Entering the ‘Matrix of Language’ With a Crossword Puzzle Fiend

Anna Shechtman was 15 when she started building crossword puzzles, and 19 when her first puzzle was published in The New York Times. She later helped to found The New Yorker’s crossword section where, as one of very few female puzzle creators, she has been part of an ongoing effort to diversify the field.

Now 33 and a resident scholar at Cornell, Shechtman has spun her experience and her deep knowledge of puzzles into a book, “The Riddles of the Sphinx: Inheriting the Feminist History of the Crossword Puzzle,” published earlier this month. Part history, part memoir, part feminist reconsideration, it offers a sweeping overview of the American crossword puzzle over the last century, told primarily through the stories of four pioneering women who were integral to its evolution.

A significant portion of the book is also an intimate chronicle of Shechtman’s struggle with anorexia, which began around the same time her interest in puzzles emerged. She sees the two as tightly linked — attempts to “retreat from the hard fact of [my] embodiment into a world of words, into its order and disorder.”

“The Riddles of the Sphinx” poses questions — What kinds of intellectual work is considered worthy of our attention? What boxes have women historically been permitted to fill? — only to consistently invert and twist them. What emerges is a surprising and ambitious investigation of language and the varied ways women resist the paradoxes of patriarchy both on and off the page.

In an interview that has been edited and condensed for clarity, Shechtman discussed her investigation of this legacy and the revelations, both personal and political, that came from finding her place within it.