Her work as a writer, critic, activist, thinker, and radical feminist spans decades, and now her best pieces are available in one must-read collection.
Via upress.umn.edu
There is a kind of woman writer who, with her long cigarettes and cars and sleek, untouchable prose, makes all the girls want to be her; and there is a kind of woman writer who, by letting herself be the screaming, crying fan as well as the cool-eyed critic, or the marching protestor as well as the reporter at the march, makes it so we can be her. Ellen Willis leads the latter camp. A critic, activist, thinker, and radical feminist whose work is newly collected in The Essential Ellen Willis (University of Minnesota Press), she is an icon to my demographic. Her gut-wrung genius for popular music (she was the New Yorker's first-ever pop critic) presaged the widespread taking-seriously of Taylor Swift. Her reportings and/or polemics and/or personal essays, usually written for the Village Voice, Rolling Stone, or The Nation, are touchstones of the genres. A founder, with Shulamith Firestone, of the far-out feminist group Redstockings, she remains one of the top defenders of both abortion and pornography as inalienable — and entirely human — rights. Always challenging, but first self-challenging, Willis' writings are never simultaneously difficult. Her thinking is all transparent — and prescient. In a 1996 essay on daytime talk shows and "trash television," Willis writes that we need more noise, not less: "Our problem is not the excesses of talk shows but the brutality and emptiness of our political culture. Pop bashing is the humanism of fools: in the name of defending people's dignity it attacks their pleasures and their meager store of power." In other words, she is one of the first defenders of so-called "toxic Twitter." A rare and truly anti-snobbish intellect, Ellen Willis is one of the great definers of our time; in 2006, she died.
Three years ago, Nona Willis Aronowitz, the only daughter of Willis and her husband, sociologist Stanley Aronowitz, put out a collection of her mother's (mostly) rock 'n' roll criticism called Out of the Vinyl Deeps. Its success led to the republishing of two other collections, No More Nice Girls and Beginning to See the Light. These weren't enough. Obsessives like me wanted more, while others, believing Willis had left pop criticism for mere academia, needed to see the evolution of her principled, pleasure-taking aims. To that end, The Essential Ellen Willis organizes Willis' work by decade, from the '60s through the '00s, and features introductions to each decade by Willis-Aronowitz's peers and friends, including Cord Jefferson and Sara Marcus. Here to talk about the project, its relevance, and growing up Willis is Nona, herself an accomplished journalist and feminist thinker.
A younger Nona Willis Aronowitz, with her mother, Ellen Willis.
Nona Willis Aronowitz
Let's start at the end of this new collection, with the beginnings of Willis' book-in-progress on Freudian radicalism and the cultural unconscious. She was working on this book for almost a decade, right?
Nona Willis Aronowitz: Yes, she was working on it for around eight years, with large chunks of inactivity in between. I think it was partly that the ideas and topic were so trenchant, and also not immediate, but also that she felt nervous and spooked about writing an actual book, rather than a loosely connected group of essays. It was an arduous editing process. She shifted very quickly from extremely polished paragraphs to indecipherable notes. I agonized over it because I knew she wouldn't have wanted unfinished thoughts to see the light of day. Eventually, I thought it was worth it to uncover ideas she'd been stewing over since the '70s, even if they weren't fashionable— like how she thought there was a psychoanalytic explanation, rather than just economic or social ones, for why conservatives had succeeded in reversing some of the '60s countercultural gains. This argument blossoms into this whole theory about how hard it is for people, even leftist people, to truly accept freedom of expression.
To wit: "A political movement that aspires to have an impact on our deepening economic and cultural crises cannot succeed simply by appealing to moral principle or rational self-interest; it must speak to the cultural unconscious, address the hidden conflict. The story of contemporary American politics is that the right intuitively understands this, while the left, by and large, has no clue."
Or: "Few people imagine it's possible or desirable to restore the old order, yet even fewer raise the obvious question: if the family as we've known it isn't working, don't we need to invent forms of domestic life and child rearing more suited to a free, postpatriarchal society? No, it has long since been agreed that such talk is silly leftover hippiespeak. Instead we feel guilty, scapegoat single mothers on welfare, oppose no-fault divorce. Or else we declare that the crisis of the family is a myth — it's just that there are different kinds of families. Aren't gays clamoring to join the marriage club? My compliments to the Emperor's tailor: we are all pro-family now."
I was thinking about how her career in political writing fell after one golden age of leftist independent publishing, in the '60s, and before another, which is happening now with The New Inquiry and n+1 and Jacobin and the revitalized Dissent (although she did serve on the editorial board of a previous, perhaps less vital Dissent).
NWA: Yes, totally. She didn't want to compromise, ideas-wise or length-wise, so she wrote in smaller journals rather than cut thousands of words. And it's funny, she also wrote in Slate and Salon pretty frequently, but none of those essays made the cut. They were just nowhere near as complicated or nuanced as her print pieces, probably by the editors' design; they were topical, around 900 words each, and didn't feel relevant, even though they were the most recent of her pieces.
How did you decide what was Essential? Did you ask friends of yours and/or hers for help?
NWA: I did write a mass email in the beginning of the process asking people for their suggestions, though I'd mostly thought of them. My main criteria was: Did this transcend its era? Even if it was about Clinton or Anita Hill or Tom Wolfe or whatever, were there useful, universal ideas? My original table of contents ended up being 50,000 words longer than the final version, so my editor made some brutal cuts. I mostly agree with them, actually. I also cut some essays that felt more academic or theoretical in favor of more intimate and/or unpublished pieces — just to give the reader a feel for who Ellen Willis was.
I can't wait for the Inessential Ellen Willis!
NWA: Ha, there's some great stuff in there. I'm already regretting a few cuts. This sounds terrible, but anything she'd written for a women's magazine was automatically out of the final cut. You could just tell it'd be edited for "tone" and that made me feel uncomfy, and there was always a better version of the piece that'd been published elsewhere.
As someone who came up in women's magazines, or fashion magazines — and I still write for them — I think it doesn't sound terrible, just complicated.
NWA: I mean, one of the pieces I edited out was sort of a primer on the women's movement for Mademoiselle, which was interesting as an artifact, but eventually I was like, "OK, this is basic."
Which brings us to something I didn't know until I read her "Three Elegies for Sontag" in this collection: She won the same Mademoiselle "guest editor" contest that Sylvia Plath had in 1953?
NWA: Oh, yes! There are some adorable pictures in that Mademoiselle issue. You know, [my mom and Sylvia Plath] were probably pretty similar when they were that age.
How so?
NWA: Repressed, depressed, confused, prim, introverted. Overachieving.
And angry.
NWA: Yep.
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