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"My dears, while I was reading this new book, I couldn&amp;amp;#8217;t wait to share it with you. I know lots of you are literary buffs; I&amp;amp;#8217;d even wager that a good number of you are Jane Austen fans. I think you&amp;amp;#8217;ll really get a kick out of William Deresiewicz&amp;amp;#8217;s new memoir: A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship and the Things That Really Matter. A guy who loves Austen? Color me fascinated! William is an award-winning literary critic and a former associate professor at Yale. He first read Jane Austen while a graduate student; he was rather reluctant to do so as he fancied himself a sulky fellow with a penchant for gritty, tougher works of literature. William wasn&amp;#x27;t the most romantic guy around; he was with his then girlfriend mostly for sex, even though he knew a &amp;amp;#8220;real&amp;amp;#8221; relationship involved much more than bedtime escapades. He hilariously pokes fun of his angsty former self early in his memoir: &amp;amp;#8220;Like so many young men, I needed to think of myself as a rebel, and modernism, with its revolutionary intensity, confirmed my self-image. I&amp;amp;#8217;d pass my days in a cloud of angry sarcasm, making silent speeches, as I stalked down Broadway in my John Lennon coat&amp;amp;#133;If I was waiting for someone and had nowhere else to go, I&amp;amp;#8217;d sit right down on the sidewalk with my Kerouac or my Catch-22, just you try and stop me.&amp;amp;#8221; He sounds nearly all of the guys I met while studying English as an undergraduate student. And on a very personal note, this was exactly how my husband was when we first met! Thankfully, William was forced to read Emma for a class and subsequently fell in love the works of Jane Austen. So much so, that he&amp;amp;#8217;s become an Austen scholar, authoring numerous essays and as well as the book Jane Austen and the Romantic Poets. His latest book, A Jane Austen Education, will be out on April 28. After reading the memoir, I had to find out more about this Austen-loving dude. I had the pleasure of chatting with William recently about love, books and everything in between: Rosemary: Why&amp;amp;#8217;d you decide to write this book? William: There&amp;#x27;s a story behind this. A few years ago, I was up for a job as an English professor. At the end of the interview, the head of the hiring committee posed a question that she must have been dying to ask me the whole time. Glancing down at my resume--I had written my doctoral dissertation on &amp;quot;The Novel of Community from Austen to Modernism,&amp;quot; published a book entitled Jane Austen and the Romantic Poets, and was planning a study called &amp;quot;Friendship: A Cultural History from Jane Austen to Jennifer Aniston&amp;quot;--she asked, &amp;quot;So what&amp;#x27;s with you and Jane Austen?&amp;quot; (What I think she meant was, &amp;quot;Wait a second, you&amp;#x27;re a guy!&amp;quot;) I didn&amp;#x27;t know what to say. Finally, I just blurted out a phrase that had been rolling around in my head for a long time. &amp;quot;Well,&amp;quot; I said, &amp;quot;sometimes I feel like everything I know about life I learned by reading Jane Austen.&amp;quot; As for why I decided to write the book as a memoir and not just a work of literary criticism, I realized pretty quickly that the best way to convey the lessons I learned by reading Jane Austen would be to actually talk about the way I learned them. Austen is very personal to me--books in general are very personal to me--and I think the only honest way to talk about her, for me at least, is to talk personally. Rosemary: Which of Austen&amp;#x27;s characters do you relate to the most? William: Tough question. Elizabeth Bennet, I suppose (who doesn&amp;#x27;t?), with Anne Elliot from Persuasion a close second. Elizabeth is so terrific--so funny and smart and flawed and human--and Anne has the deepest emotional life. You really feel what she&amp;#x27;s going through. The big thing, of course, is that I relate to her heroines more than to her heroes--something it took me some time to get used to, as I talk about in the book. Guys are not taught to be able to identify with main characters who are female, and a lot of my initial resistance to Jane Austen had to do with that. But if you don&amp;#x27;t enter into the heroine&amp;#x27;s experience--if you can&amp;#x27;t see yourself in her--I don&amp;#x27;t think you can really understand what she&amp;#x27;s talking about. Rosemary: What did the women in your life have to say when they heard about this project? Students, friends, family, colleagues? William: They all thought it was a great idea. But they know that Jane Austen has been my favorite author for a very long time. The interesting thing is what happens when I try to explain the book to a guy, especially a guy who doesn&amp;#x27;t know me very well. I get a lot of blank looks and nervous fidgets. They really don&amp;#x27;t get it at all, and I think it makes them slightly uncomfortable. Rosemary: Are there one or two Austen novels that should be required reading for men? William: All of them, no? But seriously, I wouldn&amp;#x27;t talk about it in terms of required reading. People need to come to things on their own. But yes, I do think men can learn a lot of important things from reading Jane Austen, especially things that can help them have better relationships--not only with the women in their lives but with people in general. And if I had to choose only a couple of novels, I would choose Emma and Pride and Prejudice, the first two that were important to me. Emma because it taught me to pay attention to other people&amp;#x27;s feelings, and Pride and Prejudice because it taught me to admit my mistakes--which are certainly two things that men do tend to have some trouble with. Rosemary: What&amp;#x27;s the biggest or most important relationship lesson we can learn from reading Austen? William: Be honest with each other, even if it hurts. In almost every one of her novels, the hero and heroine have a confrontation in which one of them tells the other something they really don&amp;#x27;t want to hear--something that&amp;#x27;s painful to hear, something about themselves and how they&amp;#x27;ve behaved. And each time, it looks like that may be the end of their relationship. But in the end, it not only makes them better people, it brings them closer together. For Austen, love takes courage. Thank you William! My fellow bookworms, do you love Jane Austen? Which of her novels is your favorite? Do you any of her characters remind you of your boyfriend? Do you relate to any of her characters? And will you pick up A Jane Austen Education later this month? Take a look, it&amp;amp;#8217;s in a book! * Tina Fey&amp;#x27;s New Book, Bossypants, is Hilarious, and Contains the Secret to What Men Really Want * Dinner Tonight: Sandwiches! (Some Yummy Ideas From a Gorgeous New Book!) * Why Nearly Everything You&amp;amp;#8217;ve Read About Men and Relationships Is Wrong More Ways to Get Glamour: Visit ShopGlamour.com for cute stuff starting at just $10! Download Glamour Magazine for your iPad! Enter the latest Glamour sweepstakes! Follow us on Twitter! Add us to your iGoogle homepage. Photos from top: Courtesy of The Penguin Press; Studio3dotcom"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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