Read writer, translator, and CALA director, Jenny McPhee’s wonderful essay and book review of Nancy K. Miller’s, “My Brilliant Friends”, in the current issue of the Los Angeles Review of Books.
“There is a long literary tradition of writing about friends, both dead and alive, both in fiction and fact. This tradition, like most traditions, is male dominated. Male friendships, now often referred to as “bromances,” permeate our classic and popular culture and have been written about extensively since Aristotle. Representations of genuine female friendships, however, have been scarce. “Sometimes women do like women,” Virginia Woolf facetiously points out in her 1929 essay, A Room of One’s Own:
All these relationships between women, I thought, rapidly recalling the splendid gallery of fictitious women, are too simple. So much has been left out, unattempted. And I tried to remember any case in the course of my reading where two women are represented as friends. […] They are now and then mothers and daughters. But almost without exception they are shown in their relation to men. It was strange to think that all the great women of fiction were, until Jane Austen’s day, not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex. And how small a part of a woman’s life is that …”
To read the full review click Los Angeles Review of Books
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