TARA MOSS The Fictional Woman. Reviewed by Robyne Young
Bestselling crime novelist Tara Moss examines the fictions society weaves about women’s roles, and how they have played out in her own life.
I haven’t read Tara Moss’s fiction, but I have come to know about her and her writing through her advocacy, particularly as UNICEF Patron for Breastfeeding; we’ve even had some correspondence regarding this. So I welcomed the opportunity to review her first book of non-fiction, The Fictional Woman. However, I am also aware that much has been written about Moss and this work.
Many of the media interviews have focussed on the memoir element of the book over its sociological content. Somewhat disturbingly for me, one interview appeared with the headline ‘Beauty with a Brain, Tara Moss Continues to Push the Boundaries’. This type of headline only reinforces the fictions, and overlooks Moss’s main thesis: that it is not the ‘natural state’ for women to be under-represented in Australia’s Cabinet; to be under-represented in the bylines of Australian newspapers; to be unheard or even silenced in the conversations about what happens with their bodies, including abortion; or to earn less than their male counterparts. It is Moss’s relation of her own experiences – common to many women – merged with the clearly communicated research that makes this book accessible.
Moss, a PhD candidate at the University of Sydney, is confident there can be change, and supports her case with statistics, media analysis and the writings of feminist heavyweights including Gloria Steinem, Naomi Wolf, Betty Friedan, Margaret Atwood, Germaine Greer and younger Australians Clementine Ford and Emily Maguire. She also argues that there are fictions around men, too, and that:
… the perpetuation of this imbalance – the idealised man as active participant versus the idealised woman as passive – sets a dangerous precedent for what is acceptable, expected and rewarded in the culture of femininity.
Throughout the book, Moss interrogates the social and cultural thinking that creates the fictions for women. In the chapter ‘Gender Wars’ she explores the consequences of the current trend to equate the terms gender and sex:
While sex may be your anatomical type, gender brings with it a cluster to do with behaviour, social status and expectations that are not natural or unavoidable extensions of those different bodily combinations … To further clarify this point, some ideas about the essential qualities and appropriate place in society for men and women from, say, the days of Ancient Egypt, the Middle Ages, the Victorian era or even twenty years ago are not what they are now, and also vary between different cultures and social groups within the same period – for example in very conservative circles versus moderate or progressive circles, and in the USA broadly versus in Saudi Arabia broadly.
The Fictional Woman opens with Moss’s experience in 2002 of undertaking a polygraph to silence rumours that she didn’t write her own novels:
Two and a half years later, as my second novel hits the shelves, the book itself has seemingly been overshadowed by a more compelling mystery: how a ‘model-turned-author’ (as I’m frequently dubbed in the press) could possibly write a book.
One fiction disproven.
Using some of the fictional labels as a framework – the Model, the Body, the Survivor, the Writer, Gold-diggers and Mean Girls, the Femme Fatale, the Crone and the Feminist – Moss relates significant events in her life, including being raped by someone she knew.
She learned early about the separate worlds of girls and boys:
When I was six years old, my father took me and my sister to his work picnic. Thanks in large part to my height and the long legs that came with it, I could run faster than most kids my age, and that day I won a running race. I think it was the first time I ever won anything. One of the organisers led me to a table marked ‘Girls Age 6-8’ to collect my prize. The table was covered in wrapped gifts, and fearing I’d be stuck with a toy I would not like, I asked if I could please take a gift from the boys’ table instead. The woman bent over and told me quite pointedly, ‘No darling, those are for boys. These are the ones for girls.’
She opened the prize to find a Barbie doll that she later transformed into a ‘kind of Vampirella/Bride of Frankenstein monster’.
She writes, too, of her devastation at her mother’s death in 1990, and that afterwards she ‘shadowed’ her father. Soon after that, she embarked on a life as a model that was hardly a model life. She was told she was ‘too big’ to get work and reduced her calorie intake to 500 a day (one of the photographs in the centre pages of The Fictional Woman vividly shows the result of this). Her early modelling years ‘were marked by uncertainty and long stretches of unemployment’.
It was at 23 that Moss decided to commit to her lifelong ambition to write a novel; but with no agent or publisher, she continued to work as a model to support herself. Her first novel, Fetish, introduced readers to the character of Makedde (Mak) Vanderwall. Moss was meticulous in her research for her character (to the point of being strangled until she lost consciousness). Being featured on some of her book covers did not serve her well and ‘brought criticism at times and in hindsight there is little doubt it added further focus on the author’s appearance’. But she adds it was her failure to ‘follow well-meaning advice’ on how to dress as an author that was more damning. ‘But yeah, I wore dresses and stilettos and leather motorcycling pants and was not generally seen in turtlenecks.’ There were fictions too about what a writer looked like.
Moss sets the record straight about her two marriages (and the fictions around another financially independent woman, Miranda Kerr) and her reported swipe at singer Miley Cyrus, taking the opportunity to dismiss the stereotype of all women hating each other or being their own worst enemies: ‘There’s a word for that sort of notion. It’s called fiction.’
In the chapter ‘The Mother’, Moss relates her experience of miscarriage and society’s reluctance to discuss the subject. She views this silence as dangerous because it can be the basis on which politicians (mostly men) develop laws that define a fertilised (or cloned) egg:
… as a person from the moment the sperm enters the ovum, rather than when the foetus is considered medically viable, [and] insist that a fertilised egg that has not even yet attached to the lining of the mother’s womb has more legal rights than the woman herself.
She goes on to say, ‘When laws, and the personal beliefs of politicians or doctors, elevate the wellbeing of the foetus over the wellbeing of the woman, women inevitably suffer.’
She also writes about the joy of sharing the parenthood of their daughter Sapphira with her husband, Berndt Sellheim, but highlights research that shows there is still a large gap between a father’s desire to be ‘more engaged in both caregiving and parenting’ and the reality. According to Moss, this won’t change because of current attitudes:
If caring is seen as exclusively ‘feminine’ and fathers are not considered capable of caring for their children, that ‘very large gap between their desired and current state’ is unlikely to close. When families make decisions that are best for them, those decisions should be respected (two working parents, a stay-at-home mum or a stay-at-home dad, etc).
In the chapters ‘The Crone’ and ‘The Feminist’, she examines her own experience of ageing and her earlier mixed feelings at wearing the feminist label. She is comfortable with the ‘silver’ that has appeared in the part-line of her hair and concludes that she is now proudly a feminist. She calls for a greater awareness around the truths for older women – ‘For instance, we do not often hear that women in Australia retire with far less superannuation than men and many women live out their golden years in poverty’ – and an end to the fiction that women’s lives are complete by the time they reach 35 or 40.
Moss acknowledges her present position, where ‘I can afford to tell my story, emotionally, but also financially, without worrying where my next meal will come from, as I once did. I don’t need to be “Teflon Tara” nor a “fictional woman”.’
As I imagine her crime fiction to be, The Fictional Woman is a page-turner, but in this case you turn the pages slowly, to absorb all Moss has to say.
Extensive endnotes and a reading list are included for readers who want to investigate further the many topics in the book.
Tara Moss The Fictional Woman HarperCollins 2014 PB 336pp $29.99
Robyne Young writes fiction, poetry and non-fiction, blogs at robynewithane.wordpress.com and works as the Communications Officer at Regional Arts NSW.
You can buy this book from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW here or you can buy it from Booktopia here.
To see if it is available from Newtown Library, click here. SMSA members can check the Library here.
