I've already started pressing Alice Munro's Too Much Happiness on my friends, and the one who finished my copy gave it back with a shiver and the comment, "Good. Creepy!" That sums up Munro's writing, in this book more than many of her others. Critics have faulted the stories in this volume for an excess of crime and blood. Children die, a murderer holds a woman hostage in her house, a skanky old man gets a young woman to take off her clothes and read him poetry in his library. I did not mind. To me, Munro's excellence as a writer builds on and then far outstrips her creepiness. And the images that haunt me from this book are some of the more florid ones, if I'm honest. In particular, the end of the opening story, "Dimensions" (a favorite of none of the reviewers I've read). A woman is taking the bus to visit her husband in prison. He's there because he killed their three children, but she is still in his thrall. From the window of the bus, she sees a driver plunge into a ditch and fly out of his truck. She gives him back life by breathing into his mouth. "Shy but steady whiffs now, a sweet obedience in the chest. Keep on, keep on." She tells the bus driver to go on without her. She has broken her husband's hold over her after all.

Hanna and Margaret Talbot and I will talk about Too Much Happiness for a DoubleX book club in a couple of weeks. Read it and write in here or on Facebook, before or after, to ask questions or tell us what you think.

Tags: alice munro, book of the week, DoubleX Book of the Week, too much happiness

Who would you rather have as a mother, Padma Lakshmi, Angelina Jolie, or Joyce Maynard? Last month we ran a “Modern Love Revenge” by Maynard’s daughter, in which she disclosed the exquisitely manipulative letter Maynard had written her daughter to convince her that it was OK for Maynard to write about her.

Maynard responded to the revenge piece in one of her weekly update e-mail newsletters. For those of you who aren't familiar with Maynard’s letters to fans, they are precious affairs in which she continues nearly 40 years of lyrical solipsism, updating on everything from health hiccups to yoga breakthroughs to fans she encounters at book readings to other fans she encounters at book readings who drove eight hours to get there.

In her Nov 6. letter discussing the DoubleX “Modern Love Revenge,” Maynard pulled a classic Maynard. She carefully and sensitively explained the line she walks when deciding to write about family members.

I have no right to tell anyone’s story but my own. Though sometimes—here comes the hard part—the story we have to tell, about ourselves, concerns the story of someone else (possibly someone we love), as well. This was true of my Modern Love essay.

Then she proceeded to give herself free license to write about anything:

For myself, I’m sure the decisions I’ve made as a writer and a mother are shaped, in part, by the experience of having grown up in an alcoholic family, in which the central fact of our lives—namely, my father’s drinking—was never discussed or even mentioned. To me, no topic or experience is so scary, when it’s talked about, as when it remains hidden, and a source of confusion, shame or fear. My children have lived with me long enough to understand this.

Thus, it was no surprise when she announced in a subsequent Nov. 28 letter that, “ I chose not to let myself feel rejected when one of my sons--hearing me make reference to something I'd learned from reading his Facebook page--explained to me (not unlovingly) that he needed to un-friend me.” No doubt he knew his Facebook updates could end up in the New York Times or in one of his mom’s letters to her thousands of “friends.”

So mom, we have a daughter who writes a revenge piece, a son who unfriends you, and what do you do? Well, of course, at 56, you adopt two Ethiopian girls!

Now I understand that adoption and fostering are unequivocally God’s work. And in all such acts of charity there is a balance between glory to others and glory to self, a subject much studied by places like the Templeton Foundation. That said, when a particular good work becomes trendy—Save Mumia, Feed the World, or, lately, Adopt a Child from an Exotic Country—that balance is likely to be off.

Given how deeply tuned in she is to her other children’s needs, it’s hard not to suspect that a large part of why she is adopting—whether she acknowledges it or not—is because she is running out of material.

Tags: Joyce Maynard, Joyce Maynard adoption

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Dear Sarah,

I’ve written about my mixed feelings for you since you joined the McCain ticket. I’ve always liked your energy and your toughness. I liked that you rose from small-town mayor to the national stage. The Katie Couric interview? That bizarre whirlwind tour-slash-photo op where you met all the foreign leaders? Not so much. I won’t go through the laundry list of my ups and downs here. Not enough time.

But I’d like to thank you for ending all that angst and hand-wringing. You’ve brought my thoughts into perfect clarity today with your statement that questioning President Obama’s birth certificate is fair game. I quit reading Andrew Sullivan because I couldn’t stand the way he hyperventilated about your pregnancy with Trig. It’s silly for people to say that Trig isn’t your son, and it’s silly for people to say that President Obama was born in Kenya.

Of all the things your critics harped on, the charge that you were “unserious” nagged at me the most. Was it just elitist condescension? Or was it real? I think now you’re showing that it’s genuine. With all the challenges facing our country right now—and all the rehabilitating the GOP still needs—neither the country nor the party need leaders who indulge conspiracy theorists and other time-wasting issues.

I realize now that what I most liked about you was an idealized image of you that I created. I like that a woman can have a political career while raising a bunch of kids, that one could succeed without having the right pedigree or giving those kids country club names, that you were unabashedly pro-life. From now on I’ll be looking for those qualities in someone else rather than trying to reconcile your positive attributes with all the wackiness.

Photograph of Sarah Palin by Bill Pugliano/Getty Images.

Tags: birthers, Sarah Palin

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In an op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal, James Franco ‘breaks his silence" about what on earth he’s been doing on General Hospital for the past few weeks. He confirms that his appearance on the soap is, as was predicted, performance art—or, at least, it was intended to be.

Franco writes:

I signed on to appear on 20 episodes of "General Hospital" as the bad-boy artist "Franco, just Franco." I disrupted the audience's suspension of disbelief, because no matter how far I got into the character, I was going to be perceived as something that doesn't belong to the incredibly stylized world of soap operas. Everyone watching would see an actor they recognized, a real person in a made-up world. In performance art, the outcome is uncertain—and this was no exception. My hope was for people to ask themselves if soap operas are really that far from entertainment that is considered critically legitimate. Whether they did was out of my hands.

I like James Franco and I like soap operas and I have found his entire appearance on General Hospital, thus far, to be an entertaining hoot. But based on Franco’s own, self-identified criteria, I’m not quite sure he gets to call his work performance art. Obviously, the rub with performance art, as Franco points out in his op-ed, is that just saying it is can make it so. But if his appearance on GH is supposed to qualify because “Everyone watching would see an actor they recognized, a real person in a made-up world,” I think he failed. You don’t have to watch soap operas to see an actor you recognize in a made-up world. You can just go to the movies. What was actually jarring and potentially performance-art-esque about Franco appearing on a soap is not that the audience would recognize a “real person,” but that the audience would recognize a famous one.

It seems to me the two questions we would have to be able to answer in the affirmative, by Franco’s own standards, to make his appearance on GH count as performance art are as follows: One, does the presence of a famous person render us incapable of suspending our disbelief, incapable of forgetting the person onscreen is an actor and not a character? Two, does the presence of said famous person make us question whether soaps are a more “critically legitimate” form than we typically think? On both counts, Franco gets a no.

To dispense with the latter first, Franco’s performance has not in any way legitimized soaps, or, more precisely, made us think more of the acting that goes on there. He fit right in, looking and sounding every bit the soap actor without any difficulty whatsoever. He has made soap acting look easy and absurd, exactly as mediocre as we all think it is. It is possible to construe this as a convoluted compliment: Franco’s performance suggests that a good, even semi-believable performance is incredibly hard to pull off on daytime. If all you saw of James Franco was his performance on GH, you would not believe he was capable of his performance in Milk, but you would be wrong. Thus, any actor who is halfway plausible (and there are a few, including Kristen Storm, the actress who Franco bedded on the show, if you’ve been following), would likely be a lot better on film, with the opportunity to do multiple takes in good lighting. The trouble here is that a mediocre Franco is still much better than most of the actors he appears with, and we’re left where we started.

Now, to the next question: Was it impossible for us to forget that this character Franco was, in fact, James Franco the movie star? Well, sort of. All of the non-soap-watchers who have tuned in just to watch Franco are probably unlikely to forget, given that they are watching just to blog/recap/observe this very fact. And yet, he is so much less out of place than we might have supposed. If his performance were amazing, nuanced, better than his colleagues', it might be hard to forget he’s a famous dude; as it is, it’s sort of hard to remember that he’s a famous dude.

As for all of the people who watch GH, who watched before Franco and will watch after, I suspect they didn’t care that he was a movie star about five seconds after he got on screen.

I said this briefly in a longer piece I wrote on GH, but soap watching requires an enormous suspension of disbelief. To me, this is its redeeming feature. Soaps are storytelling at its purest, by which I do not mean its best, but its most pared-down and essential. People watch soap operas to find out what will happen next to people they have known for many years. That’s it. Plot and familiarity. No acting, production values, or intelligent story arcs are at work here. Soaps are like an old friend who you find frustrating but have learned to accept for who she is—you listen to her tell you really boring stories about the dentist, and, somehow, after all this practice, aren’t even that bored. This—not only sticking with someone mediocre and dull, but being interested in someone mediocre and dull because you have known them forever and sometimes, every so often, they tell you a good story about a hot date—is not necessarily wise, cool or appropriately critical, but it is extremely, touchingly human.

All due respect to James Franco, but he is not nearly famous enough to destabilize this kind of commitment. Franco may have momentarily enlivened the viewing experience for regular watchers, who, sure, recognized him and thought something about him and his performance, but he is just another piece of plot, and another character, in a really, really, really, really long story. One’s man performance art is just stunt casting to most of us, and another minor storyline to the remainder.

Photograph of James Franco by Andrew H. Walker/Getty Images.

Tags: General Hospital

DoubleX is starting a new partnership with The Washington Post Magazine. Each week our contributors will argue over a certain question, and we invite you to join in. This week: Do women's colleges still play a necessary role?

Hanna Rosin: For me, women's colleges are something I associate with feminism past—grandma's nostalgic recollections, Mary McCarthy's scorn. I know they are supposed to be provide a safe haven for women, free of flirting, free of social pressure, free of the need to primp and preen. And I'm sure that's true for many women. But my only personal experience of the all-women's institution are Condé Nast-style women's magazine offices, and they are the least relaxing, most competitive places I've ever spent time in.

Samantha Henig: When I visited my older sister at her women's college (I learned during her first few days there that we are NOT to call it a girls' school), I was moved by the family feel of the place—a level of comfort and support that would be hard to stumble upon at a larger, co-ed university. All of the women's colleges I've visited seem like great environments ... for the right person. I am not such a person; I thrive in large, competitive, cold surroundings. That's why I love New York. But just as I can see how some people might do best attending a small liberal arts college or living in a small town, I totally get the need for women's colleges. Men often change the tenor of a classroom dramatically by interrupting and dominating and arguing for argument's sake. Personally, that keeps me on my toes. But there should certainly be an option for people who learn better without that sort of annoyance, distraction, or contention.

Claire Gordon: At my all-girls' high school, seniors could choose to take part in weekly joint discussions with our brother school. I stopped attending after the first few, because the dynamic made me so uncomfortable. The guys pontificated. The girls hardly spoke. They didn't want to seem brash and obnoxious—and therefore unattractive—in front of the boys. When I got to Yale, I calculated the relative contributions of the male and female members of some of my classes that had a fairly even gender split. While it wasn't the eerie silence of those high school sessions, the female population of the classrooms contributed approximately a third as frequently. Perhaps that's an argument for co-ed colleges, a place where women can train themselves to be assertive in a mixed-gender environment. But if a girl feels silenced growing up with a dominating male presence in the classroom, perhaps it's best that she gets an extra four years without it to gain the academic and social confidence necessary to succeed in a co-ed world.

Jessica Grose: Never for a second did I consider attending a women's college. Since all the best schools now admit women, having separate but equal educational environments is obsolete. Learning to fend for yourself in a co-educational environment is an important skill that can be stunted when you are shielded from men in a learning environment. A diversity of perspectives is one of the most compelling parts of a liberal arts education, and when you choose to go to a women's college, you're missing out on a really signficant set of views. I can understand wanting to be part of the grand tradition of certain women's colleges, and identifying with great alumnae like Hillary Clinton, Gloria Steinem, and Katharine Hepburn. But sometimes even great traditions have run their course.

Tags: women's colleges

I wrote this delicate and thoughtful response to Amy, much of which is below. But I really wanted to let go of the politically correct dance I was doing and shout, along with commenter Jewellya: Maybe it's time to change course. If you're a college-educated, driven woman who puts a lot of pressure on herself and you're putting all your energy into being a self-described stay-at-home-mom—AND you're unhappy, maybe the problem isn't your marriage or your city. Maybe you're just freakin' bored, and freaking out.

It is true that it—and by it, I mean life with small children—gets easier, and that after it gets easier, it does indeed seem to have gone quickly (or perhaps it's just blurred by lack of sleep and the grinding sameness of every day). It is also true that once it's over, it's over, and there you and your husband will (one hopes) still be. That's what Elizabeth Weil only touched on in her NYT piece on her marriage—her kids are in school, and she and her husband discovered some additional mental real estate that they could give to one another. (Whether they chose the best way to do it is another question.)

If Amy, who describes herself as a college graduate, is putting all of her energy into being a good "stay-at-home-mom," while her husband wrestles every day with wearing all of the hats that owning a business entails and then comes home and gets to be a dad, too—then I see some inequities there that may be contributing to making Amy unhappy. Of course being a mom is hard and challenging work, but it's only one kind of hard and challenging work. She's "working [her] tail off, tired stressed and unhappy"—and believe me, I've been there. What I'm saying is, maybe there's a way to reach a tired, stressed, and happy state (that being, unfortunately, about all you can hope for with a 4-year-old and a baby).

Elizabeth Weil talked a lot about her fear of losing herself in her marriage in her NYT piece on improving the state of her union. Losing yourself to parenting, especially in the early stages, is even easier. I think nearly everybody does it, and I'm willing to bet that Amy is right in the grip of that. My advice to Amy (man, who doesn't love giving advice) would be that, as she and her husband grapple with some of these bigger questions, like whether New York is the right place for their family, how important private school is, and how to balance their lives, she needs to find something that grips and consumes her outside of raising her kids, and a place where she can see herself as Amy, not just as the mother of two needy children. Because, as you've pointed out, she won't be the mother of two entirely needy children for long, and because it's nearly impossible enjoy a happy marriage and raise a happy family without some grip on your own happiness.

Amy and her husband can work together on their family and their plans for their children. But Amy, the only person who can figure out what's going to make you happiest is you. Find that, and then make your choices and compromises around it. Rachel's right to reference Dahlia's theme that you can do anything, but you can't do everything, so I'm not saying you can have it all. Maybe you'll have to wait to make changes, or plan trade-offs. What I am saying is that if you don't take a hard look at what you want to have, you're likely to end up with only what others want to give you.

Emily, agreed that the Mikulski amendment seems more like pandering than it does genuine protection of women's health care. That said, the anti-choice reaction to it gives me pause. It's not just that anything that rabid anti-choicers oppose is something that's probably puppies- and rainbows-level good—though that's usually true—but it also serves as a reminder of how little protection basic health care for women has, due to anti-choice lobbying against any health care they feel encourages women to be sexually free.

I can't tell if the Mikulski amendment covers contraception from the first news reports, but it's clear to me that the anti-choice lobby fears that it does. Of course, you have to speak right-wing-nut-ese to see this. The LifeNews article simply expresses concern that the bill will mandate abortion coverage, which is a ridiculous fear on its face. Ridiculous if you assume that by "abortion," LifeNews means abortion—ending a pregnancy through drugs or surgery. But often in anti-choice literature, "abortion" is treated as a catch-all phrase that means both abortion and hormonal contraception, and nonhormonal contraception is considered a form of Abortion Lite, because any kind of fertility control encourages the "abortion/contraception mentality." For outsiders, equating contraception with abortion is incoherent; for the hardcore anti-choicers, the two are linked so firmly that one can bracket contraception into the general category "abortion" without batting an eyelash.

Reading this article, I suspect that part of the objection to this amendment is the possibility that it will cover hormonal contraception, which hardcore anti-choicers believe causes abortion. (It actually works by surpressing ovulation.) Whether or not that specific hook is true or not is somewhat irrelevant, though. Even if coverage for the pill isn't mandated, there is almost no way that counseling and prescription-writing for the pill won't be under this amendment. That's because the vast majority of gynecologists use the occasion of the pap smear to talk about contraception options and write prescriptions. Which, in the topsy-turvy anti-choice world, is a form of paying for abortion. You have to back-rationalize about 15 steps, but it can be done. And goes a long way to explaining why they're panicking.

And it also explains why we need to have some sort of amendment protecting women's basic cancer screenings, because the relationship between the pap smear and the birth control pill could create trouble for mandated pap-smear coverage down the road. Let's not forget how the Bush administration politicized contraception. If another conservative administration was put in charge, they could easily staff the health care exchange board with belligerent anti-choicers who not only strip women of contraception coverage, but anything related to it, including the pap smear.

Tags: coverage for birth control, health care reform

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Sexting paranoia has bubbled up again, with news of 13-year-old Hope Witsell, who hanged herself after she was tortured by her peers for sending a nude photo to a boy she liked. Certainly, this is a cautionary tale for teen girls looking to woo lunkheaded boys. But I still don't understand how it's different from old-fashioned bullying. It's the same awful teen behavior, just in a different medium. I could not find statistics that said that teen suicide has markedly increased since cell phones came into wide use among the under-18 set, nor could I find evidence that bullying was on the rise overall.

Earlier this year, Dahlia Lithwick explained why the criminal justice system is not the best place for adressing the sexting "crisis." Hope Witsell's family and friends used the mass media to address sexting instead: They went on the Today Show earlier this week in order to raise awareness about sexting-related bullying (clip below). But what they don't mention is that Witsell was the one punished for the widespread dissemination of that sext. Hope was suspended for a week, according to the St. Petersburg Times. And the tone of the Today Show coverage was really about what Hope did wrong. Perhaps more punishment on the bullies, rather than the sexually misguided adolescent girls, would have been a more successful approach.

Photograph of cell phone by Medioimages/Photodisc/Getty Images.

Tags: cyber-bullying, hope witsell, sexting, teen suicide