Listen My Dear Alones: Notes on Gina Berriault’s ‘Women in Their Beds’

This is an excerpt of an introduction that will appear in a forthcoming re-issue of Women in Their Beds by Gina Berriault from Counterpoint.
 © 2017 by Peter Orner 


I feel a little like Burley, the hack in Gina Berriault’s own “God and the Article Writer.” Things aren’t going well for Burley. His son has threatened to kill him. His wife left him and took all the furniture. Even so a writer’s got to make a living. Burley goes out an assignment up in the foothills of the Santa Cruz mountains. After interviewing the eccentric physicist, a winner of the Nobel Prize, a man who has just told him absolutely nothing about physics, and everything about his sudden belief in the existence of God—Burley drives back to San Francisco, despondent, knowing that at least in terms of his article, he’s got zilch.

At the first stop sign he tore off his coat and loosened his tie, but an entanglement other than his clothes was upon him.

I’m similarly entangled. My affection for Women in Their Beds being unabashed and unprofessional, the self-inflicted pressure to say something cogent about it has begun to ruin my days. I wake up in the morning and reach for this book and re-read another story and I think: What else is there to say? She makes my pulse quicken. Any attempt to say anything more is bound to sound ham-handed—or worse. This is a writer who never lards a sentence with an unnecessary word. The only proper response to Women in Their Beds is hushed awe.

It is often said of Gina Berriault that she is chronically under-read.in a used bookstore in Iowa City in the late 1990s. (I was late to her.) The red cover has long since faded to the lightest pink. Glib is feted to the grave while people ask Gina who? It’s criminal. It’s the East Coast hegemony in action. If she wrote about Park Slope, you think she wouldn’t have been rediscovered 18 times over already? But here’s the thing. This crowing about her lack of readership is just noise. Berriault has always had enough readers, a small, motley band of loyalists who couldn’t imagine their lives without her stories. But the tyranny of numbers dies hard. As Berriault herself said in a eulogy upon the death of , a writer she referred to as her guardian angel, writers often can’t help doing the math. It’s that making a living thing again. Publishers have to keep the lights on, too. Yates (who died destitute) must have sometimes succumbed, Berriault says, to “the delusion that it’s the counting that counts, all that noisy counting that seems to sum up the value of a writer.” In the end though Yates came to what she calls “a wise comprehension of the madness of crowds.”