Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman

by Anne Helen Petersen

And while even Franzen can admit that the issue “is important,” he also believes Weiner is an “unfortunate person to have as a spokesperson.”7 Unfortunate because she writes stories that fulfill a specific psychological function for women living under postfeminism, unfortunate because her books are too commercial and their covers too pastel, unfortunate because she spends too much time on Twitter, unfortunate because she won’t let Franzen off the hook for his deeply sexist understanding of how an author should present the labor and purpose of authorship. But mostly unfortunate because she doesn’t know her place. And that, more than the request for the Times and other publications to devote more thoughtful energy to books like hers, is the ultimate in literary unruliness.

Amen