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Say you wrote a book about a person in search of meaning Imagine that it was widely praised and made you lots of money because it was so relatable and yet touched a nerve that was rarely reachable Then imagine another writer wrote a similar book and it eclipsed yours The media couldn’t stop comparing the two of you, and suddenly, you who had been this visionary was now seen as a hack, because you had been writing about women, but the other writer was a woman But how unfair to be judged only because of your juxtaposition to this other writer And say your books had nothing in common, really, they were about completely different things Say yours was about a woman coming to terms with herself and the world, and the other writer’s was about an unreliable narrator who hated other women as well as herself In her story, say men were vulgar and society in general was to be mistrusted No narrator, no character, was reliable, a trick the writer played on the reader, with whom she wasn’t in solidarity Say if you had to make this writer’s work multidimensional, it would be with a jack in the box that popped out at the end of the final chapter, punched the reader in the nose, and cried: Joke’s on you! Whereas say yours was like a gentle reminder, the lapping of waves…   Say you read every review of this writer’s book and each time were filled with an annoyance bordering on rage But not everything is about comparison and jealousy – say you told this to yourself – sometimes that down-pitted feeling is a foreboding ennui of a dangerous entity with power claiming to be something real, something safe Say you were bothered by the idea that this writer, who you – as a man who loved women – felt was actually dangerous to women, that she was usurping the language of women, of their struggles, using it to perpetuate more struggle, and say you were enraged that she was considered some sort of creative sage who