Joan Didion, who knew how to wear clothes, was too brilliant and great for anyone to write like and too skinny and sultry to look like. I thought if I couldn’t be Joan, then I’d have to be dowdy and/or crazy, like Virginia Woolf. Of course, there was always Colette, but then she was French—not living in L.A.—and even she scared men.

In the 1970s and much of the 1980s, feminist scholars looked closely at women’s roles in the family and workforce and at social expectations that women be feminine, submissive, and beautiful, if not sexually available and pornographic. Marxist ideas of women as a subordinated class that exists to support men (who, in turn, support capitalism)