barn, but with me, they have to try to cool my jets because i want to get out there, and i want to talk to people, and i want to share this with people in the country that i live in. >> author michael moore, here comes trouble out in fall 2011. >> thank you. >> next, from box expo america, francine prose discuss the authors who passed feminism on to them and influenced how they write about women and touch on the role of women in the publishing industry. it's about an hour. >> hi, thanks for coming. i think we're going to get started. i'm john freeman, and i want to welcome you to today's panel, feminism, the legacy, a

discussion about women, and power and writing on the occasion of the launch next week of the new issue themed to the f word of femme niche. for those of you not aware, granta1 the oldest organization in the world as the literary magazine. that's what happens when you say it -- [laughter] of cambridge university and was in print for 100 years, out of print, and it was brought back in the 1970s, and it's been going ever since. we've talked death to money to sex, but we never acknowledged one of the most powerful matrixes within human life is the matrix between women and power, and it's long overdue for this issue. i'm happy we did it this year with the occasion of publishing two of the writers on this panel and hopefully the third will be publishing again. what we're going to do is have a

discussion for about 5 minutes, and then i'll open it up to questions from the audience. i'm thrilled we have writers gathered here that we do. i'll introduce them briefly, and we'll start our discussion. to the right is julie otsuka, born in raised in california, a graduate of yale university and received her msa from columbia university. her first novel was published in 2003. she lived in new york city and is just about to publish her new novel that comes out in august that's been in this new issue of granta. this is the second time in the history we excerpted a novel in back-to-back novels, and the only other time was with mark neumus. we are correcting that now with this beautiful novel.

next is karen russell, i have and she was chosen as the best young american novelists in 1997 -- 2007, sorry. >> yeah. >> yeah, you would have been 12 in that year. [laughter] she was in the new yorker and if that seems suspicious, they stole it from us, but they have not stole karen. she's the author of home for girls raised by wolves and author of swamplandia. next is francine prose who is the author of over 25 books of fiction and nonfiction included big foot dreams, primitive people, and how to read like a writer, and most recently, new american life. here's my vanna white moment.

[laughter] a very scarry cover, and since march 2007 to quite recently, she was the president of the pan-america center, the resippet yent of the fellowship and her nosm about sexual harassment on college campuses was a finalist for the book award and wrote about anne frank and gluttony. two different books there, sorry. [laughter] one short announcements before we get started, in addition to the today's panel, there's a party tomorrow night at paragraph, a wonderful writing lab ran by two great women that's open to the public. 23 you like what we discussed or want to read more about the issue or buy it because it's not on stands yet, you can get it there. i thought we would go backwards in time who as you remember said

a woman is not born, a woman becomes a woman, so i wanted to ask the panelists beside chromosomes, what made you the woman that you are, and what sort of events made you the woman that you are today, and that can include parents, people, books, amusement park experiences -- julie, god. julie, go ahead. >> sometimes i feel like i skipped over womanwood. i have in children or never married. i'm 49. i think i inherited something from my mother, kind of a distrust of the world, and i think for a long time i thought that she didn't want me to

marry. i'm not sure i absorbed that, but i did, and so i feel like i don't know when i came into womanhood. i mean, it's a very strange concept. i feel there's puberty when you become a woman and the world looks at you very differently, and then as you age, you begin to become more invisible to the world, and in a sense a lot freer, so i think actually as i've gotten older, my 40s i felt more of a woman than i think i was when i was younger. there's just a sense of freedom that i feel now that i didn't have earlier, and i don't know that's a very hard question, and i feel like sometimes that's something you inherit from your mother, but i feel like that was never really explained to me. i grew up with brothers. i've always had best friends, but it was never clear to me how i was supposed to become a woman, and i'm not sure i'm

doing it in the right way, but i'm doing it in my way. [laughter] >> yeah, thank you so much for the introduction. it's funny, 1997 was probably like the ground zero for me of just like the hell that is puberty and physical calamity. you know that probably was just a terrifying time, and that is, that is such a hard question. i grew up in a house where my mother was sort of the primary breadwinner so i had modeled to me she's just the most intelligent woman that i know, and there's sort of a lot of easy outs. you know, i assumed i would go to college. her father was from the, you know, this generation where he still to this day, you know, is a wonderful person, but doesn't understand how my sister and i are not secretary or teachers. you can see the needle going, so

you're a secretary, but we explain to him for 20 minutes what it is we do. she was sort of the first female partner in her law firm, and i'm sure that i really absorbed this idea that education was par paramount and you had to be self-supporting because you could not rely on anybody, you know, on anybody else. you needed to have your own set of resources, but then as a consequence of first sort of being out of the house, there's a beautiful book that talks about the confusion right now and the pain and resentment that can be felt on both sides if you're in a nontraditional family, so i spent a lot of time with my brother and father and ended up feeling i was like missing the boat a little bit in terms of etiquette. dances terrified me. makeup, i still don't know what to do with it.

there's some skill sets that i just think i probably would have missed anyways, but i did, you know, and still feel like i'm playing catchup with some of that stuff because i was spending a lot of time with my ex-navy dad and my brother and his friends. i fought with these males and i was envious my brother and friends. had just different systems. we were under regimes. my sister and i had a curfew, and my brother took the car to mexico and came back with a trunk full of water. [laughter] just a different, different system. it was a long-winded way to say sort of now that i'm really starting to feel like i'm coming into my own a little bit as a woman. i think i've, you know, you make it through your early 20s, and you know, adolescence is a

confusing time, and now i feel like i'm on the tarmac, so yeah. >> well, i was sort of shocked to discover i was a woman because all the time i was growing up, i just thought i was a kid, and and i didn't realize anything else was the case. growing up in brooklyn, it just happened as demographics and i was the oldest kid on the block, and at that age, at least for age, age was everything and gender was nothing. i could run faster and hit a ball further, so it didn't occur to me i was inferior in any way because i could essentially beat the boys on the block, and my parents were both doctors. my mother was a doctor and my father, so again it never occurred to me that i couldn't go to school, counted have a profession, that i wasn't as smart as my brother for example,

so i was appalled when i turns 11, 12, and 13 and started discovering that i was stupider than all the boys i knew. it was not crossing my mind, and so that -- i said i was struggling with that peculiar realizization ever since. i now am i grandmother. i had two kids, a long marriage, and i still don't feel like a woman except for a vu few moments in my life. giving birth was one of them. i couldn't have dope that otherwise -- >> actually, arnold schwarzenegger did that. >> oh, we're changing that. certain moments, but when i write, let's say, i'm not, oh, i'm a woman writing, i think i'm just a person with a brain and a certain flair for language sitting down to write, so all of

that, you know, what coming from the outside which is you're a woman, you're this and that because you're a woman has been very alien to me and very foreign to me, and i should say a big source of shock and disappointment. >> francine, i'll stay with you. your book "reading like a writer" you say my chance in reading was with my limitations i discovered day by day and the brick walls of probability to say nothing of the messages picking up from the culture. i like novels like pip pi long stalking and daughters and little women, girls whose resourcefulness doesn't exclude them from the pleasures of male attention. i wonder if the panelists can talk a little bit about the way how you have become a leader growing up as a woman, as a girl, and then a woman, and how that conditions, if it does at all, how you write. >> well, i'm shocked to find i

use the word "plucky" and we were talked about how much we hate that word. it's mortifying. [laughter] >> i like it. [laughter] >> well, you know, it is true that those children's classics and so forth, i mean, rearm reading little woman thinking, joe, don't marry the professor, what are you thinking? literature is great that way and useful. now when i look back, i mean, there's plenty of books i loved because i was a kid with no idea what they were about or what was in them, but, # for for example, now when i read jane and i liked more now than i did when i was a kid, it's a great representation of female anger and resentment that's been written, but at the time, i thought, oh, poor jane

working in this horrible school trying to be an american, but i think that kind of reading you rern. i mean, one of the advantages you learn that i'm not alone in feeling a certain way even if you don't know what you're reading that there's other girls out there who feel similar to your own. >> yeah, i remember reading magazines and like really feeling personally interested because for me that's exactly how literature worked, and it's true. we were talking about publicky being this and it's not applied to huck fin. that plucky young manmade his way down the river. [laughter] it's spirited or really courageous. i learned so much about the world through books. that was my artery out and was just generally still sort of anxious as a kid and shy.

suddenly it was a conversation, the safest inthat ma sigh you can have, talking to this voice, and everybody else in my grades were reading books about horses or the babies that are there, there's 1,000 of these books. they are so boring, you guys. it's a bunch of girls baby sitting. i thought, oh, man, you better pay me to read this. [laughter] it's just two twins with romantic dramas, and that couldn't have been less interesting to me at that time. it was wonderful to find pippy long stalking or secret garden, anything with a female protagonist with a mental will to represent my own was intoxicating to me. i felt like my interactions in the real world were so scripted or i felt just flattened or just, you knowing like i lost a dimension because i was so shy,

so to have these conversations with a book was really crucial. >> yeah, i loved also hair yet the -- harriet the spy. you got a secret notebook that nobody else could see. i read a lot of science fiction as a kid, and for some reason, there's a very early book, and i can't remember the name, but it's about a young girl painting the walls of her room with water color and make these beautiful worlds and it would rain and everything was washed away, and i feel like that's what happened to me when i began to paint. i crave these beautiful worlds, and at some point i began to destroy them. i don't know where that came in, but there's a loss of confidence after many years of feeling strong as if i could really do

anything, and i don't know why that moment of doubt sets in with one or with someone who trying to be an artist, but for some reason that was debilitating to me as a painter, and i feels somehow like that has something to do with gender. i don't know why, or at least with me, but for whatever reason, it didn't happen with writing. i didn't become self-conscious in that same way, but it was a book i read at a very, very early age, and i think it's hanted me over the years, and it's not a good model certainly of what one would want to be, but it's lodged deep inside of me, so i think they are disturbing as well as inspiring stories about girls out there, and it wasn't necessarily a bad book for me to read, but it stayed with me. >> how did you come across feminism as an idea, a movement with a history and different

narrations? >> actually, i was at yale, an art major, so i didn't know about contemporary literature, but i took a class on women poets, and it was great. we read mostly lesbian poets. there was a woman named joy harjo who i just loved. it was walled we have some horses. she does that repetitive thing that i did, and it's just biewsm and incant tory and beautiful about her work incorporating the landscapes that i find myself doing now and also in a wide openceps of the world -- open sense of the world, but something i had never read poetry like that. there was also a japanese

american woman poet, and she had a book called camp where the japanese were sent, and there was the first place i had seen camp, the camp my mother and her family was sent to, and that was very kind of eye-opening. oh, you can write about this stuff and it's all right, so i think that's where i was first exposed to it, and at the end of the class, we all went to -- it was a restaurant in new haven, a feminist restaurant, and only women were allowed in, and it was vemg tearian. -- vegetarian, and it was great. [laughter] we went there as a class, and i tried writing poems, and it was a very freeing experience to take that class and be exposed to that stuff because that's not what i heard growing up. i think the japanese-americans

we are red sent and you don't talk about your troubles but paint a happy face on everything and there was a lot of anger and pain there, but it was just rarely addressed so i felt like poetry was actually a way of accessing these hidden worlds in my own family. >> at the university or were you stumbling into a library into the copy of the second sex? >> i wish i did sort of, you know, it was that sophisticated or a picture book about elizabeth stanton, but coming of age when it was take your daughter to workday and these really kind of raising efforts and lip service was paid to this idea, but i also felt like in a way it was something you were not necessarily supposed to talk about or we take for granted now

that there's equal protection and thus we don't really need to discuss it as much, and where those discussions happen probably was the university levelment you know, i remember the most popular class was gender in society, and it really was, you know, shockingly transformative. it was just a vocabulary to talk about sort of stuff you're endeared to because it's just the fabric of your life, and i do think that it was for me you mentioned poetry, and virginia wolf was somebody who i took a seminar and we did sort of like all of her books, and that was a new way to think about the intersection of art and gender, so i put it that way. that was my introduction, but as i mentioned, my mom, too, i just don't think we had those conversations explicitly, but

watching her working insane hours to support our family and watching her sort of have to do more, really, i think she was one of the few women at her law firm at this time, so she sort of, the imagine i got was that you had to do twice as much, you know, or you really had to prove yourself in this olympic way. >> francine, did you discover it in school? >> my essay is precisely about that. i was a young woman during the hay day of so-called second wave of feminism and this was in the early 1970s, and what i wrote about is joining one of those early women coshesness raising groups, and it's about my misadventures with that group, but i can still remember, you know, in those days, feminism and the simp list things about

equal rights or things, you know, culturally was a big shock and big news. i can still remember my astonishment at realizing, you know, i had never seen my father wash a dish and my boyfriend didn't know how to make toast, and all those things i just take it for granted. [laughter] but that was really big news in those days, and it was transformative and it just swept through the culture, and as i say in the essays, people talked about these things on talk shows, and, of course, those problems have not been solved. they have not been solved at all, but no one bothers to talk about it anymore because the prejudices is problem over, well, the problem is totally not over, but, you know, like so many other problems once we think it's a thing of the past, there seems to be no point in talking about it anymore, unfortunately. >> one of the things that i really like about francine's piece is it wraps very funny

observations of the ridiculousness of the fringe elements of feminism in that time including that what happens in your group, and you do point out all the things which haven't changed, and are you, as a writer, you're a human moriist writer, and are you worried about making fun of things that have to do with second wave feminism at -- that is because it could be at the expense of the movement as a whole. >> every time i make fun of anything, i have horrible regret afterwards, so, yes. [laughter] as far as i'm concerned, there's no -- how can you use the word fallow karattic and not think it's hilarious? how can you talk about that or

the fact that there were these debates about makeup as an antifeminist, you know, that's like what people were worried about? makeup? that was the issue? there were these excesses which i still think are funny. on the other hand, everything about that movement came out of something very real and very important and very painful and very persistent about women's lives, and that's the thing i wouldn't make fun of and can't imagine making fun of it because it's important. >> karen, within our office, we had quite a debate because this is only women writers and the vast majority of writers writing for magazines are men, but we decided at a certain point that, all right, we heard enough from men, what happens when you put all women together, and one of the debates also had to do was whether younger readers would identify with this because, you

know, several of the women in our office didn't identify as feminists. they thought of them as lesbian poets in a way and the world that francine partially describes in her piece. did you have reservation declaring yourself as a feminist? >> you know, i think that's what the class made possible for me. there was confusion on what that term means. the problem is not solved. it's quite acute, but there's the way in which it's inpolite or some of the stereotype that came down to my generation is it's humorless. people are making fun of it and there's a stride in it and this humor that's antiquated or the movement accomplished its goals and so we can move on. i remember people very, you know, doing these kind of self-conscious hemmings -- hedges well, i'm not a feminist,

but i think she should get paid the same. something's gone awry, ladies, so there was a confusion and continues to be about, you know, what that term means, and i feel so comfortable identifying as a feminist, but i do think there's some resist tense, you know, and i often take teenagers abroad on tours and i asked them who identified as a feminist and their objections to the term was the i don't know what they are thinking or yogurt eating and right, wearing coferalls. >> there's nothing wrong with coveralls. very comfortable. >> no, i have a pair. great for buffets.

[laughter] it doesn't seem very controversial when you lay out a few things like women deserve equal protection and everyone was like, oh, yeah, well sure, but i shave my armpits. i think there's that general confusion sometimes. >> we briefly thought about calling it the dirty word which raised all kinds of problems and decided on the f-word because there's his historical preferences for calling feminism that. i went into two book shops and talked to sellers, one who -- well, she's over 40, and she immediately got that. i talked to another book seller in her 30s and thought the f word. are you talking about f-u -- what was described as generational and all and did people when you were in school, students have qualming with the

feminist class and identify as a feminist? >> no, i think it is generational because it was certainly newer back then. i mean, when i got to yale i was there for 10 # years so it was still kind of new to have women there, and i think, you can say that you are a feminist with pride. it's not something to be embarrassed about, but, you know, everything was kind of influx and figuring out what it meant to be a woman, what it meant to be to live with men in the same dorm, often on the same floor, and we were figuring these things out, but no, it was new to us, and i think nothing was really taken for granted. >> feminism can be defined in part as the belief that equality between men and women and the desire for political action or cultural change to make that happen that in some ways is

imagining a future world, and part of what you do as fiction writers is imagine worlds and alternate worlds. you have all written books about that and encountering all kinds of hardship and having to rely on themselves and each other in order to raise their children and to take care of their families. that, in some ways is a story about that has not been told or at least not told as beautifully as you do in the novel. do you think an early interaction with the ideas of feminism makes you -- makes it possible for you to believe in telling a story that hasn't been told? does it make that story more important? . .

>> i felt like i hadn't, when i started my research there were so we fastening stories out there, and i don't know why they haven't been told yet. but i am for whatever reason very interested in women's lives and what it's like to come to a new country to meet demand you've never met before, but that many of exchange photographs and letters with. also i'm interested in the idea of -- these woman are basically assigned a husband and many of the marriages were unhappy. most of these couples soldiered

on. and also the idea of sacrifice. these when they get kind of sacrifice their own lives for their children's lives because there was very little that they could do in terms of realizing their own dreams within their own life. but there's this great silence out there about this earlier generation, and i felt like somebody had to tell the story. so i gave it a shot. >> one of the most intelligent energetic voices i've come across in fiction a very long time, and yet i don't know if this term is gross, she feels a bit like -- living out at a swampland partner come on guys and just to make her way through herself. that in some way tracks in the kind of stories were talking about that you write as a child. in another what if you want to break it down culturally and social logic to that's not a boy

she probably hear a lot in fiction. when you were writing recently following the voice and seeing where it led you, or at some point were you feeling like this is telling a story which hasn't been told? >> it's so funny. francine and i were talking about the myth of the origin stories, postpone, this genesis. in truth was drafting a probably was just following the voice, wanting to know as a reader, what would happen next. but i do think it was any kind of conscious statement i was making for sort of revision of the book, these plucky young men. but i do think that, you know, that must've been in the back of my mind a bit because i wanted this child to go on this true underworld quest. one of the books i was, sort of rightly a young age, i love the

idea this young woman sort of thwarting the king to do something. said her brother's soul, essentially. so i think somehow i really wanted it to be a true adventure story where she would come up against a physical limit. it just wouldn't be kind of emotionally i'm dealing with my grief. is going to to be a journey narrative. and one movie i saw recently that i just thought was so shocking, shockingly refreshing was winters about whether it's sort of this weird kind of mythic -- why am i blanking on the word? this appellation community, and you follow this young girl who is 16 it was incredibly courageous, is the only word for it. and i think -- that's too. there aren't as many of those stories i think. it's rare to sort of see i think

oftentimes are like a twilight, where it seems like the central drama -- central drama is about this. less about changing an action. i was talking recently, do you guys remember watching greece? it's one of my favorite movies when i was a kid. i was watching it recently and like all my lord in heaven, there's that terrible you better shape up song which i thought was so great, and i now -- it's sort of olivia newton john was sort of the bad girl. it's all become desirable to john travolta which seems like a lame prize in a way. [laughter] this was like a very long witty to say that it is exciting for me to try to have a female -- she's not becoming more desirable or giving the guy.

she's invoking her mother's strength to save her sister. >> francine, my new american life, there's a 20 social albanian woman on it, and expiring visas. city. she gets a job. this is not a character we often see in fiction. her three brothers are working around menacingly. were you writing this as you are writing it, or you realizing that it was a political fiction in some ways? >> i did. after while i did begin to realize that it was political in the sense that it's about immigration. but i never start writing fiction from an idea. i was far from a character or an observation of reality. and so it just so happened that the woman, the heroine, is smarter and plucky are and more savvy than any of the men. >> that's usually true, anyway. >> it doesn't happen all the time but certainly haven't some

of the time. so lisa felt there was some basis in reality what i was doing. >> i just want to run back around to the findings which came out. as graphical as they are, pie chart stood always chose the whole story as you pointed out, francine, once we're talking, that the imbalance start a long time forgets to point of publication. but what did those findings tell you? and as writers, as female writers, those two words together every day anyway and be doing something wanted to do? >> well, no one ever said male writers? why is that? >> i make male moderator. [laughter] like being a male nurse. >> they never have a male writer panel or a special mail, you know, three male writers but something. >> we were worried about this

we're putting this issue together. we thought will we ever have an issue, you know, tasha we do an action dash of -- we would do something cover will feminism because my nationally as much an idea as families as an idea about womanhood is. >> you should do a theme on masculinity and have on female writers. [laughter] karen, did you ever think about going as ke russell? >> i was just thinking about how it's true, it's tough to imagine. i get young female writer quite frequently. i suppose that our young male writers. i don't know. you really wouldn't hit that as often. young writers. i haven't -- i mean, i feel very fortunate. i thought the beneficiary of this movement that came before me, he did mention my mom but i really do feel like the actual

areas of like a great, the one who is benefiting from the woman who came before me. and i felt pretty generally supported, people like granta, other journals. >> they don't exist. [laughter] >> in this universe. >> so i don't know that it's ever stopped me. and the way that i feel, you know, in sort of the tours is an adjective. i think the way -- in fact, sort of getting may be gender adjectives that i don't know. on the contrary i don't know a story but 13 of al qaeda restaurant written by a man debussy. i think that be an interesting experiment. if anybody out there once in a fellow at the want to take me up on it, you know, because if you think certain adjectives come up, plucky. we're talking a whimsical is one. or quirky.

you know, to be can sometimes feel a little patronizing. but that's the way that i probably -- >> have you ever been called quirky, julie? >> corky? probably -- i think i have. i me, i started out writing comedy before get to the serious stuff. so some of the characters were a bit quirky. i think for me it's not, the adjectives and fema. its japanese-american. so if you like i think i'd be called first and american japanese article is called a called a female writer. if i look at writers, i think actually i think i look at race before look at gender. so, i feel like i get caught somewhere in between. >> one last question and i thought we would open up to the audience for some q&a. if you're going to write a

feminist novel in any period of time, self-consciously feminist, when would it be? >> i think, i mean, for me now, for some reason i'm very, i've been working on something new but i'm fascinated by the politics of the pool, and the politics in the locker room. >> like who gets which lock or? >> no, no. you have women's locker room and men's locker room, and what goes on in the segregated worlds. so i'm kind of interested in what is going on now. >> man, i want to just say that things were ago because because i dread research. the very that i've been researching so i don't have to come back to the library. [inaudible] >> i've been working on this new novel. it's funny she mentioned okay.

it seems that i just went there. i was using in my research a book that francine wrote a beautiful introduction for. the same photographers who work for the administration and sort of, you know, partly to support, to garner support from the new deal would go and i can people's lives. and it sort of an amazing -- it's just amazing, dorothy is another one. my good mother, and these women who are true artists at a time when it wasn't always the easiest thing to do. and sort of talk about strong women whose lives aren't always document. the sort of pioneering women who like me to seven seasons, of biblical plagues. maybe that period. >> i am not sure what a feminist novel would be exactly but i was

thinking the other day, i me, maybe this is not an answer. i was thinking about margaret atwood. i was thinking -- ever thought that was a book about the future. but the closer we get to it that what seems like a book about the present pics i think, yeah, that's the best of science fiction which turns out to be about now and not tomorrow. >> i think we should open up to questions now. does anybody have anything they would like to act on any of the panelists? if you just come to the microphone and asked her question, that would make it easier for them to have it on tape. >> hello. i'm a fan of all of you. hello again. i'm so very nervous. do you think that there is a current version of an aunt, a

joke, in which it booked issue residing for each of you? >> i'm not sure -- >> like a strong adventure female character. i have a lot of trouble with a dull books because i don't feel there's a very strong field presence in any of them. they're always getting rescued. >> so i have one that's off the grid a bit but i really -- one of the books that was incredibly influential to me was won by katherine dunn. she's not your conventional female protagonist. she's a blind hunchbacked blind to work. incredibly strong. not a pleaser. and she sort of is part of this graphic carnival world.

and in the same book there is east siamese twin to auction off off on virginia. they are people are making some dramatic choices and sort of thwarting conventional gender roles, if nothing else, very strong-willed. >> if your looking for strong -- i've been a big fan of her work for a long time. but i feel like i see them in a lot of the fiction that read, so. >> well, i would go back and read middlemarch. [laughter] i mean, yes, she marries this completely inappropriate guy, and has an affair with another inappropriate guy. but the moral center of that book is dorothea who is a woman character, and in a sense doesn't matter that her life is

not particularly adventures one, but she's a so called good and so intelligent and so complex that she seems like a model, or that seems like a feminist nov novel. >> any other questions? approach the mic. >> this concerns book reviews which is my province. and i know that francine a number of years ago wrote about women writers not getting enough viewing. that set me straight to my archives to see whether we had felt to be compliant. but i want to know, if you are to review your books, this is for all of you, blinded him would you be able to tell you were being reviewed by a man or a woman and? >> i feel likecomedy, if we could see it through the tears of the drama? [laughter] from that experiment? i think after -- i don't think

that it would be able to. i don't think so. >> no, i would say no. >> no. i think more and more i could tell something about the politics of the reviewer. more than i could tell about the gender of the reviewer. >> i think you might be able to tell the status of the writers. sometimes i think that can kind of intellect or if you read, if you're being reviewed by fellow fiction writer or somebody who's a professional critic spent a good ask one follow-up to that question because both francine and didn't come your reviewed a little bit here and there. >> i'm afraid to. >> then this is simply for francine. you review quite a wide range of books. i given a certain type of book have you noticed, or are you simply -- i like what i like and

i'll go to bat or go against something spent as much anymore. for example, years ago and i me 20 years ago, the times book review somehow got into the head that i any kind of soft line on misogyny is there such only get reviewed by misogynist. [laughter] i don't know why that was. it was wider than you perhaps might have imagined. [laughter] >> touché. another question? >> hello. i was wondering what your opinion was in terms of male authors writing female heroines? if you have any favorites? accent is going to keep the question real broad. >> the question is, do the panels have any opinions about male writers writing female protagonists and other any

favorite? >> i just wish this book at my that i thought was fantastic by bradley. people who doubt, he's right for you point of you of a female doctor and as i thought a fantastic job. he only -- is look at the book jacket and seen this quite large, tall fellow that can kind of just come at me to all the more astonishing to me that the rfid makes this leave without the single mother. and i don't think that, i think that, you know, in francine's new book, she adopts an albanian immigrant to this country. like i don't think there should be, you know, those boundaries. i think that's the beauty of fiction that you can make these leaps. >> i mean, i thought the whole point of fiction was to be able to imagine someone who wasn't you.

that's really the point. so makes me kind of crazy when i hear that female writers should write for male point of view, or vice versa or what ever. that just seems absurd. >> i agree. writing is an act of the imagination. man can write as women, women as men. non-japanese americans i think the tell the stories i don't just as well as i myself could. >> yes? >> i teach college freshmen and sophomores. so when we hear about not wanting to call yourself a feminist. that's something i go of a lot with my student. if you ever bring that word up, they automatically shut down. and i want to under the guise are fully with the, i just watched this play four days ago. it's about the epidemic in the '80s. we have a character as just an

action and isn't afraid of people. you have the ones who will come inside and sort of want to do it quietly. i guess as a teacher, as a writer, as a reader, do you think that that's something that is such a turnoff that we should sort of shy away from the term? or if it's important enough that we need to say i am a feminist and here's why i'm a feminist, and here's what's important about that. and i guess that's kind of a big question, but your opinion. >> i mean, just personally i think that i would go with the latter. i think it's incredibly important to have that conversation with your students, and i think that sort of what i would try and get my roundabout way. i think there's just misconceptions about, trying to figure worthy of version two the term is coming from. and i think the more people it can, for you say i'm a feminist in here because it's about a

quart of quality, i think that's something most young women can get behind pretty easily. >> women who are afraid to see their feminist it because i think the desire for male approval and mail validation is so deeply ingrained in women that the terror of losing that, anything that might lose that, it's a real problem. but what i said yeah people say they're not feminists, i essentially say, fine, go out in the world and if it turns out you're being paid the same amount of money as the guy working in the next cubicle, bless you. i hope it all works out. but i feel fairly confident, forcefully, that is not going to work out and sooner or later if young women are older women are smart, then they start looking for the explanation of why this exists. that's going to be the most obvious and logical explanation.

>> to go out to the world, yet. i worked in the construction management industry for about 15 years. talk about male dominated. so i think the minute you leave school, some of the young women might find itself becoming a little more adamant about calling themselves feminists. it can be rough out there. [inaudible] >> to realize the context which all of your choices are made, you can really trackback to a 30 recent movement, you know, how much we owe that movement. i think that was instructive for me. >> yes? >> kind of relate to that last question, i wondered, and have since i first saw the addition, you know, it feels to me kind of like again a fear of acknowledging being called the effort. was a kind of a discussion about

that to decide i'm going to actually lose the title of the word feminist. or do we keep it kind of as something else? >> the only reason we didn't call it feminism is i didn't want there to be a preconceived notion that this was an anthology of essays and articles and arguments about women, the women's movement, arguments within the feminist movement, historical essays about -- mostly it's about narrative whether it's fiction or memoirs as francine is written. so we want something that came at a from an angle that acknowledged the world in which that word exists now. and i didn't want this to be confused on the bookshelf with an anthology of essays about feminism. so we decided to do it for that reason. pretty much on that reason alone. sorry, the woman in the back.

>> i came in just a few minutes late, so forgive me if this was covered. hasn't been talked about, about how many, about any prejudice -- that's not even the right word. but women's books, books written by women, reviewed as books by men? is that something that anybody noticed or wondered about, and one interesting statistics within that? because only times i had the experience of picking up -- i have a feminist bookstore in chicago so the role of women writers, you know, that women writers are getting their due credit is something that is always on my mind and i'm always looking for. and if so many times that if you like pick up an issue of "the new yorker" to see how many articles are by women, how may books that are being reviewed

are women. the same for "the new york times," et cetera. i just wondered what if other people tracks that or if there's any statistics on it or if that's of interest to you as writers. >> the survey from the group that is trying to get women in writing put out, show that there's largely tilted toward men in terms of contributors to the journal. and i believe there was one survey of the new times book review, both of reviews and the books they reviewed, both of which were tilted, the majority, toward a male writers and male reviewers. which is the opposite of readers as you know as a bookseller, most readers are women. i think the question is whether this interest you as writers i think is interesting. do you read this and you think, damn, i should've got that gender reassignment surgery? [laughter] in my next life, believe me.

>> seriously? >> yes, seriously. [laughter] yeah, sosa. no, i'm he can we talk about -- i would apiece for harpers in 2000 called scent of a woman's ink those based on a quote from norman mayor who said i can always sniff into the wind because women are -- this was before humans learned you weren't supposed to say these things. in the course of our the article, they did research. statistics were appalled. they have gone marginally better since then. but part of what i was interested in finding out was why they should be, and because one of the things that became clear was that it wasn't only men who are making these decisions. in many cases the assigning editors were women as well as men. so it was as if it was purely -- so, what is try to find out was

what were the prejudices against work with a woman's name on it, and why did george eliot choose to be called george eliot why did the sisters right under male named. for good reason. >> i was just think about your question about contracting, karen, into kdr sunday but when the conjugation is, of course it's a consideration and i think that, you know, absolutely there is a bias and things aren't equal on this but it was proven to me my friend what a beautiful piece about quantum computing in a recent new yorker. somebody came up to become you know, instead you are friends with that guy written. he must be a genius. so i do think there are people, it's about quantum computing. so i think this prejudices are still very much with us. >> and i think even now when you think of the stereotype that tortured writer, it's definitely

a male stereotype, you know? i mean, you could be aloof male writer, but how does that translate -- is crazy if you're a woman. like there's no real -- >> always down in oxford it seems like if you write well enough and the male writers have license to do anything they want is people like, hell, he was a hell raiser. e. pete on the bed. i just think if you're a woman writer during those things you would be a mass. >> every woman over 50 hollywood is crazy is called crazy. i wanted to work with her but she's crazy. she's crazy. [laughter] i would love to keep it going but i'm sure this is needed so i just want to wrap up your. it's been a really wonderful having these writers together. francine prose is peace in this issue is both very insightful and