applaud him for not getting down to specifics, but i think it was intentional and reflected his views when dealing with complex phenomenas, sometimes as far as you can get is general principles and leave the details to people like friedman. >> lawyers even; right? >> i'm afraid our time is now up . [laughter] so thank you. [applause] >> the university of chicago press recently republished fa hayek's the constitution of liberty. for more information visit press.uchicago.edu and search the title. >> we asked, what are you reading this summer?

here's what you had to say. ♪ >> send us a tweet at booktv to let us know what you're reading or e-mail us at booktv@c-span.org. >> coming up, discuss the authors who influenced how they write about women and touch on the role women play in the publishing industry. it's about an hour. >> hi, thanks for coming.

i think we're going to get started. i'm john friedman, the editor of the magazine. i want to welcome you to the panel, feminism, the legacy, a discussion about women in power and writing, and it's on the occasion of the launch next week of granta's new issue due to the f-word, feminism. we're one of the oldest little rare journals in the world started in 1989 -- [cheers and applause] see that's what happens when you say granta. [laughter] it went out of print and it was brought back in the 1970s and been going ever since, four issues a year, and every issue is themed from death to money to sex, but we've never acknowledged that one of the most powerful matrixes within human life is the matrix between women and power. it felt long overdue for us to do this issue. we could have done it every

year, but i'm happy we did it this year because we have the occasion of publishing two of the writers on this panel, and hopefully the third will be publishing in granta again. we'll have a discussion for about 45 minute, and then we'll open it up to questions from the audience. i'm thrilled we have the writers gathered here today that we do. i'll introduce them briefly and start our discussion. to my immediate right is julie otsuka, born and raised in california, a graduate of yale university, and received her msa from columbia university. her first novel was published in 2003. she lives in new york city and is is just about to publish her new book that comes out in august that's been granted twice including in the new issue of granta. this is a second time in our history we excerpted a novel in back-to-back issues, and the only other time was with mark

neumus. we're correcting that now. it's a beautiful novel. next is karen russell. she's chosen as one of the best youngest novellest in 1997 -- 2007, sorry. you would have been 12 in that year. [laughter] she was chosen as one of the best writers under 40. they have not stolen karen. she is the author of st. lucie's home for girls raised for wolves and the author of the new brilliant novel that i'm sure you read about called "swamplandia." finally, francine prose, author of 25 books, fiction and

nonfiction, including primitive people, and most recently, my new american life. very scarry alligator about to eat someone on the cover. since -- from march 2007 to recently, she was the president of the panamerica center, and she sat on the board of awards and her back about sexual harassment on college campuses and wrote nonfiction books and anne frank and gluttony. two different books. [laughter] she is a distinguished professor at bard university. one short announcement before we get started. in addition to today's panel, we have a party tomorrow night at paragraph, a wonderful writing lab run by two very great women. it's open to the public, so if

you like what we discuss or want to read more about the issues or buy it because it's not on stands yet, you can get it there. i wanted to go back in time who as you remember a woman is not born. a woman becomes a woman. i wanted to ask our panelists, the y chromosomes, what made you the woman you are today? that can include parents, people, books -- amusement park experiences. julie go, go ahead. >> well, i feel like in some ways i forgot to become a woman. i kind of skipped over motherhood. that never happened. i never married. i'm 49, and i think i must have inherited something from my

mother, just 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 why i absorbed that, but i did, and i feel like i don't really know when i came into womanhood. i mean, it's a very strange concept. i mean, i feel like there's puberty when you physically become a woman, and then all the sud p the world looks as you differently in young womanhood, and then as you age you become more invisible to the world, and in a sense i think a lot freer. i think actually as i've gotten older, my 40s, i feel more of a woman than i feel like when i was younger. there's 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 it's something you inherit from your mother, but i feel like it 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 still not sure if i'm doing it in the right way, but i'm doing it in my way. [laughter] >> yeah, thank you so much for that introduction. it's funny, 1997 was the ground zero for me in the hell that's puberty and physical coming of age. that was just a terrifying time, and 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 for me, you know, she's the most intelligent woman that i know so 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 is a wonderful person, but doesn't understand that my sister and i are not secretaries or teachers. you can see the needle going, so you're a secretary? no, we'll explain to him for 20 minutes what it is that we do so 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 paramount and that you had to be -- you had to be self-supporting because you could not rely on anybody, you know, on anybody else. you know, you needed to have your own set of resources, but then as a consequence of sort of being out of the house, you know, there's a beautiful essay by rach l in the new issue that talks about the confusion right now and sort of the pain and resentment that's on both sides if your the nontraditional family, so i spent a lot of time with my brother and my father

and ended up feeling i was missing the boat a little in terms of etiquette. dances terrified me. makeup, i still don't know what to do with so there's some skill sets that i just think i probably, you know, would have missed anyways, but i did, you know, and still feel like i'm playing catchup with some of that stuff because i spent a lot of time with my foul-mouthed ex-navy dad and my brother and his goon friends. [laughter] i wrote about these male adolescents and tribal geometries and was envious that my brother and his friends -- they were just different systems. like it was different regimes. we had a curfew, and my brother went to mexico with a trunk full of water. [laughter] just different systems so this was a very long winded way to say that it's sort of now i love your answer, it's 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 adolescence, just a confusing time, and now i'm starting to feel like i'm on the tarmac, so, yeah, i don't know. >> well, i was shocked to discover i was a woman because all the time that i was growing up i just thought i was a kid, and i didn't realize anything else as a kidding and when i was growing up in brooklyn actually, and it was an accident of demographics, that i was the oldest kid on my block and oldest of the kids playing together all the time, and at that age, at least for us, age was everything and gender was nothing. i could run faster and hit a ball further. it didn't occur to me i was up fear your because i could beat the boys on the block, and my parents were doctors.

my mother and father were doctorsment again, it never occurred to me i couldn't go to school, have a profession, that i was not as smart as my brother, for example, so i was really kind of appalled when i turned 11, 12, and 13 and started discovering that i was stupider than the boys i knew and i was less capable and so forth, and that -- i said i was struggling with that peculiar realization ever sense. i now am i grandmother. had two kids, long marriage, and i still don't feel like a woman except for a very few moments in my life. i mean, giving birth was one of them. i couldn't of done that otherwise, and you know -- >> actually, arnold schwarzenegger did that in a mew vie. [laughter] >> intimate moments, ect., ect., but when i sit down to write

let's say, i don't think, oh, i'm a woman at my desk writing. i think i'm a person with a brain and a certain flair for language sitting down to write so all that, you know, what comes from the outside which 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. >> francey, i want to stay with you. your book, "reading like a writer" you say your taste in reading had to do with the limitations i was discovering day by day, the brick walls of space and time, science, and probability to say nothing about the messages of speaking up from the culture. i like books like pippy long stalking and little women who are not excluded from the pleasures of male attention. i wonder if the panelists can talk a little bit about the way you become a reader 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 say i used the word "plucky". karen and i were talking about how we hate the word. how mortifying. [laughter] >> i think it's fine. >> well, you know, it is true those children's classics and so forth, i mean, i remember reading "little women," you know, joe, don't marry the professor, what are you thinking? literature is great that way and up credibly useful. now when i look back 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 example, now when i read jane ayer which i like better now than as a kid, and i

liked it a lot when i was kid, i realize it's one of the great representations of female adolescent anger and resentment that's ever been written, but all i thought as a kid, poor her working in a school, but i think that kind of reading you learn. i mean, one of the advantages you learn 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 with feelings similar to your own. >> yeah, i remember reading that exact paragraph. really feeling permly interested because that, for me, that's how literature worked, and it's true. we're talking about plucky as being this advocate that's just not applied to huck fin. that plucky young manmade his way down the river. [laughter] you use spirited or brave or

really courageous, and i think i learned so much about the world through books. you know, that was my artery out, and it was just regimely so sort of anxious as a kid and shy so suddenly it was like a conversation you had. it was the safest i want ma sigh you could imagine talking to this sort of dead voice. i remember everybody else in my grade reading stories about girls with horses, you know? there was a lot of that your animal, or the baby sitter's club of the there's 1,000 of these books. they are boring, you guys, it's girls babysitting. you have to pay me to read this. [laughter] or sweet valley high. that couldn't have been less interesting to me at that time. it was wonderful to find people like pippy long stalking and

secret garden. that was intoxicating to me. i felt like so many of my enterer actions in the -- interactions in the real world were scripted or flattened or just, you know, i lost a dimension because i was shy so to have these conversations with a book was really crucial. >> yeah, i loved also harriet the spy because you could have a secret notebook that nobody else could see. [laughter] i loved science fiction as a kid, a lot of bray bradbury, and there's an early book, i can't remember the name, i've been trying for years to remember it about a young girl who painted the walls of her room with water color and make beautiful worlds and then it would rain and everything was washed away, and that was prophetic because i feel that's what happened to me

when i began to paint, i created beautiful worlds and at some point i began to destroy them. i don't know where that came in, but there was a loss of confidence after feeling for years very strong and that 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 is trying to be an artist, but for some reason that was debilitating for me as a painter, and i feels somehow like that had 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 that 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 necessarily a good model certainly of what the kind of artist one would want to be, but for some reason, it's lodged deep inside of me. i think they're both disturbing and inspiring stories about

girls out there. it's not a bad book for me to read, but it did stay with me. >> at what point, julie, did you come across feminism as an idea, an intellectual movement with different generations? >> actually i was at yale, an art major, and i didn't know about literature. i took a class on contemporary women poets. we read mostly lesbian poets. there was a woman named joy whose poetry i loved. we read a collection called we had some horses. i looked at it today, and she does that repetitive thing that i'm doing now. i didn't realize that, but we had horses, we had horses, it's just beautiful and encaptain story, and there was something about her work how she incorporated the landscapes that i find myself doing now, and

very wide openceps of the world, but something i had never read poetry like that. there was a japanese-american woman poet, i think she had a book of poems called "camp" which referred to the camps in world war ii where the japanese were sent, and that's the first place i saw the camp my mother and family were sent to written about, and that was very kind of eye opening. like, you can write about this stuff, and it's all right. i think that's where i was first exposed to it. i remember it was a different time then, but at the end of the class we went to a restaurant in new haven, a feminist restaurant. only women were allowed in. it was vegetarian. it was great. [laughter] i don't know that was my introduction to feminism and i

tried writing poems, and it was just -- it was a very freeing experience to think to take that class and be exposed to that stuff because that's so not what i heard growing up. also, the japanese-americans are are -- you don't talk about your troubles, but paint a happy face on everything. there was a lot, as in every family, a lot of pain and anger there, but it was rarely addressed. poetry actually was a way of kind of accessing these hidden worlds in my own family. >> at the university or were you -- did you stumble into a library and a copy of the second sex? [laughter] >> i wish it had been that sophisticated. it was probably a picture book of elizabeth katie stanton. i was coming up in a age where it was take your daughter to workday and a lot of conscious

raising efforts, a lot of lip service anyway was paid to the idea, but i also felt like in a way it wasn't something you were necessarily supposed to talk about and we take for granted now equal work and equal pay and equal protection. we're all for this and thus we don't need to discuss it as much, and so where those discussions happen probably was the university level. you know, i remember the most popular class was called gender in society, and it really was, you know, shockingly transformative. it was just a vocabulary to talk about, stuff you're endeared to because it's the fabric of your life, and -- but i do think that it was, for me, you mentioned poetry, virginia wolf was somebody i took a seminar, did all of her books, and that just gave me a new way to think about the intersection of art and

gender. sorry, i suppose that was my introduction, but as i mentioned, i mean, my mom too. i just don't think we had the conversations explicitly, but watching her work insane hours to support our family and watching her have to do more. really i think she was one of few women at her law firm at this time so the message that i got was you had to do twice as much or really prove yourself in this olympic way. >> francine, did you discover it in school? >> my essay in granta is about that. i was a young woman during the hayday of so-called second wave feminism. this was in the early 1970s, and what i wrote about was joining one of those early women's consciousness raising groups, and it's actually the essay is

partially about my misadventures with that group, but -- [laughter] i can still remember in those days feminism and the simpest things about equal rights or things, you know, culturally were a big shock and big news, and i can still remember my astonishment at realizing that, you know, i've never seen my father wash a dish and my boyfriend didn't know how to make toast. [laughter] now i just take it for granted. [laughter] but that was just 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 nobody talks about them because the presumption 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's no point -- there seems to be no point in talking about it anymore unfortunately. >> one of the things i really like about francine's piece is it wraps very funny observations about not the excesses of, but the ridiculousness of some of the fringe elements of feminism in that time including what happens in your group, but you do point out all the things that vice president changed, and -- haven't changed, and are you, as a writer, you're humorist writer, and are you ever worried about making fun of things that have to do with second wave feminism -- that because it could come at the expense of the movement as a whole. >> well, you know, every time i make fun of anything i have horrible regret afterwards, so, yes, it's a bad idea. [laughter] yes and no. you know, as far as i'm

concerned, there's no -- how can you use the world fallowcratic and now think it's hilarious? [laughter] and the fact there were debates about makeup. that's what people were worried about? makeup? that was the issue? there were excesses that i think were funny. on the other hand, everything about that movement came out of something very real and very important and very painful and very persist tent 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 a debate because this issue has only women writers in it and not prompted because of the findings that point the out that vast majority of writers writing for journals are men, but we

decided at a certain point that, all right, we've heard enough from men. let's see what happens when you put all women together, and one of the debates also had to do with whether younger readers would identify with this because, you know, several of the women in our office didn't identify as feminists and thought of feminists as lesbian poets in a humorous way in a world that francine partially describes in her piece. did you have reservation growing up declaring yourself as a feminist in >> i think that's what the class made possible for me. there was confusion in the class what that term meant. the problem is not solved. it's acute. there's a way that it's inpolite or some of the stereotypes that came dop to my generation is just it's hue roarless and thank -- humorless and thank goodness people are making fun and it's so apt kuwaited or --

antiquated or the movement accomplished its goals so we can move on. i remember people doing self-conscious hedges where i'm not a feminist, but i think she should get paid the same as him. something's gone awry, ladies. there was a confusion a little and continues to be about what that term means, and i feel so comfortable identifying as a feminist, but i do think there's some resist, and i take teenagers abroad and tours and i remember asking them who identified as a feminist, and some of their objections were i don't know what they're thinking? like hairy armpits -- >> yogurt eating -- [laughter] >> and like wearing men's

coveralls. >> there's nothing wrong with those. >> no, there's not. i have some. it's a buffet. [laughter] i think, you know, once you sort of -- it's difficult, it doesn't seem like very controversial once you lay out a few things that women deserve equal protection under the law, and then everyone was like, oh, well, sure, but i shave my armpits so i think there's that general confusion sometimes. >> we thought about calling it the dirty word which raised all kinds of problems, and then we decided on the "f" word because there's historical preference of calling feminism that. i went to three bookstores, talked to two book sellers, one who is over 40, and she immediately got that. i talked to another who was in her 30s. she said "f" word?

does this describe the generation at all? when you were in school, did students have qualms when they took a feminist class or identify as a feminist? >> no, i think it's generational. it was newer back then. ..

between men and women and the desire for political action and cultural change to make that happen and it is an imaginings of the future world and what you argue is imagined possible worlds an alternate universes and in the novels recently by the coming to the united states and countering all kind of hardships and having to rely on themselves and each other to raise their children and take care of their families that in some ways is a story about that hasn't been told of as beautifully as you do in an awful. do you think an early interaction with the ideas of feminism makes it possible for you to believe in telling a story that hasn't been told?

does it make that kind of important to the crestor important or as a fiction writer truly artistic? -- i feel like -- especially on i think asian-american literature sometimes you don't hear a lot about the feminine voices from the past and i feel like i read very little about the kind of women who came over to this country in the early 1900's when you think of an asian woman you think of petite tiny woman, very feminine but these were tough women working as migrant laborers in the field and domestics, and i felt like i hadn't -- what i started doing my research there were so many fascinating stories 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 a man you've never met before

and exchange photographs and letters with and also i'm interested in the idea of state and an unsigned husband and many of the marriages were not happy but most of these couples soldiered on. also the idea of sacrifice, these women did sacrifice their own lives for their children's lives because there was very little they could do in realizing their own dreams but in their own life, so there's a great silence about the earlier generation for, and i felt like somebody had to tell the story so i gave it a shot. >> and karen has some of the most intelligent and energetic fleeces that come across and fiction in a very long time and yet she, i don't know if the term is correct she feels like an okay in florida living out of

swampland park which is run down, her mother dies and she has to make her way herself and that in some ways tracks from the stories we are talking about you read as a child but in another way, if you want to break it on socially culturally that as it did receive your in fictional the time. when you were writing it were you following the place to see where it led to work at some point were you feeling like this is telling a story which hasn't been told? >> we were talking about the origin story so you to sort of create this and interest when i was drafting the boys wanting to know as a reader what would happen next it was a conscious statement backing his a revision of the young men, but i do think

that that must have been in the back of my mind a little bit because i wanted this child to go on a true underworld quest. one of the books i was assigned at a young age for some reason or school was antigone and i loved the idea of this young woman that came her to do something, to save her brother's soul essentially so i wanted to be a true story she would come up against a physical limit, it wouldn't just be kind of emotionally i'm dealing with my grief. there was going to be a journey and one movie i saw recently that i just thought was shocking, shocking really a reflection was a kind of mythic -- y am i braking on the word, this appalachian community and

you follow this young girl who is 16 and incredibly courageous is the only word for it. and it's true there are as many of those stories i think it's fair to sort of see often terms it's like a twilight it's like will she kick this supernatural or that supranational? and less about sort of changing and action. do you remember watching greece? it's like my favorite movie when i was a kid. >> the metamorphosis this that you better shape up song which i thought was great and will be stuck in our heads the rest of the afternoon. [laughter] but she's sort of like the bad girl i guess that's supposed to be like an evolution but it's the john travolta it seems like a lehman spry is in some way. [laughter] a very longwinded way to say

that it was exciting to me to try to have a female protagonist and she's not in the serving of the more desirable getting the guy she's, you know, her mother's strength to save her sister. >> my new american life is a 26-year-old albanian woman on a tour in new york city and she gets a job as a caretaker for someone in new jersey. it isn't a character we often see in fiction. the brothers are looking around menacingly. were you realizing this was a political fiction in some ways? >> i did because after a while i did begin to realize it was political in the sense it's about immigration but writing fiction from an idea i start from a character or observation of reality and so it just so happened that the woman, the

heroine is smarter and more savvy than the men. it does happen. it doesn't happen all the time that happens sometimes so i felt there was a basis in reality for what i was doing. >> i just want to rap back around to the findings that came out. as graphical as they are they don't always tells the whole story as you pointed out when you were talking that the in the balance starts a long time before it gets to the point of publication. what did those findings tell you and as writers, as female writers did those words together to get in the way of doing something you wanted to do? >> bodwell, no one ever says male writers. why is that?

>> we never have eight male writer panel for three male writers. then. >> when we are putting this together we got what we ever have an issue called -- we would do in the issue called masculinity which would be comparable to feminism because masculinity is as much and idf eminem indy 500. >> you should have an issue of masculinity and only half female writers. [laughter] [laughter] islamic to do think about growing ke russell -- >> it's up to america. i get a young female writers quite frequently. i suppose there's a young male writers. they're really are, right? you wouldn't hear that as often.

young writers. i feel very fortunate, i feel like the beneficiary of the movement that came for me and i really do like the actual areas of a great one who is benefiting from the woman who came before me and i felt generally supported. [inaudible] [laughter] >> i don't know that it's ever stopped me and the way i feel, just sort of in a book tours it is an adjective, less frequently i think the way that in fact most directly is sort of getting a gendered adjectives i don't know. i don't know a story about a 13-year-old would be received. i just think the libyan interesting experiment.

certain adjectives to come up. we were talking about a quirky, and. but that's the way that i would probably. >> have you been quirky? >> i have been. friday, the i got to the serious stuff some of the characters were a bit quirky, but i think for me it's not, the adjective is and she millets japanese-american, i think i would be called for a japanese-american writer before i called a female writer and also if i look at a line of writers i think actually i look at race before i look at gender. that's, so, i feel like i am

caught somewhere in between. >> one last question and then i thought we would open up to the audience for some q&a. if you were going to write a feminist novel in any period in time subconsciously feminist, when would it be? >> i think -- four meek i think now. for some reason i'm very -- - 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 locker? >> you have a women's locker room and a men's locker room and what goes on in these four worlds. so i'm kind of interested in what is going on now.

>> i dread of research. [laughter] the period that i've been researching. >> [inaudible] >> i've been working on this new novel. [inaudible] i actually was using in my research a book that francine rutka beautiful introduction for. it's these female photographers who work for the security administration and sort of partly to support, to garner support for the new deal would go in a document people's lives and it's sort of an amazing -- it's just amazing. dorothy is another one people aren't familiar with and these women who were true artists in a tie and it wasn't always the easiest thing to do. i was going to talk about strong women whose lives are and always

documented, these pioneer women who made it through seven seasons of just biblical plague. >> i'm not sure what a feminist novel would be but i was thinking the other day, maybe this is not an answer, i think everyone thought it was a dhaka the future. that is really the best sort of science fiction which turns out to be about now and not about tomorrow. >> we should open up to questions now. does anybody have anything they would like to ask the panelists? if you come to the microphone a little easier than to have it on

tape >> do you think that there is the version of the adventures and what does she do for each of you? >> i'm not sure, the hand of jane? >> i have a lot of trouble with either books because i don't feel there's a strong female presence for the protagonists the always getting rescued. one of the books incredibly influential to me was the glove by katherine dunn and she's not your conventional female protagonist, she's a blind elbe minow hunchback dwarf,

incredibly strong, not a pleaser, and she's sort of is part of this carnival world. and these siamese twins who offered off their virginity. it's tough against conventional gender roles and if not anything else strong-willed. >> i would say we need to [inaudible] if you're making a for strong female protagonists on i've been a big fan of her work for a long time. i see it in a lot of the fiction that i read. >> i would go back and read middlemarch. [laughter] she marius' this completely inappropriate guy and the moral

center of the book is a woman character and in a sense it doesn't matter that her life isn't particularly had ventured as but she's so complicated and intelligent and so complex that she seems like a war that seems like a feminist model to me. >> any other questions? just approached the microphone. >> this concerns book reviews which is my problem and i know that francine years ago wrote about women writers not getting reviewed enough and not revealing enough but scurrying to the archives to see that they are in compliance but i want to know if have reviewers of your books would you be able to tell whether you are reviewed by a man or woman?

>> you mean like if we can see through the years? [laughter] after vomiting into a trash can? [laughter] no, i don't think i would be able to. i don't think so. >> i would say no. i think more and more i could tell something about the politics of the review work more than i could tell the gender. >> icg may be able to tell if they are writers. i think that can kind of reflect haole reviewer reads if you're being reviewed by a fiction writer for professional critic. estimates of one to ask a follow-up to that question because both francine, you have reviewed a little bit here and

there. this is simply for francine. you who reviewed a wide range of books. are you given a certain type of book have you noticed or i like what i like and i will go against something? >> not much anymore. for example, years ago, and i mean 20 years ago, the times book review somehow got it in their head i had a kind of soft line on misogynist so i would only get reviewed by misogynist. [laughter] don't know why that was. >> another question? >> females writing protagonists and i feel like this question

really drives i wonder what your thoughts are on that. >> the question as to the panelists have any opinions on male writers writing female protagonists. estimates are just finished a book i thought was fantastic. he's reading from the point of view just a fantastic job and he's seen this kind of quite large and tall fellow that is made it all the more astonishing to me that he really i think makes a sleeveless ability to this single mother she adopt the voice of an albanian immigrant. i don't think there should be those boundaries to make these

leaps. >> i thought of the whole point of fiction was to be able to imagine someone who wasn't you. that's the point. so it always makes me kind of crazy when i hear female writers in the right to the male point of view or vice versa. it seems absurd to me. >> i agree. writing is an act of the imagination. men can read as women and women as men. non-japanese americans can tell the stories i'm telling just as well as i myself could >> i teach college sophomores and freshmen and you said a woman to not call herself a feminist that's something i deal with a lot with my students like if you bring that word of it is automatically shut down.

and i don't do if you are familiar with this devotee aids epidemic in the 80's and there's a character who is an activist and you have the ones who work on the side and sort of want to do it quietly, and i guess as a teacher and a writer in the reader, do you think that is something that is such a turn off that we should sort of shy away from the term or if it's important enough we need to say i am a feminist and here's why i am a feminist and here is what is important about that and that is kind of a big question but just your opinion? >> personally i think i would go with the letter. i think it is incredibly important to have that conversation with your students and that is what i was trying to do in my roundabout way.

there's misconceptions to try to figure out where that is coming from and the more people for you to say i am a feminist and because it's about the quality before the sexes - that's something most young women can get behind pretty easily. >> i have great sympathy for young women who are afraid to say they are feminist because i think that the the desire for male approval and may all validation is deeply ingrained that the terror of losing that of seeing anything that might lose that is a problem. but what i say to young people who say they are not feminist fine, go out in the world and if it turns out you are being paid the same amount i hope it all works out.

sooner or later if all the women are smart and start working for the explanation of why the success that's going to be the most obvious and logical explanation. >> talk about male dominated, some of these women might becoming a little more adamant about calling themselves. it can be rough out there. realize the context in which all of your choices are made you can track back to a recent movement how much we owe that movement i think that was instructive for me to.

>> i wondered and i saw the addition it feels like a fear of acknowledging the word like kind of a discussion about that to decide are we going to actually use the title and the word as evidence, or do you keep it kind of as something else? some of the only reason we didn't call that feminism is we didn't want her to be a preconceived notion that there was an anthology of essays and articles and arguments about the women's movement, arguments within the feminist movement historical essays about, granted it's mostly about narrative, whether it's fictional memoir something is written or read prato's, so we wanted to come out from an ankle that acknowledged the world in which that word exists now.

anthology of essays about feminism. so we decided to do it for that reason. very much so. that reason alone. one in the back. >> forgive me if this is covered but has it been talked about how many about prejudice that's not even the right word, women's books written by women and reviewed as often by men is that something annuity has noticed or wondered about and wonder if there are any statistics about that because i had the experience of thinking i have a feminist bookstore in chicago the women writers are giving credit is something that always is on my mind and i am always

looking for and there's so many times i feel like i pick up an issue of the new yorker to see how many articles and how many books are being reviewed by women and in "new york times," etc.. i just wondered if other people to track that or if there are any statistics or if that is an interest to you as writers. >> of a survey which is a group that is trying to get women in writing show that is largely tilted towards men and contributors to the journal's both of reviewers and the books they read you both of which were tilted majority to words male writers and reviewers whether

this interests you as writers is interesting. you think i should have gotten that gender reassignment surgery or -- [laughter] >> i wrote a paper in 2000 called the scent of a woman's ink that said i can always sniff out the women because they are sentimental, this is the four men have learned you weren't supposed to say these things. [laughter] and in the course of writing the article the research statistics more appalling. they've gotten marginally better since then but partly what i was interested in finding out is why this should be. and because one of the things that became clear is that it

wasn't only men making these decisions and assigning editors or how women as well as men so it wasn't as if it were true, so what was the prejudice against a work with the woman's name on it and why did george eliot choose to be called george eliot? for good reason. >> i was thinking about your question about contracting and my only contribution is of course it's a consideration and i think that it's still absolutely there is a biased and this was proven to me recently my friend wrote a beautiful piece about quantum computing in the recent new yorker and somebody came up to me and set your friends with that guy, he must be a genius.