Women writers weren’t inspiring to a young Gay Talese because they weren’t interested in “uneducated” or “anti-social” types, the literary journalist said Saturday to an audience filled with female journalists.
Talese was speaking about his illustrious career at a Boston University conference on journalism called “The Power of Narrative” when he was asked by an audience member at the end of his talk which women journalists inspired him.
“I didn’t know any women writers that I loved,” Talese said, according to a a tweet from NBC reporter Andrea Swalec, before rejecting the suggestion shouted out from another audience member that Joan Didion may have influenced him.
Didion, Talese said, didn’t “report on anti-social ppl,” Swalec tweeted.
“We in the audience were hoping that some names would come up,” author Mary Roach, who was also speaking at the conference, told the Daily News, adding that “there were so many amazing women writers there.”
After Talese, 84, considered naming critic Mary McCarthy as an influence, he later said that he admired the novelist and poet George Eliot, the 19th century author of “Middlemarch,” according to Janelle Lawrence, a Boston-based freelance writer who was in the audience and spoke to the News by phone.
The fedora-wearing magazine icon dug himself deeper when he made the claim that educated women are averse to “being around anti-social types, not comfortable telling those stories,” according to a tweet from Nikole Hannah-Jones, a reporter for the New York Times Magazine who was also speaking at the journalism conference over the weekend.
“It is inevitable: Your icons will *always* disappoint you,” lamented Hannah-Jones, who has produced award-winning civil rights coverage.
While Twitter erupted in outrage over his remarks, the co-moderator of the conference said he believed Talese’s understanding of the question was whether he was inspired by any female journalists when he was cutting his teeth in the industry in the ’50’s and ’60’s—as opposed to whether he has ever been inspired by women writers.
“The world he inherited in the 1950’s and 1960’s didn’t have a lot of women doing non-fiction narrative. That was his world,” Mitchell Zuckoff, the Redstone Professor of Narrative Studies at Boston University told the Daily News. “I truly believe he was talking about the era. That the women he knew in that era weren’t drawn to the stories he was drawn to.”
“I don’t believe he was characterizing women journalists as not being interested in those. I know he wasn’t talking about the women at the conference. I feel like he’s not getting a fair shake here,” Zuckoff said in defense of the legendary writer.
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Requests for comment from Talese’s publicists weren’t immediately returned.
Some people in the audience didn’t take his comments lightly, a few of them leaving the talk altogether.
“Many women walked out of the #gaytalese talk,” tweeted journalist Michelle Garcia.
The hashtag #womengaytaleseshouldread was born on Twitter following Talese’s remarks, giving users the opportunity to throw out names of women writers the literary icon should consider.
