Cracking Spines

“ Chick lit - the range of fiction by women about contemporary city life, friendships, sex, jobs, climbing out of the wreckage of youthful dreams - gets a lot less respect than the male equivalent, which people tend to approach as if it were automatically more artful, more written. Women write ‘thinly veiled accounts’; men write ‘romans à clef.’ Women writers may have a room of their own, but men who thrash around in front of the mirror and record their every failure, humilation, moue, and excretion for an audience’s consumption still own the house, even if all they do in it is lie on the couch - and then write about it. ” -

from Nancy Franklin’s “Brooklyn Dodger,” in the current New Yorker.

I’ve never had my entire career pre-criticized before, and so spot on.