Featured book:

Paretsky, Sara, Writing in an Age of Silence, London and New York, Verso, 2007.

What this book meant to me as a writer:

Five years after 9/11, with the Patriot Act and recently formed Department of Homeland Security running full tilt, Sara Paretsky, author of the V I Warshawski detective series, wrote a memoir of how political events and activism affected her stories.

I am fascinated with detective Warshawski. She is tough and tender, smart and perceptive, bold and brave, prone to calamity, and bound by conscience, all in one. If I seem enthusiastic, it is because I trust Paretsky’s stories. She delivers the requisite rounding up of criminals, but with an eye to larger ills in the social terrain underlying the plot.

In Writing in an Age of Silence, Paretsky captures the tough road for women in society, in the workplace, and in their relationships during the late 1960s and 70s. As a young adult during those years, I nodded in agreement with her retelling. Backlash was strong against women’s access to traditionally men’s jobs, funding for sports, equal pay, and many other roiling issues. Paretsky says, “As for me, I wanted to write a crime novel. I wanted to create a woman who would turn the tables on the dominant views of women in fiction and in society…V I isn’t flawless. Merely, she is an adult, with the same freedoms that men have to act, to move, to make decisions, to fall in love, experience sex, even to be wrong, without any of those things making her a monster.”

As a writer, I struggle with the concept of voice. The first novel I wrote dealt with the social upheaval during my college years in the late sixties. In many instances, today’s problems seem stuck in those times. Progress in civil rights, women’s rights, poverty remediation, all experienced significant strides in those years. The chants and protests today feel so topically identical, I wonder, why did we fall silent? Why did our voices trail off?

In finding our voices as writers, we can understand much by reading this successful author’s journey. She tells us, “This memoir traces the long path I followed from silence to speech, and the ways in which my speech has been shaped by what I’ve witnessed along the way.”

Paretsky discusses threats to our freedom in Writing in an Age of Silence. She writes, “I cannot find words to express the depth of my loss, or my outrage, to see my country abrogate treaties abroad, and violate the very heart and bones of our Constitution here at home. Some of us feel corrupt and tainted, others weak and angry, and the mood of the country is ugly. As a writer, in a time like this, it is hard to know what to say and how to say it.”

She challenges us. “Every writer’s difficult journey is a movement from silence to speech.”

A closer look at the book:

I found Writing in an Age of Silence some years ago in a Borders book shop. Sara Paretsky’s novels, as well as Writing in an Age of Silence, can be found in most libraries or through her web page. Her awards include the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America and the Cartier Diamond Dagger from the Crime Writers Association of Great Britain. Learn more at https://saraparetsky.com/

The spirit of Writing in an Age of Silence is best consumed as a memoire more than a how-to, yet the entire message is concerned with the most precious of writing tools, our voice.