Honest criticism, I suppose, has its place. But honest writing is infinitely more valuable.

The writing you allude to is a form of dissent, but it's also expressive of the need to evolve beyond what is turgid and stale in contemporary fiction.

The woman who thinks she can choose femininity, can toy with it like the social drinker toys with wine - well, she's asking for it, asking to be undone, devoured, asking to spend her life perpetrating a new fraud, manufacturing a new fake identity, only this time it's her equality that's fake.

Divorce also entails the beginning of a supposition that that familial reality might have obstructed one's ability to perceive others.

How can there be so many mothers in the world but so little sense of what it might be to become one?

A neighbor is something that belongs to the stable world of home life, the thing that lives next door to you.

Hope is like one of those orchids that grows around toxic waste: lovely in itself - and an assertion, if you like, of indefatigable good - but a sure sign that something nasty lies underneath.