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In 1997, Adrienne Miller became the first female literary editor of the venerable Esquire magazine at the early age of 25. By this time Esquire had published fiction from some of America’s most distinguished literary voices, including Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Norman Mailer. In her new memoir, In the Land of Men, Miller describes what it was like to be an unwelcome outsider in the male dominated publishing industry that was still beholden to these titans of the genre.
Miller begins with her time growing up in rural Ohio, her early fascination with the transporting power of literature, and the various conditions that eventually lander her an editorial assistant job at GQ after graduating college. She describes her consistent battle to be taken seriously by her male colleagues, which continued even when these men were no longer her superiors, but her direct reports. Miller brings a witty and sharp sensibility to her career retrospective, offering honest appraisals of her experience while simultaneously dismantling the archaic power structures of her industry.
Miller has an ineffable literary sensibility, and the strongest points of the memoir are her appraisals of the fiction that was being submitted to her during her tenure as a fiction editor, where she offers sharp critiques or praise of a variety of notable stories or books. Alas, if only Miller focused on her own interesting body of work at Esquire, than turning to another’s oeuvre. The memoir feels very promising until it becomes subsumed by the arrival of the legendary David Foster Wallace, who had a professional relationship with Miller that quickly became personal after Wallace harassed Miller with multiple phone calls after she bought one of his stories. Miller’s writing about Wallace offers troubling insight into Wallace’s emotionally manipulative behavior and blatantly sexist attitude, both of which are absolutely present in his fiction.
What is most frustrating about Miller’s perspective on her relationship with Wallace is that its clear that she partly understands the emotional abuse that her partner is subjecting her to (“Had I actually been involved in an abusive relationship with David?”), but is never ready to take that final step in naming the abuse. Wallace’s pursuit of Miller crosses a number of professional boundaries, and his behavior is clearly incredibly manipulative and falls under the umbrella of workplace harassment. The scenes in which he calls to discuss his sexually graphic and misogynist work with his editor are grotesque, and the reader gets the sense that he is getting some sort of pleasure out of forcing Miller to come to terms with his sexist and pornographic material. Miller acknowledges her partner’s problematic behavior—she is aware that he his a “great male narcissist”, to use a term that Wallace coined—but nevertheless she engages in weakly constructed defense of the white male troubled genius. Her insights into his work, praise and criticism alike, are far more interesting than her personal assertions of his genius, which begin to feel like excuses for his behavior.
One of the main threads of the memoir is Miller’s experience of workplace sexism, whether it be snide comments or out-and-out sexual assault, but for some reason Miller refuses to lump in Wallace with these other bad actors. Her reverence of his work seems to prevent her from being truthful about the man she encountered, and she always asserts that he was too mysterious for her to ever really know him well. In the first half of the memoir, she uses the old Maya Angelou adage, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them,” but seems unable to apply this sentiment to her tumultuous relationship with Wallace. In a memoir that tackles important issues of workplace sexism and gender inequality in the publishing world, the David Foster Wallace idolatry only cheapens the message.