Author Julie Gilbert Discusses the Writing of Her New Book ‘Giant Love’
Julie Gilbert Today, we delve into the enduring relevance of the themes explored by Pulitzer Prize -winning author Edna Ferber
When I was twenty-one, I became friends with a group of models living in London and for a while we ran wild together, night after night in the city. The champagne was endless, the venues exclusive, and the stories they told me were spectacular. They were stories of excessive fees paid for lunch dates and whole lives of luxury funded in secret by benevolent billionaires. I couldn’t help but wonder why I’d never read a novel about it before, this glamorous and complex world in which the lines were blurred and the limits extinguished. I was stunned by the currencies at play, all the privilege afforded by looking a certain way and knowing the right people, or where to find them at least. The power dynamics of these interactions intrigued me. I planned to write my own novel and I dreamt up characters and scenarios inspired by what I’d seen and heard. I knew the story would be exciting not just because it would illuminate a secretive world but because it would be a story of now, of the internet, of feminism, of capitalism, of sexual agency, all coming together in a way that wouldn’t have been possible at any other time. And then there was the appeal of dissecting the “sugaring” world, one of young, attractive sugar babies and older, monied sugar daddies. The anthropologist in me was fascinated with the prospect of chronicling this world with all its own customs, terms and expectations. I collated my journals and my scrawled imaginings and committed to finishing a first draft of the novel that would become my debut, Sugar, Baby. This is a reading list with a common theme: women who paint and polish their beauty into a gleaming currency of its own. These women are aware of the way the world works and use their looks to their advantage in a patriarchal system. It’s true across the board that beauty opens doors for these women and provides opportunities to improve their lives. They garner varied results, sometimes finding that the life they earn with their beauty is not […]
Click here to view original page at Taking Down the System, Seductively: On Women Who Use Beauty as Currency
© 2024, wcadmin. All rights reserved, Writers Critique, LLC Unless otherwise noted, all posts remain copyright of their respective authors.
Julie Gilbert Today, we delve into the enduring relevance of the themes explored by Pulitzer Prize -winning author Edna Ferber
The Mallorcan Joana Marcús is a young bestseller in Spain and America, writer of young adult novels with a romantic
