The Professor and Other Writings Book

A 'fag hag' is a straight woman who enjoys the company of gay men. Even I know that. But what do you call a straight guy who digs lesbians? There's got to be a slang term for that, right? Whatever it is, I think I might be one. Not that I have a lot of lesbian friends or anything, but at parties I tend to hit it off with outspoken, crop-haired women with alarming neckties. I just have a good rapport with them for some reason. Of course, I also have a good rapport with elderly ladies, pre-pubescent girls and close female relatives. Pattern? There's no pattern here. What are you talking about?

Terry Castle is my kind of lesbian. She likes and admires men, has an irreverent sense of humour and takes an almost fanboyish interest in cool stuff like jazz and war. Plus, she's one of the best literary journalists around: her book reviews have that mix of sass and erudition that is, with me, an unfailing erectile aid.

So I went into The Professor all excited, thinking it was a collection of her reviews. Nope. Turns out it's a series of autobiographical pieces. This shouldn't have been a problem in itself. After all, I'm the guy who's been making himself obnoxious around here by crapping all over the novel and valorizing the personal essay. But now I see there's a point where the personal essay can become a bit too…personal. For me, that threshold was crossed early on in The Professor, where Castle spends a whole page cataloguing the dozens of CDs she brought along on a road trip. Okay, she has surprisingly catholic tastes for a middle-aged English prof (Sonic Youth and Fatboy Slim had me raising an eyebrow) but a full page? Is this some kind of Rabelaisian list-making thing? Or just self-indulgence?

Maybe what it comes down to is a failure of sympathy on my part. Call it sexism or what you will, but there are certain areas of female experience'or let's say, white, upper-middle class female experience'that I just don't care about. Castle has a difficult relationship with her mother; she's guiltily obsessed with home décor; she's acutely status conscious'things she has in common with about, oh, 80 million other American women. And that's fine. I'm not saying my own anxieties and preoccupations are any more interesting than hers, because they're not. But at least I'm not trying to make a memoir out of them (yet).

Another bias of mine: I view memoirs as a form of disaster tourism. I expect to be appalled and horrified'from a safe distance. Political prisoners, sex maniacs, hopeless junkies: these are the people I want to hear from. I demand exoticism in autobiography. But the contours of Castle's experiences are all-too familiar to me. Take away her gender and sexual orientation and her life starts to look a lot like mine: pathetic and mildly awful at times, but mostly sort of mundane and comfortable.

Certainly Castle is amusing about the absurdities of her bobo-lesbian lifestyle (lesbobo?) but is that enough? Do irony and self-mockery make solipsism okay? I want to say yes, if only to enable my own solipsism, but I'm not sure that's the right answer.