It was in reading the feminist canon that I was first lured away from the unabashed pursuit of fiction. And Marilyn French was a presiding deity. must have been 19 when I first read The Women’s Room. It was an old Abacus edition with an afterword by Susan Faludi. I could see the patches of over-earnestness, the way characters represented issues, the way characters mouthed particular viewpoints. Still it excited me and satisfied me the same way The Female Eunuch and The Second Sex did.There were the resonances of shared experience which held some gravitas. When I read The Bleeding Heartlater I agreed wholeheartedly that liberals feared the embracing of power.But what I remember is The Women’s Room‘s vein of quiet, bitter comedy.
2 comments
Anu says:
May 8, 2009
Women’s Room does have that slight heavy handed and earnest quality of a lot of American fiction doesn’t it? Still, I read all of M. French
The Chasing Iamb says:
May 10, 2009
Me too. Even Summer with George, a title that always makes me giggle