Siri Hustvedt: ‘I responded viscerally to De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex’

The US author on becoming a feminist, growing into Gertrude Stein, and the comfort of folk tales

My earliest reading memory
At six I became fascinated with the Lonely Doll books by Dare Wright that I found in the public library of my small town, Northfield, Minnesota. They used photographs, not drawings, as illustrations; they gave me an uncanny feeling of secrets lurking behind the words and images. It is a feeling I have never forgotten.

My favourite book growing up
I loved Ann Petry’s biography, Harriet Tubman: Conductor on the Underground Railroad. I found it in my school library in 1965, 10 years after it was first published. I was 10 years old and intensely aware of the civil rights movement, despite the fact that I lived in an all-white town and had seen black people only on forays to Minneapolis every Christmas. I was passionately attached to the story of this extraordinary, heroic woman.

The book that changed me as a teenager
When I was 14 or 15 I read Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. Despite my lack of philosophical sophistication, I responded viscerally to the book. Rereading it later, I wonder exactly what I understood at the time. It is not an easy book. I suspect that, despite my struggles with the text, I gleaned its essential message – that women were treated as outsiders to history as the eternal feminine, had always been other to man, and that these injustices ran deep. I became a feminist.

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/3CTEVO8