Tag
Secrets
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The Ferrante Paradox
Reading Frantumaglia, the new collection of letters, interviews, and occasional prose from Elena Ferrante, I was struck by how often the author opened her correspondence with an apology. “I apologize …
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Murderous Schoolgirls
While little girls may be made of sugar and spice and everything nice, in fiction the teenagers they grow into are anything but. We are drawn to stories where girls are scandalous, promiscuous, and even—or especially—murderous, where a sinister drive emerges from beneath facades of propriety and innocence. The dark underbelly of female adolescence and…
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Passing Beauty
How do you break a spell? How do you get over the grief of racial, gendered, and childhood injuries? Helen Oyeyemi’s novel Boy, Snow, Bird is not a black-and-white parable but a black-and-blue story. A bruising tale about miscegenation, passing, and beauty, this novel brings to life the idealization and wounding that haunt the American…
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Her Mother and Herself
Do you hear a sound like rolling surf in the self-help section labeled “Family”? It’s what a sea change sounds like in its early stages, when one paradigm is fading away and another surging forward. Drifting away is the idea of the repressive family, out to “fuck you up,” in Philip Larkin’s phrase of 1971.1…
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Jean Stafford, Antisocialite
Alice Munro’s Nobel Prize last fall was hailed as a victory for the novel’s neglected stepsister, the short story. What struck me most about Munro’s win was how well she has fared by following a heavily beaten path. She faithfully adheres to the rules Edgar Allen Poe set out for the genre in the 1840s:…
