The Orange Prize nominations award are is coming up soon, and Jessa Crispin has, of course, written a nice thought piece on what it means to have a prize for female writers:

There are still huge gaps of women's experiences for fiction to fill. That can be inspiring for a writer. Lorraine Adams said to me about her book The Room and the Chair — which is populated with aggressive, batty, slutty, heroic, downtrodden female fighter pilots, reporters, wives, and underage prostitutes — "I feel like so much fictional women are not reflective of the women I know." Virginie Despentes wrote King Kong Theory in part out of frustration that "Even today, when women publish lots of novels, you rarely get female characters that are unattractive or plain, unsuited to loving men or to being loved by them...

Had the book [Our Tragic Universe by Scarlett Thomas] been written by a man, I would have tossed it aside halfway through with a roll of the eyes. But having been at one point in my life broke, living with a horrible boyfriend and unable to leave without serious financial (or hell, physical) consequences, and seeing female friends trapped in poverty, bad relationships, bad apartments, it felt like a betrayal of the reality of the situation. Obviously it is not impossible to get yourself unstuck, but it can be devastating. If we're still trying to figure out how to live our lives and get out of the traps we got ourselves into, hearing "You just have to cosmic order some money and a new house, and the universe will totally provide — or wait, probably not because you're not secretly a princess," can make us want to scream. Which is maybe why we discuss the state of women's literature every single year, and take it all so incredibly personally when it comes up short.

I've been reading a lot of fiction written by women lately without really thinking about it--the stories were just ones I've wanted to read, the voices were just ones I've been drawn to (problems of time and scale aside, of the 50 books I wrote down to read this summer--including fiction, poetry, and non-fiction--34 were written by women). Sometimes I think I take for granted that this isn't usual, and it's good to be reminded of that, if only because I'm an over-ambitious and obsessive-compulsive list-maker.  And because Jessa Crispin made me.