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“I’m interested in this moment on the cusp of adulthood—when we encounter how the world treats women and girls—and what it means to be a girl in the world.” —Emma Cline
I’ve shown women as they are, as divided human beings, and not as they ought to be.
When I was starting to write—in the late fifties, early sixties—there was a kind of social tradition in which male novelists could operate. Hard drinkers, bad livers. Wives, wars, big fish, Africa, Paris, no second acts. A man who wrote novels had a role in the world, and he could play that role and do whatever he wanted behind it. A woman who wrote novels had no particular role. Women who wrote novels were quite often perceived as invalids. Carson McCullers, Jane Bowles. Flannery O'Connor, of course. Novels by women tended to be described, even by their publishers, as sensitive. I’m not sure this is so true anymore, but it certainly was at the time, and I didn’t much like it. I dealt with it the same way I deal with everything. I just tended my own garden, didn’t pay much attention, behaved—I suppose—deviously. I mean I didn’t actually let too many people know what I was doing.
An enchanting and strange excerpt from Robert Walser’s “Looking at Pictures.”
How an early twentieth-century French artist thought women firefighters would look, and other news.
“Also have cut out heavy drinking … and since Liquor is my best friend and severest critic I miss it.”
—From Ernest Hemingway’s letter to Colonel Charles T. Lanham, April 2, 1945.
“All this gives the metaphor some potency—but it’s also why the metaphor doesn’t, as Elsa correctly notes, quite make sense.”
In our second installment of the “Mating” book club, Miranda Popkey looks at Norman Rush’s strange use of metaphor.
“Sex isn’t ever just about sex. Women tended to understand sex and pleasure as knotting points. Men tended to treat sex as an isolated act.”
—Paul Chan on “New Lovers,” a series of erotic novels written by women for a new generation’s sexual imagination