May 27, 2008

Revolution is a Daily Task

“Even now you will hear, from female critics as well as male, a regular complaint, a bleat – and I call it a bleat as one who, like Gray, knows nothing of sheep farming – that even today women writers play safe with small, domestic novels. They have forgotten that grand truth we learned, or relearned, at the close of the 20th century: the personal is political. The domestic novel need not be small, or tame. Homes are very unsafe places to linger. The crime statistics will tell you the streets are safer. Everything, even warfare, happens first in the kitchen, in the nursery, in the cradle, and no one grows up without a coup d’état against the powers that be; revolution is a daily task, a common story, the narrative that drives all others.” –Hilary Mantel, “Author, author”