Literary Memes
Recently I’ve noticed an interesting meme that has sneaked into book titles over the past several years: ‘_____’s Daughter’. There has been an avalanche of books using this construct as a title--some are written by very famous authors, and others have gone on to win sizable awards. Here’s a list of some of the big ones:
The Memory Keeper’s Daughter by Kim Edwards (2006)
The Florist’s Daughter by Patricia Hampl (2007)
Pandora’s Daughter by Iris Johansen (2007)
The Gravedigger’s Daughter by Joyce Carol Oates (2007)
The Hummingbird’s Daughter by Luis Alberto Urrea (2006)
Galileo’s Daughter by Dava Sobel (2000)
The Mistress’s Daughter by A.M. Homes (2007)
The Bonesetter’s Daughter by Amy Tan (2003)
The Abortionist’s Daughter by Elisabeth Hyde (2007)
Belshazzar’s Daughter by Barbara Nadel (2006)
The Professor’s Daughter by Joann Sfar and Emmanuel Guibert (2007)
Rasputin’s Daughter by Robert Alexander (2006)
There’s also Methuselah’s Daughter by friend and blogger Dean Esmay, which is available through his website.
There may be something slightly magical about this construct. Does it attract the reader’s eye on a bookshelf? Has someone cooked up a formula suggesting that titling a book ‘_____’s Daughter’ drives up sales? It’s certainly edgy--it’s a self-conscious shift in focus from big blustering heroes to their quiet and implicitly neglected feminine offspring. This meme has legs like I’ve never seen on a literary conceit...it just doesn’t seem to be slowing down. No one--including, significantly, the editors at the major publishers who are signing off on these titles--has yet suggested that ‘_____’s Daughter’ has “been done”. Where is this staying power coming from? I’m baffled.
Fellow comics-writer Saurav Mohapatra once wrote me a funny, spontaneous mini-essay about being similarly baffled by Indian expat literature; “novels whose titles are generated by collective nouns and food-item names. I am waiting for a novel written by a Non Resident Author to be called “Bucketful of Mangoes”, since we have written about everything else. If no one else writes it I might just call my next novel that.”
I think the time has come for a literary hypersigil; a mish-mosh of all the trends in modern English literature. It would be a towering work of cobbled parts and have something for everybody, or nothing for anybody. It will have offspring, pathos and food items. We will call it: The Blind Mango Picker’s Daughter.
I’ve threatened to write it.