The Wild Girls is a small collection of writings by Ursula Le Guin, as well as one interview. I enjoyed this book enormously and it’s a quick read.
The first piece is a short story from which the collection gets its name. The Crown men, the elite denizens of a nearby city, kidnap children of the “dirt people,” otherwise known as slaves. They steal a little girl named Mal, whose sister Modha chases after them until she’s caught up with the cadre of soldiers. Among the children is a baby, whom one of the men tosses into the bushes and leaves to die. Modha and Mal continue to hear the baby’s cries, long after they are out of range. The baby’s cries follow them like a ghost in their new life in the city. This is a story in a small space; Le Guin can worldbuild on even the smallest scale. The story is about grief, love, sacrifice and a complex society shot through with cruelty. It’s a superb little story.
The next piece is an essay about capitalism’s insidious stranglehold on publishing books. Le Guin writes: “For years now, most editors have had to waste most of their time on a very unlevel playing field, fighting Sales and Accounting. In those departments, beloved by the CEOs, a “good book” means a high gross and a “good writer” is one whose next book can be guaranteed to sell better than the last one.” She laments this fact and talks about the joy of physical books and art’s engagement of the mind. It’s a good rant!
Next are some poems, none of them very good. Moving on.
The next essay on modesty is an interesting read. She talks about modesty being defined in gendered ways, where a modest woman is a woman who defers to men. She (hilariously) writes: “Its direct opposite, immodesty, came to be applied mostly to female behavior and dress. I’ve never heard the word ‘immodest’ applied to a male costume, not even to something as preposterously boastful as a codpiece or as uncomfortably bulgeful as a ballet dancer’s tights.” She finishes with a discussion of the beauty of modesty in the communal sense, where we listen to and communicate with others: “The conversation of the modest is what holds ordinary people together. It is the opposite of advertisement. It is communion.”
The final piece is a vastly entertaining interview with Le Guin full of bon mots and pithy answers. My favorite part was her delightful critique of literary snobs:
The only means I have to stop ignorant snobs from behaving towards genre fiction with snobbish ignorance is to not reinforce their ignorance and snobbery by lying and saying that when I write SF [science fiction] it isn’t SF, but to tell them more or less patiently for forty or fifty years that they are wrong to exclude SF and fantasy from literature, and proving my argument by writing well.”
Preach, Ursula!