Katie Roiphe of Slate has some ideas about what Knausgaard’s critically acclaimed work would be like if, instead, he was a woman.
I imagine to this committed Knausgaardians would say that they are responding to the quality of his writing and thinking. But I’m convinced that even if Carla Krauss were writing and thinking on an equally excellent level, readers would still be impatient and irritated. They would take her equally well-observed sprawling minutiae as an impingement on their time and attention. What seems novel and fresh in a tall, craggy male writer would appear grandiose and humdrum in a female one.
