Writers Women

Helena Maria Viramontes does not look like the voice of the oppressed. Shopping at a Mexican market in Orange County, the author known for her book on migrant farm workers is fashionably, and strikingly, dressed in a black skirt and colorful shawl. But this is what you get when you cross a bookworm with a self-described Chicana activist.

Why do education and cynicism so often go hand in hand? Heaven forbid an intellectual should be wholehearted or, God help us, earnest about anything. Geoff Dyer is an intellectual, and not just because of the Oxford education -- because his books, fiction and nonfiction, are all in pursuit of something, some idea. He builds on the work of other writers, among them, John Berger, Somerset Maugham and D.H. Lawrence. His books build on literature.

Isabel Allende, Latin America's dona of literature, has found a new inspiration for her fiction. It's here, Northern California, where the tree huggers roam and being weird is relative. "My publishers were horrified," says the Chilean writer. "They said, 'No more banana republics? No more bloody military coups? No more dancing around with ghosts?' I said, 'What are you talking about? I moved to California!'

Barbara Seaman, a writer and health activist whose groundbreaking 1969 book that warned against the dangers of the birth control pill is widely credited with launching the modern women's health movement, has died. She was 72. Seaman died of lung cancer Wednesday at her New York City home, said her son, Noah Seaman. In her first book, "The Doctors' Case Against the Pill," Seaman exposed the serious and little-known side effects of the high-estrogen pill prescribed at the time.

Spunky Nancy Drew might faint with fright--golden locks flying, high heels twisting, pearls askew--if she knew what was to befall her flapper girl self: The '90s Nancy is a university journalism major who drives a Mustang, colors her hair and thinks way too much about boys. "They have changed Nancy Drew in a frightening way," sniffed Beth Caswell, founder of the Nancy Drew Detective Club, "taking away her manners, her roadster, her white gloves."

A 23-year-old graduate of Cal State Northridge set a new Hollywood record late last week when Paramount Pictures bought her screenplay for $1 million, believed to be the highest fee ever paid for a woman's script.

As a 7-year-old girl, Dorothy West read a poem celebrating the last leaf on a tree and its proud but solitary fate. Right away, little Dorothy made a plea: Don't let that happen to me. I don't want to be around after everyone I love is dead. Eighty-one years later, it's safe to say her wish didn't come true.

Linda Barnes, a writer of mystery novels in nearby Brookline, spent years thinking about writing a series with a female detective. "But everyone told me that a woman, especially the kind of woman I envisioned, who was not a Miss Marple type, would not work," Barnes said. American mystery readers were conditioned to a diet of tough, male detectives, she was told. They expected this tough-guy hero to rescue women, not to work alongside them. A female detective, Barnes was told, "would not sell."

When Harold Bloom's name comes up, Erica Bauermeister smiles to herself a little ruefully, like someone who knows she should keep her mouth shut and knows perfectly well she won't. Bloom is the venerable Yale professor and recent author of "The Western Canon," an exhaustive and oh-so-authoritative recitation of the 26 greatest authors in the history of Western Civilization, nearly all of whom happen to be white men.

Japan-born, Seattle-bred poet Mitsuye Yamada spent part of her childhood in an internment camp in Idaho during World War II. But in the 1950s, when she was a graduate student in English at the University of Chicago, " politics was a bad word," she said. "You weren't supposed to say anything in your poems except truth and beauty."

Duygu Asena, a bestselling writer and crusader for women's rights in Turkey, has died after a two-year battle with a brain tumor. She was 60. Asena, author of the book "Woman Has No Name," died in Istanbul's American Hospital early Sunday after being admitted on Thursday with a high temperature and respiratory problems, the hospital said. Asena had trained to be a teacher but began writing for newspaper women's pages in the early 1970s.

At only 24, Drew Barrymore can be forgiven if she submits to occasional bouts of fear. After all, for the past year, the adoringly sweet actress with the girl-next-door demeanor has faced the daunting task of co-producing one of the most talked-about movies in Hollywood: "Charlie's Angels." The film industry is eagerly waiting to see if young Barrymore can pull off what many veteran filmmakers have rarely accomplished over the years--create a hit action movie starring women.

It's hard enough to write decent prose about Los Angeles; just when you think you've wrapped your fingers around a good, honest handful of the place, it squeezes out the other side and tiptoes away to get a bikini wax. And writing poetry about Los Angeles? A disciplined art for an undisciplined place? My dears, what could one end up with but either parody or doggerel? I ought to have known better, and now I do, for I have read it.

Playwright-performer Josefina Lopez is one of those dynamos who never seems to need a break--a quality that's been a blessing and a curse. "I'm a very multi-task person," Lopez, 30, said during a recent interview in a freshly painted Hollywood bookstore cafe filled with Mexican folk art. "I feel like I can do 20 things at once." To wit: Her "Confessions of Women From East L.A." opened Thursday at Santa Ana College.

Taslima Nasrin, a celebrated and incendiary Bangladeshi writer, is on the run in her native land. Nasrin, hounded from her country by Muslim extremists four years ago, returned in September to Dhaka, the capital, where her mother lies dying. Nasrin had hoped that controversy about her had calmed enough to permit her return.

You expect a firebrand with flashing eyes and clenched fists, not the gentle woman who opens the door to the nondescript apartment in the dull brick building in a far-flung borough of this city. It was only four years ago that Taslima Nasrin, the 35-year-old Bangladeshi poet, novelist, feminist and self-proclaimed atheist, stirred Muslim fundamentalists in her homeland to such a pitch of righteous wrath that she had to flee the country.

One day in 1985, UCLA professor Wendy Martin looked up from the podium of her women's fiction class and realized that she was lecturing about Edith Wharton and Emily Dickinson to a class filled with young Asian-Americans, African-Americans and Latinas. "I was teaching the white woman's canon, but . . . these were not their stories," said Martin, who now chairs the English Department at Claremont Graduate School.

Does anyone remember the 1986 Newsweek story that said a 40-year-old single woman has as much chance of getting married as of being killed by a terrorist? Most people do remember it because Susan Faludi exposed the study on which it was based as insidious tripe in "Backlash," her 1991 bestseller. Have we traveled far from the time when our culture gleefully reinforced the myth that the worst and most useless thing a woman can be is single? Most women over 30 know that we have not.

The critics aren't at all sure how to handle this one. Since her debut 20 years ago with "Final Payments," Mary Gordon, patron saint of American Irish Catholic angst, has been hailed as one of this country's finest writers. In return, she has dutifully produced three more lyrical novels--"The Company of Women," "Men and Angels," "The Other Side," and countless essays and short stories, revelations all of the tyrannies of love and death, family and faith.

"TROUBLE GIRLS: THE ROLLING STONE BOOK OF WOMEN IN ROCK" Edited by Barbara O'Dair Rolling Stone Press, $25 * * 1/2 The phrase "women in rock" has come to be nothing so much as an unwarranted (and often unwanted) classification that jams together artists who otherwise have no connection. This anthology of new essays feeds the notion of a gender-based genre, particularly since it recruits only women writers to examine the subject.