Ann Rower was 53 when she made her literary debut with this collection of personal essays and stories. Initially published by Semiotext(e) in 1991 as the first entry of their Native Agents series that platformed women in an overly male literary landscape, If You’re a Girl captured the spit and vinegar of mid-late twentieth-century female bohemia.
As a novelist, you have to decide, what doesn’t serve the drama at that particular point. Even biographers have had to make serious decisions about what to include.
Suspense, as a genre, can be a Trojan Horse. It’s a strong vehicle that you can hide things within [to] explore ideas about culture, gender, language, or place.
There is an elegant cadence to the prose, a slight twist in language to create a dynamic image of a simple nighttime scene. Two proud firs. The single star as the sky’s beauty mark.
Through her terse yet piercing consideration of this school fight...Manthey asks us to look directly into the historically charged layers of the book’s eponymous fight.
When women are in partnerships—being a wife or a girlfriend of a partner—we take on all these different roles but they’re always changing. Our jobs are always changing and evolving.