Samantha Harvey: “We don’t always have to write about women in the context of their relationships wi

Samantha Harvey: “We don’t always have to write about women in the context of their relationships with men” The “Dear Thief” author on why we’re only just starting to see great novels about female friendshipMichele Filgate: Why aren’t there more literary novels that deal with the complexities of female friendship? There are plenty of commercially-written books that talk about female friendship, but I feel like now we have Elena Ferrante’s books, which have been doing tremendously well, and really analyze female friendship in a way that I haven’t seen a lot of before. And now with your book too, it’s so refreshing to see this. But why do you think we don’t see more literary novels that deal with something that is incredibly complex, in some ways even more so than romantic relationships? Samantha Harvey: I don’t know the answer. I don’t know. Maybe it’s because it’s more complex. It’s quite difficult to write about female friendship without it seeming to be a very niche subject. It’s a difficult balance. I think writing about female concerns is even now, even in the 21st century, we’re still very much living in a male context. And in writing a book that’s about – between two women, it’s almost without context. Where’s the romance? Where’s the man? And with whom do these women stand in relation? I think it’s just not easy to do. It’s not very easy to write about … I found this as I was writing the book, to write about anger as a woman and appearing sort of hysterical or dealing with a sort of very niche female emotion that’s just a sort of female hysteria, a female neurosis, and to make that a universal human condition. Men can write about it – or a woman can write about a man’s anger much more reasonably, I think, and a man’s rage and jealously, but when it’s women it always seems much more exclusive to the experience of being a woman rather than the experience of being human. So you know, it’s perhaps because it’s without a male context and that makes writers steer away from it. I honestly don’t know why there are so few books about it. Maybe there will be more as well. Maybe it’s becoming a more valid subject somehow, that we don’t always have to write about women in the context of their relationships with men.“Read the full interview here#Heteronormativity -- source link

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