brianrayfiction.com Blog

Here’s something I found while reading up on Angela Carter for a course I plan to teach in the fall. Her revisions of fairy tales are well-known, but probably not her thoughts on Joan Didion, whom I’d thought to be a relatively unsentimental writer. I’m staying impartial here, but I find the clash interesting:

Angela Carter – “Although I am a card-carrying and committed feminist, what I would like to see happen to Joan Didion’s female characters is that a particularly hairy and repulsive chapter of Hells Angels descend upon their therapy group with a squeal of brakes and sweep these anorexic nutters behind them despite their squeaks of protest. Like aversion, dare I say it, of the rape of the Sabine women. And bear them off to hard labour in the grease pits. Or else ten years compulsory re-education in the coffee plantations of Nicaragua might do the trick, make those girls feel there are worse things in life than running out of valium. Except what lousy fun it would be for the Angels. And the Nicaraguans might feel with justice it was a particularly foul C.I.A. plot.”

–Bomb Magazine, Issue 17 Fall 1986