Andra berättelser om kvinnor

Watching a woman repeatedly subsume her entire emotional and artistic life to a totally worthless man for years is as exhausting to me in fiction as it is in real life, and while I suppose “we had a healthy relationship! the end” is a pretty short story if I am going to read about straight women I would prefer they be doing something more interesting than being made miserable by men over the course of a thousand pages—because, in the end, that’s not a book about women, it’s a book about dudes. So much of the Neapolitan quartet is about Nino! and let’s face it, Nino really, really sucks. It’s like reading early Margaret Atwood, where for a certain amount of time you’re like OMG yes exactly all men will fail you and then at a certain point you’re like, Lady, just go do something else. To me, certain books seem to suggest that the essential struggles of women’s lives center on negotiating boundaries with emotional labor, with raising children, and with male lovers, partners, and husbands, but that’s an essentialism that also serves to universalize heterosexuality and the nuclear family unit and leaves out whole swathes of other women’s lived experiences and histories and struggles.

Härifrån.