially now with how much of consumption is public-facing with social media, the things that you consume represent you. You don’t want to be represented by things that you know are shameful and silly and fluffy, and you should feel guilty and ashamed of them.
Dr. Zibrak: Yeah! And I think that a lot of women who love reading, and especially young girls who love reading, who become women who love reading –
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Zibrak: – have, like, adopted this identity as, like, the bookish, nerdy, smart girl.
Sarah: Yes.
Dr. Zibrak: Like, like that is sort of how you are right –
Sarah: Can confirm! [Laughs]
Dr. Zibrak: – and we all identify with this. You’re, like, the person in the lunchroom with a novel –
Sarah: Yeah.
Dr. Zibrak: – the person at the playground with a novel, on the bus with a novel. And that becomes your identity, and then when you get older you’re told, like, it’s not bookish or smart to read these kinds of books.
Sarah: Yes, you, you need to read a very specific kind of book to have the cachet of being the nerdy person.
Dr. Zibrak: Right! And so my identity was very much wrapped up in, like, the only thing of value about me is I’m the smart girl, so I need to be reading different things if I want to, like, validate this understanding of myself as the smart girl. And it took me a long time to realize (a) you don’t need to have any kind of identity to be allowed to live your life and take up space on this planet. You can –
Sarah: Yeah.
Dr. Zibrak: – be whatever you want. You don’t need to justify yourself. And (b) it’s not not-smart to like any particular kind of book.
Sarah: Very true. It is very self-diminishing and self-defeating to try to conform to an external standard of what is smart when your own thoughts about the things that you love are just as intellectually valid. Especially if the things that you love are the things that other people don’t take seriously, ‘cause you’re going to see the value in them.
Dr. Zibrak: Yeah, of course! And also, so many other people are too –
Sarah: Oh yeah.
Dr. Zibrak: – and probably those other people are going to have identities that are more like your own, and I think it’s definitely no coincidence that the very smarty-smart things are the things that have been, like, created and sanctioned by the people with all of the social and structural power.
Sarah: Oh yes! Very true. Very, very true. Among my favorite things that when I, when I meet somebody and I tell them what I do and I tell them what my job is and that I run this website about romance novels, sometimes I get this almost resetting from the other person of, oh! So I can talk to you about the books I really love. Like, if you say you love reading, then you get to, you know, you have to rattle off the titles of the books that are important, and I’m like, nonononono! Let’s just, let’s, let’s talk about historical fiction and historical romance, and how ‘bout, you know, vampires, you want to talk about those too? ‘Cause we could talk about that.
So what will readers find in your book? Tell us all about your book, and what will readers find in your book?
Dr. Zibrak: What readers will find in my book is readings that I think are fun of a lot of different kinds of media. So I talk about 19th-century popular fiction, which is a huge interest of mine, and some of the juiciest moments in some of the juiciest novels. I talk about romantic comedies ranging from My Best Friend’s Wedding to Bride Wars to Father of the Bride to – I guess it’s not really a romantic comedy, but one of the most fun parts of the book for me to write was about the film Ghost, because once I started thinking about it within the framework of the book, where I sort of piece apart the ways in which we understand the world through a set of desires that are predominantly white and male, I realized how messed up it was that this entire movie is about an African-American woman, against her will, having to facilitate the emotional and sexual relationship of a dead white man and his wife.
Sarah: It’s really quite blatant when you look at it from that framework, isn’t it? Like, I was reading that section thinking, holy shit! [Laughs] Yeah! This is really fucked up!
Dr. Zibrak: Yeah! So part of what I want to do, I mean here and in my other work, is take things that we’re all really familiar with and love and not tear them apart and say these are bad or we shouldn’t read them or consume them, but say, like, you know, here’s why we might have such a fondness for them, and here’s also how they’re informing some notions that we have about the world that we might hold to be self-evident but are actually really constructs of the culture that we’re steeped in.
Sarah: Yes, it’s, it’s sort of the perennial reappearing argument, are romances novels feminist, or are they codified reinforcement of patriarchal standards? And my general thought is always, well, both, actually. They are both, and sometimes one is stronger and sometimes it’s the other, but you can’t create something within a patriarchal structure without reflecting the structure in which it was created, no matter how subversive it is. You have to have something to subvert first!
Dr. Zibrak: Exactly, and, I mean, another thing I talk about a lot in the book is how, the way that a lot of femme subjects experience sexual desire and the way that sex scenes are written in romance novels also speaks to exactly this paradox that you’re describing, because part of what is erotic or, you know, sexually fantastical or arousing to us is the simultaneous acknowledgment of the fact that we live in this patriarchal society and we do feel dominated by male figures and male ideas, and the ability to be sexually, like, to experience a sexual release from that.
Sarah: Yeah.
Dr. Zibrak: So, you know, I talk a lot about the dark hero as a figure in romance and other genres as well, and I think that that’s a really interesting place from which to think about this question about the feminism of romance novels, because it doesn’t make you a bad feminist if you have a desire to fantasize about a strong male figure who’s maybe at times dominating or domineering. I’m very, like, on board with the movement in romance away from rape scenes?
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Zibrak: But I also understand why they were part of the formation of the genre and why they were there –
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Zibrak: – and why I think women still – I mean, I still see, like, especially in, like, fictions for young women – something that I wrote an article about that kind of prompted me to write this book is a Netflix movie called The Kissing Booth?
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Zibrak: Which is about a real, like a very classic dark hero figure: this guy who, like, rides a motorcycle and has anger issues and is constantly, like – there’s a scene where he punches the hood of his car and says to the heroine, get in the car, Elle! And she gets in the car, and I’m like, no! In real life –
Sarah: Oh, hell no!
Dr. Zibrak: – never get into the car with that guy! But yet I also understand why this is pleasurable to consume and watch, because she then gets to have, like, very tender and loving sex with him. And so I think part of the fantasy is, like, taming the structure of oppression through the ex-, the cathartic experience of sexual release with the very figure of that oppression. It’s like a Beauty and the Beast thing.
Sarah: Yes! Absolutely! Now, your book is called Guilty Pleasures, which of course makes my inner meerkat sort of sit up and go, oh yeah? Sorry? You have, you have released the bat signal towards me. I am fascinated with this phrase itself, and I wanted to ask you about it because there are a lot of folks who get very irritated with the concept of a guilty pleasure, and one of the things your book is sort of skewering is that at its absolute foundation – and this is part of your introduction – femme-coded topics do not have to be drenched in shame because you enjoy them. Now, and I want to say that as the owner of a site that talks about trashy books, I appreciate very much this duality, ‘cause I don’t actually believe that romances are trashy. I was just sort of –
Dr. Zibrak: Right.
Sarah: I mean, when we named the site sixteen, seventeen years ago? We were trying to reclaim the idea, like, yeah! We’re going to talk about, you know those books that you call trashy? We super love them! Come on over to the hot pink palace. So what is your take on the phrase guilty pleasure and what it describes?
Dr. Zibrak: I do not feel guilty about consuming anything.
Sarah: No, me neither.
[Laughter]
Sarah: Not a bit.
Dr. Zibrak: Like, for example, I watched a show last night called Murder House Flip, which is a Roku original show about home makeovers of houses where murders occurred.
Sarah: Okay, when this episode comes out, a thousand people just paused –
Dr. Zibrak: [Laughs]
Sarah: – to go google this. Like, no one is listening at this moment because everyone has paused, and they are googling that show right now. Oh my gosh!
Dr. Zibrak: – saw that come by on the screen, and I’m like, yes.
Sarah: Yes!
Dr. Zibrak: Thank you for sending this to me.
Sarah: [Laughs]
Dr. Zibrak: The, I mean, the things about this show are (a) they just renovate the murder house, and the people keep living in it. So the murder, like, what’s changed? You still live in a murder house? I mean, I have a lot of, like, questions and complaints about this show, but I loved watching it, and I will tell anyone that that’s what I did last night. I mean, I think that the whole concept – exactly as you said before, like, we are not what we consume, so it doesn’t say anything about me in particular that I really deeply enjoyed watching – I mean, the episodes are seven minutes, so just bear that in mind –
Sarah: That’ll do.
Dr. Zibrak: – when I tell you that I think I watched eight episodes last night of Murder House Flip, but yes. I don’t think that says anything about me as a person, so I don’t feel any guilt about watching it. I think if –
Sarah: No!
Dr. Zibrak: – if anything says anything about me as, as a person, I am proud that I am proud to say that I have watched Murder House Flip.
Sarah: Uh, yeah! Well, it’s like if True Crime and House Hunters had a baby!
Dr. Zibrak: It’s a beautiful concept. I wish they would develop it a little bit more. I have some thoughts –
Sarah: [Laughs]
Dr. Zibrak: – if the people who produce Murder House Flip are listening, into making this into a longer, like thirty-minute or even hour-long episode; there are other elements I’d like to see enacted.
But the point is, I don’t, when I said guilty pleasures, I don’t think we should feel guilty about anything that gives us pleasure, especially –
Sarah: Yes.
Dr. Zibrak: – if “we” is inclusive of we as people who experience any kind of structural oppression. I think that people who are in non-dominant identity categories especially are entitled to whatever gives them pleasure, because, you know, the every day is so difficult, and I think that –
Sarah: Yeah!
Dr. Zibrak: – like, seizing pleasure from a society that tells you your pleasure is not valid or worthwhile is a really important revolutionary act for people to undertake.
That being said, my definition of guilty pleasures is stuff that gives you pleasure because it allows you to sort of play in the space of your own feelings of guilt. So I think that we feel guilty about a lot of things that are outside of our control: our class background, our race background, our gender background, the desires that we have, the inadequacies that we feel. People feel guilty about the shape of their body.
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Zibrak: Like, you, you can’t control that.
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Zibrak: And so I think that one thing that women’s fictions are really good at doing is depicting that guilt. So I talk about, like, the, one of my favorite novels as a kid, the Judy Blume novel Deenie, where the main character –
Sarah: Yes.
Dr. Zibrak: – has scoliosis and has to wear a brace all the time, and it’s really a novel about her physical shame comingled with her emergent sexual desire.
Sarah: Yeah.
Dr. Zibrak: And I think that so many romance novels do this so well, where the heroine is coming into her own sexuality in a way that is as much suffused with shame as it is with desire, and I think that it’s really cathartic for us to read about shame and guilt. So to me it’s like, if you took that part out, it wouldn’t be as pleasurable, so a guilty pleasure is one that allows you to experience your guilt alongside your pleasure.
[music]
Sarah: I will be right back with more of my conversation with Arielle Zibrak, but first, a thing to tell you real quick:
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And now back to the rest of our conversation with Arielle Zibrak.
[music]
Sarah: One of the things you say in the book that I really like was the idea that guilty pleasure texts are like baths for the mind. Pleasure is productive because it produces itself.
Now, I read an, a book to do another interview much earlier in the year, I think it was in January, with Dr. Devon Price, who wrote a book called Laziness Does Not Exist. So it’s a massive skewering of productivity culture and the idea that laziness is a construct and it doesn’t actually exist and that your, you know, your brain and your body are doing the best that they can to protect you when you are burning out. It’s a great book if you really want to dismantle the concept of laziness and productivity, but I was grabbed by your use of “productive,” that pleasure is productive because it produces itself. And again, we receive these coded messages, don’t we, that we shouldn’t even pursue or produce pleasure for ourselves.
Dr. Zibrak: Yeah! And I think, I mean, this goes along with the idea of feeling like one needs to earn their spot on Earth. Like –
Sarah: Yes!
Dr. Zibrak: – we, we need to constantly be doing something to validate the fact that we exist and are here, and, like, I think we feel a lot of shame about, you know, even if our partner, like, catches us watching TV in the middle of the day, or, like, if you’re lying in bed at night and you realize, oh my God, I didn’t anything on my to-do list today, or I didn’t get anything done today.
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Zibrak: But you lived! And, like, maybe you went for a walk, and maybe you took a bath, and maybe you, like, experienced the bliss of being alive, which I would argue is one of the most important things that anyone could be doing. And so I think –
Sarah: Especially in the past year, yeah!
Dr. Zibrak: Yeah! We, like, a lot of people miss their entire lives because they spend them trying to justify being alive by, like, making money and making things and making plans and trying to seem like they are busy.
Sarah: Yep.
Dr. Zibrak: I feel like what your life is is what you spend your time doing –
Sarah: Right.
Dr. Zibrak: – and I would like to spend my time – not completely; I’m not, like, a total hedonist – but, like, spending a lot of time doing things that bring me joy, because I only get one chance of being alive.
Sarah: Yeah! You don’t get a do-over.
Dr. Zibrak: No.
Sarah: Nope. You also talk a lot about the concept of shame and guilt, which aren’t quite exactly the same thing, but you point out that guilty pleasure and trash or trashy media is still coded femme.
Dr. Zibrak: Mm-hmm.
Sarah: Because, you know, serious stuff is status, so of course if status novels are white male novels, then anything that is female-centered is the opposite of status, which would be shame and guilt.
Dr. Zibrak: Right.
Sarah: That was something that you tackled a lot in the introduction and you come back to in the, in the subsequent chapters. Was that section kind of cathartic to write?
Dr. Zibrak: Oh my God, absolutely!
Sarah: [Laughs]
Dr. Zibrak: Especially as somebody who went through all of these major white male systems like publishing and academia.
Sarah: Oh yeah!
Dr. Zibrak: I mean, the whole, like, structure of higher education is built around white male ideas, schedules, desires –
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Zibrak: – standards, and, you know, I’ve, in coming through those systems, I’ve faced the same kind of sexism that anyone would have faced. I remember very early on, when I was thinking about applying to grad school, a male professor told me, I think your problem is going to be that you don’t quite seem as smart as you are.
Sarah: Oh Jesus – what?!
Dr. Zibrak: And I really took that very uncritically and thought, oh my God, what am I doing that makes me seem stupid? Is it how I talk? Is it how I dress? Is it – what? You know, and, and thought about how could I reform myself to be more smart-seeming in order to be successful in this enterprise which I want to undertake? And I think that, you know, it’s, it’s an almost shamefully long time before I realized there was, there’s nothing I could do about that!
Sarah: Yeah.
Dr. Zibrak: That’s just, he’s a sexist!
Sarah: Yeah!
Dr. Zibrak: I can’t change the way that he thinks about me!
Sarah: Yeah.
Dr. Zibrak: That’s never going to happen!
Sarah: So would you be willing to talk a little bit about the structure of the book and how you frame the concept of, you know, undermining the guilt of pleasure with three main concepts that you, that you, that you focus on in this book? Would you talk a little bit about those three concepts? I thought that was a really smart way to structure the entirety of your examination.
Dr. Zibrak: I’m glad you saw it that way, because I really – like, the way that these chapters came about was through asking, I just asked myself crucial questions I wanted answered, and then I gave myself the task of researching them and thinking about them, and basically there’s, like, a question that animates each chapter. So the first chapter is called “Rough Sex.”
Sarah: Yep.
Dr. Zibrak: The question that I wanted answered there was why is the dark hero such a familiar figure? And why do women who really strongly – and I’ve talked to so many women who, you know, agreed that this describes them, women who really identify as feminists have fantasies of, like, sexual domination –
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Zibrak: – and like reading stories about sexual domination. And I actually, I didn’t include this in the book, but as part of my research I really did some exhaustive perusals of Goodreads, and especially of Goodreads reviews of books that have been widely criticized for, for containing rape scenes or containing very violent scenes, and a lot of women expressed this kind of bafflement at their own enjoyment of these titles. I was motivated by this question; like, why do women who would never want to experience any kind of violent sexual encounter in real life like fantasizing or reading about violent sexual encounters? Also, in that research I discovered that most Pornhub searches for rough sex are searched for by women, by people who identify as women.
Sarah: Interesting!
Dr. Zibrak: Yeah. And then the next chapter is called “Expensive Sheets.” And these are questions also, you know, like, expensive sheets in particular are a question I asked myself, which is, like, why do people who are neither white nor rich love fictions about white, rich people?
Sarah: Your whole examination of that –
Dr. Zibrak: Like, why are they so popular?
Sarah: – all these rich, white, rich – white, rich people narratives, the, the, the listing of, the minute they’re listed under that title I was like, oh God, yeah. That’s a bunch! That’s a whole bunch of –
Dr. Zibrak: Yeah!
Sarah: – of different subgenres housed under rich, white people stories.
Dr. Zibrak: And why do we care about their lives?
Sarah: Oh yeah.
Dr. Zibrak: Like, why do we, why do we want to spend time in that place? I mean, the more that I thought about that question, the more baffling it was to me, but I hope, I mean I think that in the, in the chapter I start to uncover some answers.
And then likewise in “Saying Yes to the Dress,” I was thinking about, like, what’s with the enduring fascination with weddings when, similar to rough sex, they – I mean, every-, everything about the wedding, the western wedding ceremony and wedding traditions is so mired in this history of women as property –
Sarah: Yeah.
Dr. Zibrak: – that it’s like, why do we want, why do we love watching weddings and reading about weddings, the dress shopping, and again, why do so many of my feminist friends and very independent, empowered women get so wrapped up in the whole, like, wedding ethos when it’s their time to get married?
Sarah: Oh yeah.
Dr. Zibrak: I was interested in the bridezilla trope. Like –
Sarah: Oh yeah.
Dr. Zibrak: – there’s just so much there that seems contradictory, like when our desires are at odds with our values.
Sarah: One of my favorite quotes from the book – I always like to share my favorite quotes – this one is my, probably my favorite, ‘cause I have two teenage sons, and all of them, and my husband, are super into the Marvel Cinematic Universe? So –
Dr. Zibrak: Mm.
Sarah: – this was my favorite quote: Gossip Girl is an excellent example of a genre I call Rich White People’s Fictions (RWPS): books, movies, shows about very rich, very white people. They offer a fantasy of the power that super wealth and super whiteness confer. They’re a form of escapism akin to superhero movies. They indulge us by imagining what it would be like to move through the world effortlessly, to inhabit an experience so elevated from the experience of everyone else.
Okay, so way to codify that into like twenty-five words? Awesome!
Dr. Zibrak: [Laughs] Thanks!
Sarah: That is probably one of my favorite sections, because it’s like, oh, yeah, of course! What we’re, what we’re fantasizing about, what we’re, what we’re generating, what is generating pleasure is the idea of moving through the world effortlessly without obstruction and without criticism, and how powerful that fantasy is.
Dr. Zibrak: Yeah! And I think that, like, a part of that too is the kinds of problems that show up in Rich White People Fictions, which are, it’s, it’s always like a tempest in a teacup –
Sarah: Yes.
Dr. Zibrak: – some very, like, big deal made out of some very small stakes issue, and I think it’s very relaxing to consume media that’s, makes a big deal out of small problems. Like –
Sarah: Oh yes.
Dr. Zibrak: – it’s the same reason why baking shows are so fun, because you can totally lose your mind about being like, oh my God, she put in the wrong amount of butter!
Sarah: Nooo!
Dr. Zibrak: It’s going to be a catastrophe!
Sarah: She didn’t temper the chocolate! Yeah.
Dr. Zibrak: [Laughs] Right!
Sarah: Oh yeah.
Dr. Zibrak: And that’s always how, like, rich, white people problems are, which is very relaxing to consume. Because you don’t want to have to get into, like, the mire and the nitty-gritty with someone else’s bad day when you yourself have had a bad day.
Sarah: Oh yeah. The absolute monstrosity problem that in the real world is not actually a problem? It, it’s, it’s lovely when it happens to someone else on a screen and you don’t have to worry about it, and often they look really nice and they’re dressed really lovely and everything is clean, and they all look cool; no one’s sweaty! No one’s ever sweaty –
Dr. Zibrak: Yeah!
Sarah: – or uncomfortable.
Dr. Zibrak: Well, so, I mean, one of the things that, that I noticed when I was writing the chapter, and I write about this in the book, is, like, in Rich White People Fictions, people are constantly wearing white –
Sarah: Yes!
Dr. Zibrak: – and all of their stuff is white?
Sarah: Yes!
Dr. Zibrak: And part of that is, like, the fantasy of – I mean, like, I have this white sundress that I love –
Sarah: Oh yeah.
Dr. Zibrak: – and I got it at a thrift shop, and I’m always like, I’m going to look so great in this this summer every summer, but there’s never a day when I can wear it, because I have a five-year-old son –
Sarah: Yeah!
Dr. Zibrak: – and I clean my own house –
Sarah: Yep!
Dr. Zibrak: – and I bike everywhere that I go. Like, if, I could wear that for five minutes tops, and then it would be totally destroyed.
Sarah: Oh yeah!
Dr. Zibrak: So there’s, like, this incredible fantasy of being, like, in, like, a flowing white blouse and white jeans –
Sarah: Yep.
Dr. Zibrak: – and you can go through your whole day like that, because you’re never doing anything that’s going to compromise that outfit.
Sarah: Nope. Candice Bergen wearing crisp white shirts. You mentioned Gatsby in a, in a linen suit that is never wrinkled? Like, I even look at linen and it’s wrinkled. I don’t even have to take it off the hanger. I just looked at it.
Dr. Zibrak: [Laughs]
Sarah: But yeah, wearing, wearing white and never having to worry about pit stains or any kind of stains? And I don’t know what it is –
Dr. Zibrak: Yeah!
Sarah: – but, like, the upper slope of my chest? That’s just, collect food stains there. It’s like I for-, didn’t know how to eat correctly. It’s just, I just accept that that’s part of my human body: it’s messy. [Laughs]
Dr. Zibrak: Right! That’s why we wear prints and dark colors.
Sarah: Yup! That’s right! That’s us –
Dr. Zibrak: But you nev-, you don’t see those things in a Rich White People Fiction.
Sarah: No! They’re all wearing white, and they’re never wrinkled or sweaty! [Laughs]
Dr. Zibrak: No. The other thing that’s a real fantasy of Rich White People Fictions regarding wrinkles, and this is, like, my favorite part of Fifty Shades of Grey, the movie, is when someone has a closet where there’s like three inches of space between each hung item.
Sarah: Oh yeah.
Dr. Zibrak: That’s like a major ultimate fantasy for me.
Sarah: Oh yeah.
Dr. Zibrak: Like, that the, you could see all the garments and you’re not like, you’re not doing the big, like, closet heave? [Laughs]
Sarah: Yeah. Oh yeah. It looks like, they live in a place that looks like a staged place. Yeah.
What are some of the 19th-century writings that you love teaching? And do you have any recommendations for readers now?
Dr. Zibrak: Sure! I feel like we’ve all been robbed a little bit, because most of us are taught the 19th-century fiction of white men, which is like Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Melville –
Sarah: Yeah.
Dr. Zibrak: – and I like those works. This is not to say I don’t enjoy reading those things; I do enjoy reading them, and I teach them as well. But there’s a whole 19th-century culture that doesn’t really get taught in school –
Sarah: No.
Dr. Zibrak: – but is just as fun as our culture now.
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Zibrak: And so, like, one of my favorite examples of that is a work that only recently was republished in book form by a woman named Eliza Potter, and it was published originally in 1859. It’s called A Hairdresser’s Experience in High Life, and it’s about this African-American woman who was the hairdresser to all of these Southern, rich, white ladies, and it’s just this dishy tell-all about her experience with all of these debutantes, and she’s a fabulous writer, and it’s so much fun! And it’s like, it, it’s basically the reality show version of 19th-century literature. Like, they had that too, and everybody read this thing! And people were trying to piece together, like, who is it? Who’s she talking about? It’s great, and students love reading it, and I assign it to them alongside, like, I get them to make their own little fashion magazines about the 19th century by digging through archives and finding, like, pictures and how-to advice. So that one is super, super fun.
I also really recommend – I write about this a lot in the book – The Hidden Hand?
Sarah: Yes!
Dr. Zibrak: By E. D. E. N. Southworth. And everyone I’ve recommended this to has loved it, and my students always say it’s their favorite book in the course. It’s really long, which to me is always a benefit –
Sarah: Yeah.
Dr. Zibrak: – ‘cause you get to hang out with it for a very long time, and it’s just, like, this epic romance about this heroine who we first encounter when she’s a child dressed as a boy, selling newspapers in New York City to avoid, so that she could support herself and also to avoid being raped. So she realizes the necessity of dressing and living as a boy, and she’s like this sort of fast-talking, quick-witted, tomboyish, kind of like Huckleberry Finn-ish character, and she, along the lines of Punky Brewster or Little Orphan Annie, gets rescued by this curmudgeonly old white dude, who lives in a big mansion out in the country, and he tries to, like, tame her and put her in fancy dresses and make her behave, but of course her outrageous behavior only succeeds in, like, opening his heart to the greater joys of the world. But in the meanwhile, she, like, gets into sword fights and gun battles and, like –
Sarah: As you do.
Dr. Zibrak: – stops all of these villains; falls in love with, like, a robber who’s kind of like a creature out of German folklore.
Sarah: [Laughs]
Dr. Zibrak: She saves, like, a very feminine, meek, blonde girl from having to marry an evil rake, and she has her own – I don’t want to spoil it, but she has her own little love affair and Happily Ever After, even though in my reading and in a lot of my students’ readings, it would be more satisfying if she ended up with the villain, because he’s like a dark hero sexy type. He’s also 6’8”, which is something that I find really funny every time I read the book, because that’s super tall now, but it’s like crazy tall in the 19th century –
Sarah: That’s like massive tall!
Dr. Zibrak: – and he’s also, like, constantly in disguises, which I don’t think makes any sense for someone who is 6’8”, but it’s really fun. And it’s just written – E. D. E. N. Southworth was the best-selling writer of the 19th century.
Sarah: Really!
Dr. Zibrak: She wrote – yeah – like, anywhere between fifty to seventy novels; we don’t really know how many novels she wrote, because she published so many, and a lot of them were only published serially in periodicals. And they’re all about, like, intrigue and escapes and battles and romance, and a lot of them are about men leaving their wives and women having to fend for themselves, because that is indeed what happened to her in real life?
Sarah: Oh!
Dr. Zibrak: Her husband went to Brazil in search of gold, abandoning her and her two young children.
Sarah: Oh!
Dr. Zibrak: And so she became a writer to support herself, and she ended up being, like, extremely successful and wealthy and a real celebrity of the 19th century, although she’s very little known today.
Sarah: Wow! That’s really interesting! So you must have a really good time finding texts that you’re going to incorporate in your classes, ‘cause there’s a lot of undiscovered and forgotten books from that period of time that were as popular as romances are now.
Dr. Zibrak: Yeah, a hundred percent! And it worked in a very similar way, which is that readers had a lot of say in the community of women writers and popular fiction. So because the novels were published serially for the most part, these writers were, had a huge correspondence career as well, and readers would write to them, and they would alter what they were writing based on what readers were saying. They would communicate with readers; they would find out what kinds of stories readers were interested in reading, and they would write those stories.
Sarah: Sounds like fanfic!
Dr. Zibrak: Yeah, exactly! I mean, a lot of it is fanfiction, and it was also, I mean, really, truly popular culture in the way that, you know, television was, or still kind of is –
Sarah: Yeah.
Dr. Zibrak: – and internet culture is, because there was simultaneously this huge boost in literacy –
Sarah: Right.
Dr. Zibrak: – so there were far more people who could read, and these innovations in print technology that allowed print media to be disseminated really, really cheaply –
Sarah: Yeah.
Dr. Zibrak: – so people, everybody was reading! And there was, like, this huge demand for stories, and stories written by women sold better than stories written by men, so it, I mean, it seems crazy to us now, but if you were a woman who found yourself, like, with no way to support yourself in the 19th century, one of the first thoughts you would have is like, maybe I could write something for the newspapers, because they were constantly looking for content. It was like they were so content thirsty, and the more they, the more they produced, the more they could sell. It was like audiences were insatiable for these kinds of stories.
Sarah: Wow. So what are you working on right now?
Dr. Zibrak: Hmm, I glad you asked! [Laughs] So I just finished writing a novel, actually.
Sarah: Oh, congratulations!
Dr. Zibrak: Thank you! Which is about that, it’s, it’s a, it’s a historical novel, but sort of mildly historical? It’s set at the end of the 20th century, and it’s about that period between graduating from college and kind of like finding your way in the world. The heroine is a young woman who has a lot of family problems and is sort of torn between her desire to establish herself and her relationship with her very troubled sister. So basically I wanted to write a novel that was like a Happily Ever After for a female relationship, so it’s kind of about how the sisters find their way in the world and ultimately succeed, despite all of this shit that’s thrown in their path.
And then I’m also working on a nonfiction book that’s called In the Image of Our Own Desires –
Sarah: Ooh, hello!
Dr. Zibrak: – and it’s about consumer feminism and its roots in two 19th-century, again, very popular ideological movements that we don’t know much about because they were so female-centered? One is called New Thought, and one is called Arts and Crafts, and they were basically philosophies that contradicted each other in a lot of ways but served the same kind of social purpose, which is helping women think through how to empower themselves through the mechanisms of corporate capitalism.
Sarah: Oooh. Relevant.
Dr. Zibrak: So New Thought is like the movement that gave birth to The Power of Positive Thinking or, like, The Secret, things like that.
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Zibrak: It grew out of Christian Science, and it’s this philosophy that you can control the world through controlling your thoughts.
Sarah: Hmm!
Dr. Zibrak: Really popular and influential in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and it kind of became like this Ponzi scheme-like thing, sort of like multilevel marketing companies, that was totally engaged in by women and run by women, where you would pay a ton to be taught to be a New Thought teacher, and then you would teach other New Thought teachers. You would charge these exorbitant rates to teach other New Thought teachers how to be New Thought teachers.
All of these aspects of our culture, I argue in this book, come from these women-led ideological movements that we don’t tend to think about or write about. There’s really only one really good history book about New Thought, even though it was like a huge part of culture in the time period and I, I think, and, and think I show in the book, carries on to today. Like, it’s a huge part of the history of America that I’m hoping gets more recognition as a result of the book.
And then Arts and Crafts is on the other end, which is like instead of thinking about how we can change the way that we think or behave to influence outcomes in the real world, Arts and Crafts is about making our environment different in order to facilitate a happier and more rewarding life.
So you can think about it as like New Thought would be something like Gwyneth Paltrow and Goop or, like, yoga movements versus, like, Etsy and Craftivism where there’s like these two kind of factions of thinking within popular feminist culture: one that is more around, like, the inner life, and one that is more around, like, physical practices. But both are about how consumption styles kind of offer this false promise of liberation.
Sarah: Wow. That is really, really cool.
Dr. Zibrak: [Laughs]
Sarah: So I always ask this question: what books are you reading that you would like to tell people about?
Dr. Zibrak: So I just read Wild Rain by Beverly Jenkins. I don’t know if you’ve read that one yet.
Sarah: So good! So good!
Dr. Zibrak: Yeah. It’s amazing, and as someone who lives in Wyoming, I was like, yes!
Sarah: [Laughs]
Dr. Zibrak: Because it, as you know, it’s about a woman named Spring Lee who is a rancher in Wyoming, and a hot journalist comes to town –
Sarah: Yup!
Dr. Zibrak: – and she has to take care of him. And she’s just this really awesome, compelling character who’s a little bit hard to figure out, but I found their love story very compelling and believable –
Sarah: Oh yeah.
Dr. Zibrak: – and fun. And I love Bev Jenkins; I think she’s a great writer.
Sarah: Wyoming is a, a bit different from New York.
Dr. Zibrak: In some ways! [Laughs]
Sarah: Yeah. In a few different ways.
Dr. Zibrak: It’s a phenomenal change. And in fact I, before I moved here, I had only ever lived in major cities.
Sarah: Oh wow!
Dr. Zibrak: In my whole life, so it was huge.
Sarah: That is a big change.
Dr. Zibrak: I really love it here. Part of the reason I love it here is ‘cause it’s almost always sunny –
Sarah: Mm.
Dr. Zibrak: – and another reason I love it here is that it’s just so easy to be out in these extremely gorgeous landscapes. Like, I can drive –
Sarah: Yes.
Dr. Zibrak: – for twenty minutes and go on a hike that in my previous life would only be accessible via like a two-week-long vacation –
Sarah: Yeah.
Dr. Zibrak: – where I removed myself to an area of such extreme beauty. So I’ve noticed that it’s, it just changes my mu-, my mood hugely to be able to experience those kinds of environments –
Sarah: Yeah.
Dr. Zibrak: – with great regularity.
Sarah: Oh yeah.
Dr. Zibrak: That I like. And I also live in, like, a very cool, small, university town full of lovely, thoughtful people.
Sarah: Yep. And I also notice –
Dr. Zibrak: I think I’ve been –
Sarah: – a cultural change when you move from a place like New York to a place where, if you are dumb, the land will kill you. It cre- –
Dr. Zibrak: Yeah!
Sarah: – it creates a different cultural community.
Dr. Zibrak: Hundred percent.
Sarah: It’s a completely different community environment when, even if you really, really dislike that person, if you see them in danger and you know that they will die if you don’t help them, it creates a different sense of community.
Dr. Zibrak: That is so true, and I kept – when I moved here and I first made that realization, I kept going around telling everybody, like, now I really understand Willa Cather.
Sarah: Yeah!
Dr. Zibrak: Because –
[Laughter]
Dr. Zibrak: Because before I was like, why is everyone so mean about all this stuff? And then, like, they’re mean because these people will die!
Sarah: Yeah!
Dr. Zibrak: Like – [laughs] –
Sarah: Yeah!
Dr. Zibrak: – stakes are high, people!
Sarah: Yeah!
Dr. Zibrak: Get it together!
Sarah: Are there any other books you want to mention?
Dr. Zibrak: Yes! So I just also finished reading a brand-new book called Lizzie & Dante by Mary Bly? Which is a real fantasy for me also, not because it’s set in Wyoming but because it is about a Shakespeare professor who gets into this, like, wildly fabulous romance with an Italian man on the Isle of Elba, and it has all of this, like, beach-y, scenic, atmospheric stuff and another just, like, really charming and super convincing love story. So that was fun.
And I’m also reading a not-quite-so-new book, but one that’s been on my list for a while, that I’m just loving the writing style of, which is Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler?
Sarah: Mm-hmm?
Dr. Zibrak: About her time working in the restaurant industry. And her prose style is just, like, intoxicating.
Those are the things that I have just engaged with beyond the flipping the murder house show.
Sarah: Right.
Dr. Zibrak: [Laughs]
[music]
Sarah: And that brings us to the end of this episode. Thank you again to Arielle Zibrak for sending me a copy of her book and hanging out with me to discuss everything inside it. Of course I will have links to Avidly Reads: Guilty Pleasures and all the other books we talked about in the show notes at smartbitchestrashybooks.com/podcast! You can also find Arielle Zibrak, her CV, and links to all of her writing at ariellezibrak.com, and of course that link will be in the show notes as well.
Thank you to garlicknitter for transcribing this episode. [Loved it! – gk] Thank you to the cat for stopping the loud munching in his food bowl, which is, of course, next to my microphone. And thank you for listening.
I end with a terrible joke, because that’s how we do things here, and I love sharing horrible jokes, so here’s another one:
If H2O is on the inside of a fire hydrant, what’s on the outside?
Well, if H2O is on the inside of the fire hydrant, what’s on the outside would be K9P.
[Laughs] This joke is brought to you by my dogs, who have their walk very early in the morning because it is so hot, and have a favorite fire hydrant. K9P!
On behalf of everyone here, we wish you the very best of reading. Have a wonderful weekend, and we’ll be back here next week!
Smart Podcast, Trashy Books is part of the Frolic Podcast Network. You can find more outstanding podcasts to subscribe to at frolic.media/podcasts.
[charming music]
This podcast transcript was handcrafted with meticulous skill by Garlic Knitter. Many thanks.
Thanks for an informative interview, Sarah and Dr. Zibrak. Thanks for the transcript, garlic knitter. And thank you for the silly joke, Sarah!
I was listening to her talk of reading the book by Mary Bly and thinking “that sounds like Eloisa James”. Yep. It is. /insert laugh here