I had begun to grow suspicious of novels. I’m interested in poetics, in subtle changes of mood and feeling—you read enough stories and the plots and characters start to feel too contrived, too obvious. My reservations about the novel were also due to a recent weariness with the heroic quest. At a time in my life where it is vital for me to read books by women—to find examples of how a woman might carve out a literary space of her own and write about her experiences—the epic novel remains a masculine territory, something I associate with the desire to document history, and claim it.

The Italian writer known as Elena Ferrante discusses this in the latest issue of The Paris Review: “As a girl—twelve, thirteen years old—I was absolutely certain that a good book had to have a man as its hero, and that depressed me. I devoured books at that age, and there’s no getting around it, my models were masculine. So even when I wrote stories about girls, I wanted to give the heroine a wealth of experiences, a freedom, a determination that I tried to imitate from the great novels written by men.”