Don’t goldfinch that book, my friend. Pass it over to me because, lord knows, as someone in the more-or-less female assemblage, I bring to you my unreliable taste in all things literary. Women, you know. We can’t be trusted to read a book.
Just the fact that we enjoy or admire something is, all on its own, enough to sully achievement.
Didn’t you realize?
Read all about it in this article by Jennifer Weiner up at The Guardian.
Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction
Such effusive congrats to all!
But there’s something here that ought to give women great pause in the Baileys announcement:
[Ms Fraser said]: “There’s very little domestic drama, and that clichéd idea of romantic fiction. There wasn’t much of that this year. These are big ambitious books that deal with war, grief and loss. They are not confined to the domestic arena.”
How long are women going to accept this critique of what makes literature important? It used to be that men told us our fictions didn’t matter because they were small, interior, domestic, but now here is the same malarky coming from a woman: if it’s personal, if it’s domestic, it’s unimportant.
Or goddamn it. Could we maybe judge on merit regardless of subject matter?
Eaton Hamilton 