I know a few women younger than me who have careers and children, and so the burgeoning career and family happen at the same time. A few have said something like, "During dating, he was all about feminism. But now I have to ask him to help with the children, I have to ask him to do the dishes, and every time he does, it's like a favor. Where's the feminist I married?" That's theoretical feminism, not practical feminism. I don't think we're all where we need to be. I don't know if we will be in my lifetime. Life is imperfect. But interesting.

Memoirs are going to be problematic sells for a while, though, because even if memoir means "based in memory," right now, in the collective mind, memoir means "recovery." When my agent and I started looking at small presses the possibility for my book, I realized most small presses were not publishing memoir, because they don't want to be associated with the genre that Mary Karr calls, half-facetiously, "literature's trashy cousin."

Yet one new trend I do like coming from mainstream publishers right now is memoirs tied to research that explores the narrator's dilemma.

Grading creative writing is always an ethical dilemma. But what you brought up about grading personal stories versus the research paper is of course a truly volatile issue in teaching memoir or the personal essay, because there's no pretense that the narrator is a character.

Historians will look back on this era and how the Internet changed what we value, what we consider art, the way we think, the way we define what it means to be human. In Sincerity and Authenticity, Lionel Trilling describes the changes that occurred between about 1850 and 1920, due to the Industrial Revolution and the resulting migration of people from small communities to relative anonymity in cities. Because of that paradigm shift, ideas about what it means to be an individual underwent a transformation that leeched into all areas. Art, psychology, history, marriage, gender.

I guess the biggest difference between me and many of today's female graduate students is that a lot of them were raised by mothers with careers, and they got college degrees studying with female professors. Both of those factors make the enterprise of educating yourself for a serious profession seem feasible.

I know a few women younger than me who have careers and children, and so the burgeoning career and family happen at the same time. A few have said something like, "During dating, he was all about feminism. But now I have to ask him to help with the children, I have to ask him to do the dishes, and every time he does, it's like a favor. Where's the feminist I married?" That's theoretical feminism, not practical feminism. I don't think we're all where we need to be. I don't know if we will be in my lifetime. Life is imperfect. But interesting.