It's long been known that Papa had threatened to cut his mom off if she ever revealed anything about his childhood, and his sister's revelations about their early years explain why: according to Marcelline, their mother Grace was desperate for twin daughters, and despite the 18-month age difference between the kids, carried out the fantasy, holding her daughter back a year so the siblings would be in the same grade, and dressing the children in matching girl's clothes. Oh yeah — she also addressed her son as "Ernestine." To Have and Have Not, indeed. [MentalFloss]

Munro was born in rural Ontario in 1931, and she spent the first part of the interview talking about her background. Her mother had Parkinsons and the family had very little money, but Alice really wanted to go to college, so she rustled up a scholarship and shipped off to university. "Don't give me that much credit," she said. "I didn't go for education, I just went because I wanted time to myself."

Her family neither encouraged nor discouraged her education; they had enough to deal with and as long as Alice supported herself financially, they didn't care what she did. The idea of writing for a living was so far outside the realm of her childhood that she had "terrific confidence. I didn't know any writers so I thought I was just great." Then Alice talked about getting married and becoming a mother in the 50s in suburban Vancouver, and Deborah Treisman said, "You've written a lot about women feeling trapped by marriage and motherhood," and she wondered if that was from Alice's personal experience. "I never felt trapped by kids or housework," Alice said, "but I felt trapped by a community of people who all did the same thing."

Since writing was as unheard of in Vancouver as it was in rural Ontario, when Alice started publishing short stories people were more bewildered than anything else. The local newspaper even published a story about Alice entitled, "Housewife Finds Time To Write Short Stories."

When asked if she considers herself a feminist writer, Munro said, "I don't think about it at all. I think I am a feminist politically and in my life, but that's not the purpose of (fiction) writing. You have to go down deep, and you don't start with political stuff." She spent much of the sixties raising her kids and mentally creating stories while her children were napping. But Alice emphasized the notion that writing is always hard, and rejection is even worse. You never get a thick skin, she said, but you go on anyway.

And just like the deep emotional content of Munro's stories, the woman herself was forthright and funny and true. Though it's hokey, listening to Munro speak made me realize how much I take for granted. My access to education, my supportive family, the relatively egalitarian times in which I was born. But it also made me realize that the key to future success in writing is probably ignoring these outside influences like Munro banished the potential detractors who lingered outside her own mind.

New Yorker Festival [New Yorker]

I agree with the Ephron choice (Heartburn is a must read), and would like to add 1984 Pulitzer Prize winner Foreign Affairs by Alison Lurie, and many things by Anne Lamott, who has been tenderly funny although slightly less so ever since she found Jesus. What fiction-writing females would you nominate for funniest novel ever?

What's The Funniest Novel Ever? [NY Times]
Hitchens Take Heart: NYTBR Also Finds Women Unfunny [Mediabistro]
Monday, September 15, 2008 [Moment Of Jen]

But even if more books are written and purchased by women (Byatt's assumption that schoolchildren are taught more women's literature is just wrong...look at any high school reading list), the fact remains that only eleven women have won the Nobel Prize for literature, and that novels focusing on "women's issues" continue to be critically underrated. In the past ten years, three women have been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction (for those counting at home, that's 30%). Even the judges of the Orange Prize themselves are complaining about excessive number of "domestic dramas" written by women.

Kirsty Lang, the chair of a panel of judges (including, um, Lily Allen!) for the Orange Prize, told the Guardian, "Reading 120 books I did find myself thinking, 'Oh god, not another dead baby'...There were a hell of a lot of abused children and family secrets." But then Lang corrects herself, saying, "Yes, there were a lot of domestic dramas. Do I have a problem with that? Not really. Most fiction readers are women and we like our reading to reflect our experience. Women will write about domestic life because that is the reality of women's lives. I'd like to say the opposite, but it wouldn't be true."

But what makes one book inherently more valuable than any other? Does a subject matter of politics or war make for a categorically "better" novel than one about "abused children" and "family secrets?" Shouldn't the quality of the writing and the structural integrity of a book be the most important thing? Until all books are judged equally, I don't have a problem with women getting their own cash prize for fiction. Harriet Hastings, the "project director" of the Orange Prize had the best attitude towards the critics, "Although major prizes have been won by women, the value of the Orange is as a celebration of women's fiction." I'll drink to that.

Women's Fiction Prize 'Infected By Misery Memoirs' [Times of London]
Tim Lott: Orange Prize For Women Is Sexist [Telegraph]
Women's Fiction Prize 'Infected By Misery Memoirs' [Guardian]

She was a patient likely to improve but never be cured...[she was initially] diagnosed as schizophrenic, and [years later her doctor] would describe her as a 'constitutional, emotionally unbalanced psychopath...in Zelda's case the onset of the illness could have come several years before she was ever hospitalized. Scott, in the fall of 1928, had made a cryptic entry in his ledger: 'Dirt eating in hotel.' (The psychiatric term is 'stool smearing' or 'stool eating.')...presumably no one knew of it but Scott. Whatever he saw was so disturbing that he tried to block it from his mind.

Feminist revisionist literary scholars have resurrected a lot of great writers — Charlotte Perkins Gilman of the The Yellow Wallpaper, Kate Chopin and her Awakening — and I think their time would be better spent unearthing other fantastic female writers from the prior centuries. Zelda's life was interesting and dramatic for sure, but continuing to argue for her artistic prominence is losing battle.

The Art of Being Zelda [BlueStocking — Click on "Current Issue" to find article]
Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin: Writers Running Wild in the Twenties [Amazon]