[Crossposted from Millicent and Carla Fran: A Female Bromance in Letters]



Dear Carla Fran,



After reading your letter about your grandmother, I’ve thought a lot about how “repression” and closed doors have gone out of fashion. Good things open doors, bad things close them (unless God opens a… Continue

[cross-posted from Millicent and Carla Fran]



Courtesy of Carla Fran, my co-blogger. If you need a giggle and a snort with your coffee, read on:



Norman Mailer is a self-mythologizer, very much in love with the idea of the hungover writer who understands the virility of being. Writing is dangerous: you risk alcoholism, depression and madness if you let yourself go into your art.… Continue

"There exists a great politesse around women's poetry," Courtney Queeny writes, "and to write critically is, in some ways, to betray one's feminine self (the part that's supposed to blink a lot and sigh into the shadows when the menfolk start talking politics at the dinner table)."



In solidarity with Kamy Wicoff' and the SheWrites call to action, I've already bought Francine Prose's Gluttony and just bought Adina Hoffman's My Happiness bears No Relation to Happiness, which looks like… Continue

It's a curious feature of the Republican approach to reproduction that the fetus has the right to life but not to medical care*. The life belongs to the fetus, so the money required to bring that fetus to term---including the cost of the birth---should be calculated not as part of the "expense" of being a woman in the health care system but rather as a Fetal Birthday Gift From America.



Women are more costly, the prevailing Republican wisdom goes, because of their child-bearing years.… Continue

[crossposted]



Laura Miller's article on Publishers Weekly's top ten list led me to Francine Prose's article, "Scent of a Woman's Ink," which was published in Harper's Magazine in 1998. It's not available to nonsubscribers but it's a formidable piece and relevant still, though it's equally interesting to think about the ways in which some things have changed. I want to rescue it from the archives and reproduce some parts of it here for consideration as we pound our way… Continue