The mother lode

MENTION New Yorker writer Caitlin Flanagan to a certain class of woman -- liberal, educated, media-savvy, professional -- and vitriol will almost certainly follow. She’s been called “a retrograde feminist-hater,” “shrill, smug and condescending,” “an Old World elitist of the most lip-curling kind” even “the most repellent person in the world.”

That’s because in the five or so years she has written on domestic life from her Los Angeles vantage point -- on its being “laughably child centered,” on the “epidemic” of sexless marriages, on her belief that “when a mother works, something is lost” -- Flanagan has aimed her intellect and razor wit directly at upper-middle-class working mothers.

These are the women who seem to be a natural audience for the 44-year old Flanagan, who lives in Hancock Park with her husband and two young sons. She socializes in liberal circles, and she writes about working mothers’ struggles: to keep households humming, to cope with ego-gratifying yet demanding careers, and to live with the nagging specter of the Perfect Mother. But because Flanagan writes cloaked as a (mostly) happy housewife, she’s raised the ire of her peers. In their view, the only thing more maddening than a happy housewife is a happy housewife who writes for the New Yorker.

Now she has a book, “To Hell With All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife,” due on shelves Monday. In her stylish and snappy, often sarcastic prose, she revels in retro notions of femininity, revisiting her most memorable essays.

Predictably, early responses to the book -- written mostly by women -- have tended toward the vicious. “Ms. Flanagan,” one critic writes, “ ...is anxious that her mother’s way with a lobster salad not be forgotten, that we not forget the innocent joys of stamp collecting and of kids playing T-ball. But not so anxious that she decided to toil at, say, Family Circle rather than The New Yorker.”

But while some say she owes her success largely to a misogynistic media that loves a catfight, Flanagan has so masterfully created a persona that it virtually guarantees literary celebrity. On the surface she’s a “follower of Martha Stewart,” who serves her husband a hot dinner every night. Underneath is a more complex character whose lyrical prose only hints at a churning inner life, full of anxiety.

“It’s not a dishonest performance, but it is something of a performance,” said Benjamin Schwarz, Flanagan’s longtime friend and the Atlantic Monthly’s literary and national editor. Flanagan herself points out that hers is a rare, some say refreshing, perspective in a media “stacked in favor of working motherhood.”

“Every single piece that you see that’s on TV, that’s in the magazines, or that’s in a newspaper, was written by a working mother or produced and edited by a working mother,” she said. And so, Flanagan said, she has mustered the courage to tell the truth: “You can’t do it all.”

Of course, this is hardly news to most working mothers. For them, Flanagan’s observations feel less like the bracing gust of clarity that she intends and more like a very precise, very deep, slice across the jugular.

“She just builds her career on attacking women and making them feel bad,” said Ann Crittenden, author of “The Price of Motherhood.”

A profile in this month’s Elle is a case in point of the impasse between Flanagan and her critics. In writer Laurie Abraham’s telling of their interview, Abraham arrived at Flanagan’s house flustered; back home, her daughter’s pet gerbil had just died. Flanagan at first sympathized. Then after their chat turned heated over the question of what’s lost when a mother works, she reminded Abraham: “The gerbil’s dead and you’re here.”

“You could hear me gasp on the tape,” Abraham said in an interview.

When reminded of the exchange, Flanagan gazed into the middle distance and mused, “Yeah, that was funny.”

“She can sometimes be wounding in her humor,” Schwarz said. “But she really thinks through all of the big and important decisions in her life in a way that almost no else I know does. And she’s asking women to think through things as carefully as she does.”

Tea and cookies

In person, Flanagan is charming, a touch self-conscious, even solicitous. She answered the door of her home looking very much the traditionalist in a lavender sweater set and black flats. It was raining and she had the kettle on for tea.

As Flanagan set out a plate with mini muffins -- straight from a gift basket -- and store-bought cookies from a tin, she was suddenly aware of herself, or more accurately, of her persona. Her breathy, girlish voice took on the comic tone of an overheated newscaster: “Breaking news! Caitlin Flanagan serves old Christmas cookies!”

She moved into her sitting room, where a coffee table was strewn with puzzle pieces, a project, she explained, of her sons, Patrick and Conor, now 8, who were at school.

Flanagan tucked her slim frame into her overstuffed sofa and picked at a mini corn muffin. She said she wished novel writing came more naturally to her. “Then people would be like, ‘I loved her novel,’ or ‘I didn’t like her novel.’ Nobody would be like, ‘I hate her!’ ”

On the topics she has been most controversial about, gender roles and working mothers, she dodged and parried until her true opinion came to seem terminally fractured, like the pieces of that undone puzzle.

Flanagan seems to specialize in walking fine lines. She has made an interesting distinction in her writings, for example, between the housewife of her mother’s era, for whom children “came along with the deal” and the “at-home” mom of ours, whose life is defined by her kids.

“Although the at-home mother must think of the work as exalted, (otherwise why isn’t she back at the law firm bringing home the big bucks?),” she writes, “housewives were willing to admit the enterprise was often an emotional bust.” And then there’s the working mom, who’s torn between allegiance to a nanny and anxiety that “the child is getting confused about which woman is the mother -- which, if the child is young enough, he probably is.”

But where does Flanagan herself fall?

She calls herself an “at-home mom” who would “sooner miss a blood transfusion than an open house” at her sons’ school. Yet she acknowledges that she qualifies as a working mother, with gigs at the Atlantic Monthly and the New Yorker. And she has a second book in the works that will expand on her recent article on the “epidemic” of fellatio-obsessed adolescent girls. It’s tentatively titled “On Their Knees.”

“Sometimes people say, ‘Caitlin Flanagan, your life doesn’t really matter. You don’t stand for a lot of people,’ ” she said. “No. I don’t. But I’m trying ... to understand the things that are going on in my day-to-day life in this larger context of ... history [People say] ‘She’s so hypocritical!’ And I’m trying to say, ‘That’s what the book is about.’ It’s a kind of life, a way of life that’s wrought with divergent conflicting impulses.”

Her most incendiary piece, the 12,000-word “How Serfdom Saved the Women’s Movement” that appeared in the March 2004 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, Flanagan now calls “convoluted and slightly insane.” And though she used parts of the article in her book, Flanagan said that she deliberately softened her tone for the republication -- removing that “something is lost” phrase -- because “nobody likes to be scolded.” She will even now admit that “something is gained when a woman works.”

“If you put everything I ever wrote about the losses working moms face, they’d really be on a postcard,” she said. “But we’re all the same about motherhood. We’re so emotional and we’re so vulnerable and we’re so passionate. And if we feel wounded ... we feel almost that our child is ... being wounded by the words.”

Flanagan doesn’t publicly discuss her husband, Rob Hudnut, a Mattel executive. But Schwarz, who has known Flanagan for more than 15 years, describes him as a calming influence, the perfect foil to her intense, reactive and mercurial personality.

The younger of two daughters, she grew up mostly in Berkeley, but the family spent summers in Ireland. Her father, Thomas Flanagan, was a well-regarded Irish American literary scholar and novelist. Her mother, Jean, was a nurse who went back to paid work when Caitlin was 12.

Her first marriage was brief. After marrying a second time, she quit her teaching job to write a novel. She hit writer’s block, and the novel was never finished.

In the meantime, Flanagan started trying to get pregnant, and after a year of working with a doctor conceived twins.

Flanagan stayed home with her boys -- and their full-time nanny -- until they started preschool, a period she now recalls as having been marked by mild depression. She planned to return to her book, which she described as “a multigenerational historic epic set in the Deep South with not a laugh to it.”

Then her mother died in 2001. Around then, Schwarz invited her to write essays for the Atlantic Monthly about books, on what he called “contemporary manners and mores.”

Two years to the day after her mother’s death, Flanagan was diagnosed with late-stage breast cancer. Then David Remnick of the New Yorker called. “A lot of things were happening at once,” said agent Walsh. “She wasn’t sure she was going to live or die and we got a book deal and we got an offer from the New Yorker. It was unbearable.”

Today, Flanagan said, she’s “cancer-free.” Considering the timing of her success, it follows that Flanagan’s work is as much a tribute to her own childhood as to another time and place altogether, which she now calls “the ruined city.” When and where it existed is not easy to pin down, and may not be the point. In this city, women considered sex part of their wifely duty, and nonetheless ended up enjoying it. They stayed home with their babies, even if that meant years-long melancholy, took pride in their ironed sheets and washed walls and had meat and two sides on the table every night.

Kids roamed their neighborhoods safely, while a network of mothers passed time in one another’s kitchens.

This gauzy image is more fiction than history or sociology, of course. She’s taken a literary concept -- and a literary talent -- and let it loose in a polemical marketplace of ideas. And as the critics line up this week to have a go at her book, that may be the challenge Flanagan faces. She’s not only a media star but an author now, with a book tour ahead and a persona that’s between hard covers, certain to ratchet up the scrutiny yet again.