In the Land of Men by Adrienne Miller
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In the Land of Men
By Adrienne Miller
Ecco, 2020
As she writes in her new memoir In the Land of Men, Adrienne Miller first arrived at GQ as a dreamer fresh from the Midwest in her early twenties as an editorial assistant. It was the mid-nineties, and Miller wastes no time in portraying the 70-year-old men’s magazine as a very men-centric place, the kind of “land of men” mentioned in the book’s title. It’s a place curiously well-populated with women, variously described as “holdovers” or “survivors,” but this doesn’t slow Miller’s resentment even a speck. Instead, as she recalls, she spent her days asking herself “Was I necessary? I was not. Was I indispensable? Nope.”
In a psychological twist that will be intensely recognizable in 2020, this young editorial assistant asks if she’s indispensable to the old, established magazine that’s just hired her, sees that she isn’t, and immediately blames the magazine. “Could I actually have any self-respect as a female person if I worked for a men’s magazine?” she asks herself (after, rather than before, she applies, apparently). “Yes, yes, there was outstanding journalism at GQ; yes, there was great criticism. But weren’t men’s magazines at least half embarrassing, and maybe even more than that?”
These questions are bandied around page 100 of In the Land of Men, and if by that point you think you’d have enjoyed working with Miller at GQ, the follow-up will offer confirmation (and if not, then not):
The self-evident fact of the magazine’s sexism could be spoken of only with the other assistants. We’d sit at Mexican restaurants with our machine-dispensed margaritas and fulminate about the representation of women in the pages: they were never actual people but were instead personlike ideas, concepts of people. Why, one of us might ask, did the women in the magazines appear unclothed, yet the men did not? Why, for example, did we always need some pervy description of each female profile subject’s lips? Why, in a larger way, did men feel so freaking entitled to women’s bodies? And if male readers wanted porn, why didn’t they just go buy some porn?
The kinds of answers that start swarming to mind after such a barrage of dumb questions - “GQ isn’t porn,” or “GQ uses images of scantily-clad women (and not men) because it’s a magazine aimed at stupid straight young men and wants to make a profit,” or “what did you expect when you applied for a job at GQ?” or maybe “what did you expect when you applied for a job at GQ?” asked a second time in a neck vein-popping scream, etc. - will fizz in some readers’ minds throughout the book.
When Miller moves over to Esquire in 1997 to be the magazine’s first female literary editor, she brings her entire portmanteau of angers and objections with her. In the Land of Men is lavish with a repulsive combination of backbiting and self-pity, with ample anecdotes cutting famous male authors down to size and citing how massively overworked Miller was while fielding literary submissions all day long. “The influx was astonishing, and I had to reject pretty much all of it,” she writes. “How many short stories did I have to reject every day? Think of a number and put an exponent on it.” 20 is a number. 20 raised to the power of, say, 2 is 400. Did she reject 400 stories every day? 20 raised to the power of 4 is 160,000. Did she reject 160,000 stories every day? Or did she reject, possibly, fewer?
She worried that all she was doing was “canceling people.” She then spends the next 200 pages of In the Land of Men doing everything short of exhumation in order to cancel David Foster Wallace, Esquire’s star writer who killed himself in 2008. Ironically, it’s this tell-all element about a famous cult-favorite male author that forms the longest and most memorable portion of an ostensibly anti-patriarchy bit of autobiography, although it’s memorable mainly for how sordid it feels. From one of their first meetings:
What else was in his bag? He wanted to show me. Let’s see - there was a secondary “head hankie,” a white one, in case he perspired through the American-flag one he had on, and a yellow legal pad - “that’s in case you say something witty.” (This was David too: a thief and a vampire.) There were some books. There were pens. There was an amber-colored container with pills in it.
This goes on and on. Foster Wallace was a thief and a vampire. Foster Wallace was a compulsive liar. Foster Wallace was hypocrite (“a Wallace speciality: saying mean things about his friends”). And, it need hardly be added, Foster Wallace was a sexist pig. By the time Miller writes “A note to the men of the world: when you speak ill of your ex-girlfriends, we know that we’ll be next up,” you don’t know whether to howl with laughter or outrage at the lack of self-awareness.
“When you are consumed with thoughts of retaliation,” Miller writes at one point, “you are probably not coming down on the right side of things.” In the Land of Men could very easily - and perhaps more accurately - have been titled Thoughts of Retaliation, with the primary target being a dead man. Whether it’s left Miller on the right side of things remains to be seen, but her future employers will at least have a more informed idea of what’s being said over the margaritas after work.
—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.