Lucy pointed to a placard advertising the specialty cocktail. “I’ll try the Dewar’s Decimal System, I guess.”
Florence ordered a red wine.
“I’ve got Cabernet or Pinot.”
“Either,” she said in a tone she hoped sounded breezy. She knew nothing about wine.
They each took a sip, then set off to find a group with breachable borders. They spotted some other assistants huddled by the food table and joined the fringes. A junior editor named Amanda Lincoln was arguing showily with a tall, lanky twenty-something in a tan corduroy suit.
“There’s literally no way, you fucking misogynist,” Amanda said.
Gretchen, a perky assistant whose desk faced Florence’s, turned to explain, “Fritz claims he knows for a fact that Maud Dixon is a man.”
“No,” whispered Lucy, drawing her hand up to her mouth.
Maud Dixon was the pen name of a writer who’d published a spectacularly successful debut novel a couple of years earlier called Mississippi Foxtrot. It was about two teenage girls, Maud and Ruby, desperate to escape their tiny hometown of Collyer Springs, Mississippi. They are thwarted at every turn by their age, their gender, their poverty, and the cold indifference of their families. Everything comes to a head when Maud kills a contractor traveling through town on his way to a job in Memphis. He had made the mistake of setting his sights on sixteen-year-old Ruby and refusing to look away.
The murder ultimately releases both girls from the clutches of their hometown. One ends up in prison; the other lands a scholarship to Ole Miss.
Critics had remarked upon the sharp, unsentimental prose and the freshness of the perspective, which caught the attention of the literary crowd, but the book didn’t really take off until a famous Hollywood actress chose it for her book club. Whether by prescience or by luck, the novel had appeared at the height of the #MeToo movement and perfectly captured the strain of righteous, brutal anger in the air. Whatever happened the night young Maud Dixon stabbed Frank Dillard—an undeniably menacing, lecherous figure—behind the Driftwood Tavern, you couldn’t quite bring yourself to blame her for it.
The book had sold more than three million copies in the U.S. alone, and there was a mini-series in production. Curiously, its author, Maud Dixon, was a cipher. She did no interviews, no book tours, no publicity whatsoever. There wasn’t even an acknowledgments page in the book.
The novel’s publishing house—one of Forrester’s competitors—admitted that “Maud Dixon” was a pen name, and that the author preferred to remain anonymous. Naturally, this set off immediate and rampant speculation about her identity. “Who is Maud Dixon?” was the question asked in countless magazine articles, online forums, and publishing lunches all over town.
The two known Maud Dixons in America had been duly tracked down and ruled out. One lived in a nursing home in Chicago and couldn’t remember the names of her own children. The other was a dental hygienist who’d grown up in a middle-class town on Long Island and by all accounts had never shown any talent for or proclivity toward writing.
Many people assumed the story was autobiographical since the author and the narrator shared a name. A few amateur sleuths had identified crimes that shared certain markers with the one in the book, but none matched closely enough to be a smoking gun. Besides, Mississippi sealed the court records of juvenile offenders when they turned twenty. The town of Collyer Springs didn’t even exist. The investigation stalled there.
In general, Florence tended to look down on books that owed their success to the dramatic machinations of plot. Murder, in her eyes, was cheap currency. But when she’d read Mississippi Foxtrot she’d been astounded. The murder wasn’t a technical ploy to up the stakes; it was the novel’s raison d’être. The reader could feel the author’s urgency; the murderer’s absolute imperative; even the satisfaction of the knife going in.
Florence could still recite the passage:
The knife slipped in easily, a sharp-edged interloper among the warm, feminine folds of Frank’s insides. She raised the knife again. This time, it hit a rib and shuddered violently. Her hand slipped off the handle and slapped the soft pale flesh. His stomach was coated in blood now, the coarse, dark hairs slicked down like a newborn’s scalp.
The voice was like nothing Florence had ever read before: sharp and savage, almost violent. Ultimately, she didn’t care whether Maud Dixon was a man or a woman. She knew that whoever she was, she was an outsider, like Florence herself.
“Why are you getting so worked up about this?” Fritz asked Amanda. “Jesus, I’m not saying women can’t write. I’m just saying that this particular writer is not a woman.”
Amanda pinched the bridge of her nose and took a deep breath. “Why am I getting so worked up? Because this particular writer was the best-selling novelist of the year and she was nominated for the National Book Award. But of course it can only be an ‘important’ book if a man wrote it; if a woman wrote it, it’s just book-club drivel. For god’s sake, you can’t have all the fucking cookies and then come take our crumbs too.”
“Technically,” Florence interjected, “James Patterson was the best-selling author that year, even though Mississippi Foxtrot was the best-selling book.” The group turned to look at her in one synchronized motion. “I think,” she added, though she was sure, and immediately hated herself for it.
“Well thank you, Florence, there goes another crumb.”
“This isn’t about whatever absurd scorecard you keep in your back pocket, Amanda,” said Fritz. “My friend—who happens to be a woman, by the way—works at Frost/Bollen and swore to me that Maud Dixon is a man. She could be a woman, obviously, but she happens not to be, in this case.” He shrugged in apology. Frost/Bollen was Maud Dixon’s literary agency.
“So who is it then?” Amanda demanded. “What’s his name?”
Here Fritz faltered. “I don’t know. She just overheard him referred to as a ‘he.’”
Amanda threw up her hands. “Oh, this is total bullshit. There’s literally no way a man could have written that book. There’s not a man on earth who can write women that convincingly. No matter how well he may convince himself.”
As if to punish herself for her earlier timidity, Florence said: “Henry James? E. M. Forster? William Thackeray?” She’d always felt a special affinity with Becky Sharp.
Amanda turned to face her. “Seriously, Florence? You think Mississippi Foxtrot could have been written by a man?”
Florence shrugged. “Maybe. I don’t see what difference it would make.”
Amanda looked at the ceiling and said in wonder, “She doesn’t see what difference it would make.” She turned back and asked, “Are you a writer, Florence?”
“No,” Florence said quietly. In fact, she wanted nothing more than to be a writer. Didn’t they all? Every one of them probably had half a novel tucked away in some drawer. But you don’t go around calling yourself a writer until it’s out of the drawer.
“Well then it may be hard for you to fully appreciate how important it is for female writers to have female exemplars. Women who have come before them and refused to let their inner lives be explained by men. I don’t need one more man telling me how women are, okay? Can you understand that?”