The memoir by women, read by female readers, is considered a market form, not "great literature."

The concept of "girl-on-girl crime" is perplexing to me, and it happens in many ways. There are those, who refuse to identify with women as a group, preferring the shade of the mythologized men, who want to keep up the status quo.

I don't think men experience the embargo on channeling the autobiography in their literature.

On the whole, most biographies about literary women tend to diagnose them.

I hope what I do when I draw from other people's lives is pay tribute. To try to understand what it means in our society to be silenced. To try to understand how class and gender intersect with that. To try to understand how being named and classified within the context of psychiatry can intersect with all that, as well.

The nonfiction novel or literary memoir as authored by women is usually given a much harder time in mainstream criticism.

I think for a woman, getting older can help, through personal experience, although of course older women are then rendered invisible in our society, another existential crisis.