When Women Aren’t Angels
Detail from the poster for Der Blaue Engel
Not long ago, I watched, on the Internet, footage of myself being interviewed by Charlie Rose. It was May, 2000, and the subject of our interview was Blue Angel, my then-recent novel about—of all things—sexual harassment. Or at least, that’s what Charlie thought the novel was about.
Early in the course of our conversation, it became clear to me that he hadn’t read my book, but that someone at the other end of his earpiece had. And, just in case I hadn’t figured that out, Charlie told me, moments after the cameras stopped rolling, that he didn’t “have time to read fiction,” but his girlfriend did. As he said this, his face wore precisely the same blurry mask of interest that it had worn when we spoke on camera.
In , a middle-aged novelist, who teaches creative writing at a small New England college, falls in love with (and ruins his life for) a talented female student. Charlie didn’t want to talk about sentence structure or about where the idea for the novel came from. The earpiece steered us straight to the subject
