the singing knives

Writing in the feminine. And on a colored sky. How do you inscribe difference without bursting into a series of euphoric narcissistic accounts of yourself and your own kind? Without indulging in a mar- ketable romanticism or in a naïve whining about your condition? In other words, how do you forget without annihilating?

Girlhood was no longer a temporary phase but a prolonged state that reached almost to midlife. But part of this stylized extended adolescence, it seems to me now, was about allowing room for experimentation. Girls are allowed to be vulnerable—to overshare, to overanalyze, to unburden themselves, to embarrass themselves, to fail. (The writer Leslie Jamison has observed the extent to which our language of confessional writing is steeped in the “liquid language” of female bodily experiences: “gushing, vomiting, purging, bleeding.”) After a decade of being prized primarily as decoration, it seemed as though many women had minimal interest in their work’s being pleasing or even palatable. What they wanted, as Ezra Pound wrote of modernism, was to create portrayals of life made wholly new. Inevitably, there was backlash.