The Riddles of the Sphinx by Anna Shechtman

A deep dive into the history and politics of crossword puzzles

I’ve always loved puzzles and games. When I was a kid, it was logic puzzles. I just loved to fill out that little grid, make deductions, and see all the little dots and X’s fall into place. I did Sudoku pretty regularly for a while too, another logic game. And the crossword. I’ve done it on and off for years, probably starting around when the documentary Wordplay came out and coming back to it for good while my daughter was a baby and I needed something to keep me entertained during those long overnights. I’ve become an avid follower of the New York Times crossword (I’m a little over two years into a daily streak), an occasional solver in other venues like The New Yorker, and even an amateur competitor (I really like the virtual crossword tournaments run by Boswords).

When I heard about The Riddles of the Sphinx: Inheriting the Feminist History of the Crossword Puzzle by Anna Shechtman, I immediately put it on my TBR. Shechtman is a writer, academic, and crossword constructor, and I heard her interviewed on Slate’s Working podcast (RIP) about her book, the politics and history of crossword puzzles, and her early career working as Will Shortz’s assistant. I was fascinated by the women who pioneered what is sometimes seen as a male-dominated field, and the ways that a constructor’s life experience and cultural references inform both the content and humor of their work. [For example, a simple answer like MARY could be clued to Mary Queen of Scots, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Berry, Mary J. Blige, Mary Baker Eddy, etc. Of course any constructor could look up any of these, but one or another might come more easily to someone who studied feminist history, loves to bake, or listens primarily to R&B music.]

Full disclosure, I haven’t quite finished the book yet, but it’s been a challenging and wonderful surprise. What I wanted and the book has delivered is a history of how the crossword rose to become a favorite cultural pastime, and the women who played a central role in its evolution. As a minor publishing and crossword nerd, I love details like this one: Margaret Farrar, the first editor of the New York Times crossword, also edited many early crossword collections for Simon & Schuster, the first of which was the very first book they ever published. The money she made from editing those early collections helped her husband launch one of my favorite publishers: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

I was expecting this kind of cultural anecdote, but I was not expecting the two other main threads of the book. First and most prominent is Shechtman’s own lifelong relationship with disordered eating and how it paralleled her early interest in constructing crosswords. She writes frankly about the sense of control that anorexia afforded her, her related obsession with the language of sexuality, and the way she equated solving word puzzles with solving the puzzle of her mind and body. It’s her own version of how the personal experience of the body and the political implications of language are intertwined.

Alongside the her own story and the history of the crossword in the 20th Century, Shechtman also gives a primer on feminist thought in the same period, showing how it has informed her own work. She connects word games with the wordplay of the French feminists Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva and the linguistic rebellion of queer feminists like Julia Penelope. The academic rigor with which Shechtman brings theory into the story of crosswords has been a challenge for me, particularly as I do most of my extracurricular reading at bedtime, but I have appreciated how it has stretched my thinking about language.

It’s not new to believe that language is political. Crosswords, it turns out, are a place to work out that politics, display it, play with it, and subvert it. I’m grateful to Anna Shechtman for the nudge to think about them this way, and for some of the tools to do so.

For: Crossword nerds, those with an interest in feminism and feminist theory, and readers who like to deconstruct pop culture