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 I Two moments in May May 2, 2011 The novelists Siri Hustvedt and Céline Curiol are giving a talk at Shakespeare and Company in Paris The shop is filled to bursting, and the audience spills onto the sidewalk outside The topic of their discussion, they announce, is the ‘strange bias against fiction in general and fiction by women in particular’ Men don’t read books by women, they lament; women’s writing seems only to appeal to other women ‘Would you have written the same book if you were a man?’ Curiol reports having been asked on numerous occasions The question, she implies, has become so banal as hardly to be worth answering: ‘Yes, no, maybe,’ she says Both authors dismiss the idea that men write as men, and women write as women ‘Novels do not have a gender,’ says Curiol One audience member, an emissary from the French feminist group La Barbe (‘The Beard’) berates them, quite aggressively, for turning literature into a battlefield Hustvedt protests: ‘You’ve misunderstood entirely what we were trying to say’ Meanwhile the bookshop’s owner, Sylvia Whitman, shakes her head in bafflement as she’s asked to account for the actual ratio of male to female authors on the shop’s shelves   May 20, 2011 I’m at an academic conference in Paris A graduate student gives a paper on a novel about partition by the Pakistani writer Bapsi Sidhwa, making what seems to me to be an innocuous yet perceptive argument on the vexing ways in which gender and colonialism intersect in the novel During the discussion period, the student is dressed down by the two (female) faculty members chairing the panel ‘Do you really think Sidhwa has anything to say about partition that’s different from Salman Rushdie just because she’s a woman?’ The student is silent ‘Don’t work only on women’s writing,’ one professor, a placid blond with an immobile page boy haircut counsels her ‘That goes for all of you,’ she says ‘It’s been done, and by people much older than you It’s over Find something else to work on’   I’m gobsmacked I’ve just defended my PhD on British women’s