radical soul

Still, [Junot] Diaz admits that writing in a woman’s voice comes with certain risks. “The one thing about being a dude and writing from a female perspective is that the baseline is, you suck,” he told me. “The baseline is it takes so long for you to work those atrophied muscles—for you to get on parity with what women’s representations of men are. For me, I always want to do better. I wish I had another 10 years to work those muscles so that I can write better women characters. I wring my hands because I know that as a dude, my privilege, my long-term deficiencies work against me in writing women, no matter how hard I try and how talented I am.” For one of the most lauded writers of his generation to say he needs another decade of practice to write better women is no small thing. But Diaz told me that he’s often appalled by the portrayals of women in celebrated novels. “I know from my long experience of reading,” he said, “that the women characters that dudes [write] make no fucking sense for the most part. Not only do they make no sense, they’re introduced just for sexual function.” He gave a high-profile example, though he wouldn’t name names. “There’s a book that came out recently from a writer I admire enormously. A woman character gets introduced. I said, ‘I promise you, this girl is just here to throw herself at the dude, even though the dude has done nothing, nothing, to merit or warrant a woman throwing herself at him.’ And lo and behold. This brilliant young American writer, that everybody sort of considers the god of American writing, turns around and does exactly that. When I asked my female friends, we all had a little gathering, and I was chatting. I was like, ‘Have you heard of a woman doing this?’ They’re like, ‘Are you fucking nuts?’” On the other hand, Diaz said, “I think the average woman writes men just exceptionally well.” He cited Anne Enright, Maile Meloy, and Jesmyn Ward as examples of younger writers who write great male characters—and pointed to two of his idols, Jamaica Kincaid and Toni Morrison, as timeless masters. But he also detects an across-the-board improvement even in woman-penned books that are less than high-brow, especially in Young Adult fiction. “Look how well the boys are rendered in The Hunger Games,” he said.

Let people feel the weight of who you are and let them deal with it.

The real tragedy of the book to show conversion is that the sand snakes actually wanted to crown Myrcella, not kill her.

Dear John (Green), You wrote an entire essay online about how groundbreaking it is for a teenage girl to kiss a teenage boy in a tragic movie about being white and pretty and dying. Meanwhile, the only times I see girls like me getting kissed on screen is when they’re being felt up by some old man in a tragic movie about being colored and poor and abused. Brown teenage girls do not get love stories like the movies, even though we are taught straight from the womb that we are no more than curves and wild fight that still shines in our eyes after the white boy kisses us in secret, after the white boy does not want to be seen with us in front of his friends. Because we’ll always bring drama and bitterness, with our loud voices and attitude, until we are finally broken on the night something is slipped into our drinks, or we’re evicted from our house, or we lose the basketball game, or a family member climbs on top of us, and wraps the silver screen around our bodies like butcher’s paper for the meat that we have been portrayed as since birth. No, we do not get Shakespeare quoted to us, instead we become the bitter narrative, the comfort to the suburban parent, thank goodness their little girl is the one with the “nice young man,” and not the one getting her teeth knocked out by the “thug”, and why does Hollywood only find colored girls palatable when they are hardened by the world, to the point where we see them as grown women? You want groundbreaking story telling? Write about a girl with brown skin who is so filled with joy, each one of her breaths is like tasting cinnamon, and she lightens even the darkest moments. Write about a hijabi girl, who is so empowered, that she can convince a generation of young women of every shade that we don’t need to kiss a boy first to feel in charge of ourselves. Write about a Latina girl, who is so in love with life that she tiptoes on the heads of her problems. Portray colored girls as soft, as naive, as quickly, as teenage girls in love, because we deserve a narrative as sweet as diverse and as powerful as we are.

Skull in a salt lake