'The Girls' Guide to Hunting & Fishing'

Discovering the novels of Melissa Bank

The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing by Melissa Banks

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I recently discovered the writing of Melissa Bank after reading

Nick Hornby

’s piece about her and I honestly can’t believe that I hadn’t come across her work before now.

Having just devoured her two books, The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing and The Wonder Spot, both of which feature a young female narrator who is making her way through life in New York, her voice and characters are fresh and feel very contemporary, despite being written in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, respectively.  

The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing, her first book, is written in a short story structure through pivotal points in the life of the young narrator, Jane Rosenal, who starts out as an adolescent trying to figure out her older brother’s first serious girlfriend and how romantic relationships work.  It then follows Jane throughout her twenties and thirties as she navigates relationships, work, and life.  Her relationship with her father is particularly touching.  

Interestingly, when I began to research Bank, I found that I was not alone in coming late to her work and that she has often appeared to be underrated.  

Guardian columnist Hadley Freeman wrote a piece in 2020 about The Wonder Spot, Bank’s second book, which she claimed as the one book she wished more people would read.  Despite the relative success of The Girls’ Guide, Freeman states that she favours The Wonder Spot over that first book, and I would tend to agree.  

Freeman even goes so far as to state that The Wonder Spot is ‘perfect’ and that it is the book she would have wished to write herself: 

“The Wonder Spot is my perfect book. The tone is perfect, the stories are perfect, the characters are perfect and every word, seemingly so casually chosen, is perfect.”

Similar to Bank’s first book, The Wonder Spot is again written in interlinked short stories and  follows Sophie Applebaum as she navigates life over twenty years from her adolescence through to her mid-thirties, navigating dating, relationships, family dynamics and career paths.  It follows Sophie’s journey through remarkable events, turning points, and failed romantic relationships.  Sophie is funny, smart, but ultimately a little lost- as many young people are when starting careers and setting out on their lives.  She felt like she represented a type of ‘every woman’ to me; of that liminal space when we are figuring out our roles and our tastes whilst also dealing with the everyday banalities of life.

The Wonder Spot by Melissa Bank

What I particularly liked about Sophie’s narrative is the close relationship she shares with her two brothers, both of whom she sees regularly in New York and who form a stable backdrop to her life.  

Because of her subject matter and often funny, acerbic female protagonists, as Freeman and others have pointed out, Bank got slotted into the handy title of “chick lit”, the term coined in the 1990s for books written by women and focusing primarily on dating and the life of the single woman (often in New York, which Bank’s two books are mostly set.)  Her books have been compared to Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’ Diary, with the humour of Nora Ephron thrown in.    

However, as many critics have pointed out, the chick lit moniker was a somewhat reductionist way to read Bank.  

Firstly though, I want to say: what is wrong with enjoyable books that portray young women’s journeys through dating, anyway?  Publishers and critics love to slap labels on books (particularly by female writers), don’t they?  Like many great novels, Bank’s books tell their protagonists’ story through humour, through relatable incidents, through likeable characters, and they have a lot of heart: they allow their characters to grow through their experiences.  That is what has us, as readers, hanging on to their stories for dear life, hoping that they will come through and realise what a great life is waiting for them.

‘Too late, you realise that your body was perfect—every healthy body is.’ Jane Rosenal, The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing

A lot of this discrepancy between female/male novels of this type, according to many critics (including Freeman), is that their publishers choose to put ‘feminised’ covers on them in order to market them within the chick lit space.  Interestingly, some years ago, Maureen Johnson writing for the Guardian encouraged readers to flip covers around to expose the sexist agenda of book marketing.

Another issue here I think is around book snobbery. 

I had a discussion recently with a group of nonfiction writers around this subject, and how often the books that are denigrated as being somewhat less….literary, perhaps? are often books written by women.  This isn’t exclusively the case of course.  I have heard Dan Brown’s novels denigrated as weakly written pulp fiction, and Stephen King has mentioned before about being seen as a ‘mere’ genre writer.  

Often what these books and writers have in common are that they are huge bestsellers; popularity, it seems, often draws out the criticism of something being less intellectual than, say, a Pulitzer Prize winner.  But it is worth remembering that even revered, now-classic authors such as Jane Austen and Daphne du Maurier would have likely been thought of within this vein in their own lifetimes.  In fact, Austen’s novel Northanger Abbey ironically pokes fun at the book snobbery around the reading of novels, where it is seen as a mostly female pursuit.  

‘Longevity is the only indicator of literature that really matters, and this book is built to last’, Nick Hornby, Foreword to 25th anniversary edition of The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing

I have even been on the receiving end of criticism for the inclusion of certain titles in my own favourite book selections on this platform, something which I find both slightly amusing and a little exasperating.  Firstly, surely a reader’s favourite books are a personal choice.  Secondly, holding up one writer’s work as inherently more ‘worthy’ than another feels wrong and reductionist to the time and work that goes into writing anything, regardless of what you might personally feel about the work.   

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Published in 1999, Bank’s first book The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing went on to sell more than 1.5 million copies.  But the book was far from straightforward to write.  In fact, it took Bank twelve years to produce the final manuscript, partly because she suffered a serious bicycle injury whilst writing, landing on her head and causing her helmet to split in two.  This caused her to suffer post-concussion syndrome for the following two years, affecting her short-term memory and depriving her of an estimated 10-15% of her vocabulary.  

Banks also took her time writing the book because she worked, like her character Jane, in a day job as a copywriter for an advertising company.  She reportedly stayed at her office until 1-2 am each day in order to work on her novel writing, returning home and falling into bed for a few hours before returning back to work.  

Melissa Bank in 2006

The title story of the book first appeared in Zoetrope, the literary magazine started by director Francis Ford Coppola, and it was following this that a bidding war began for the publication of the completed book.  Viking Press eventually got the deal, paying $275,000 dollars for the privilege - an unusually large sum for a debut book, particularly one structured in the short story form.  

The deal paid off: Bank’s book reached the top spot of The New York Times bestseller list, where it stayed for several months.  Coppola even optioned it for a possible movie.  

The book follows Jane Rosenal in a coming-of-age collection of linked stories from the age of fourteen to her mid-thirties.  Bank’s writing in the book was compared to that of literary heavyweights Salinger and Hemingway, as well as the The Los Angeles Times calling it “Like John Cheever, only funnier.”

Surprisingly, both Hadley Freeman and myself were not alone in feeling that Bank’s second book, The Wonder Spot, was even better than her first.  Appearing in 2005, many critics agreed.  This did not, however, translate into sales, and it did not sell anywhere near as well as The Girls’ Guide.  

‘The good thing about being nowhere in your career is you can do it anywhere’, Sophie Applebaum in The Wonder Spot 

Melissa Susan Bank was born 11th October 1960 in Boston and raised in a suburb of Philadelphia.  Her mother was a teacher and like Jane Rosenal’s father in her first book, Bank’s father was a Neurologist who sadly died of leukaemia, hiding his diagnosis for over ten years. The way Bank portrays Jane’s reaction to the potential loss of a parent felt very real, and was clearly impacted by her own father’s early death.  As someone who lost a parent at a similar age, it felt genuine, and yet not morbid or overwritten.  The dialogue between Jane and her father remains some of the best in the book during these scenes, and they never lose their connected sense of humour.  

Bank had one sister and a brother, and this is another thing which feeds strongly into her writing.  In both of her books, sibling relationships are strong and in The Wonder Spot in particular, Sophie’s relationship with her two brothers is so heartwarming and reciprocal that these felt much more enriching than the relationships she has with the male suitors she encounters.  

After graduating with an MA from Cornell in 1987, Bank began writing The Girls Guide, writing after work, and somewhat unusually, turning down promotions at her company in order to focus on her writing. She went on to win a Nelson Algren Literary Award in 1993 for one of her short stories.  Work on the book was stunted however when she suffered her bicycle accident in 1994.

The after effects of the accident meant that she was struggling to both speak and write for around two years following the crash.  She still managed to publish a few short stories during this time, catching the attention of the editor of Zoetrope, Adrienne Brodeur.  Coppola had reportedly asked Brodeur to commission a story based on a self-help book published in 1995, The Rules: Time-Tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr Right.  The result is Bank’s title story ‘The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing’, in which Jane finally succumbs to following the advice of a self-help book in order to figure out why she can’t make a romantic relationship work.  

The result is a funny, heartwarming story of a young woman so confused by her disastrous romantic life that she almost fails to recognise a good man when she dates him.  Two stories from Bank’s final book were later adapted into the 2007 film Suburban Girl, which starred Sarah Michelle Gellar and Alec Baldwin.

Bank openly admitted that some of the book drew on aspects of her own life, including the family dynamics and the loss of her father to leukaemia, leading gossip columnists to try to track down the real-life ‘characters’ from the book.

The constant rewrites and polishing of her work really paid off: there is not a word wasted in either of her books.  What I also appreciated in The Wonder Spot is her choice to give Sophie the perfect ending for her character and personality; she did not succumb to expected tropes. 

Bank began teaching at the Southampton Writers Conference on Long Island, and later in the M.F.A. program at the Southampton campus of Stony Brook University.

Following the publication of The Wonder Spot, which had taken her a further six years to write, Bank was commissioned to write a third for Viking, which she was reportedly working on just before her death at age 61.  She had been suffering from lung cancer.  

As any fervent reader will know, falling in love with a book by a new (to you) author is an anticipatory pleasure: it means the seeking out of more titles by the writer and the potential of many more enjoyable novels.  In the case of Bank, however, I was disappointed to realise that these were her only two books.

But then, that such a female writer went unnoticed to me for so long, is perhaps the point of continuing to research the lives and stories of women as I do each week in this publication.

*A 25th anniversary edition of The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing, with foreword by Nick Hornby, is on sale now

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