"What’s with her?” says the painter. “She’s mad because she’s a woman,” Jon says. This is something I haven’t heard for years, not since high school. Once it was a shaming thing to say, and crushing to have it said about you, by a man. It implied oddness, deformity, sexual malfunction. I go to the living room doorway. “I’m not mad because I’m a woman,” I say. “I’m mad because you’re an asshole."

You may also like:

• 

  Alice Munro
  Author

• 

  Doris Lessing
  Novelist

• 

  Jane Austen
  Novelist

• 

  Jeanette Winterson
  Writer

• 

  Kazuo Ishiguro
  Novelist

• 

  Margaret Laurence
  Novelist

• 

  Toni Morrison
  Novelist

• 

  Ursula K. Le Guin
  Author

• 

  Virginia Woolf
  Writer