A Daughter of My Mother: On Women, Earrings, and Architecture
I write mostly for women. I’ve been doing it since the first time I set pen to paper, the summer after high school. I began a novel that summer, based on my maternal grandparents’ lives, from the point of view of my grandmother. I only wrote a few chapters, but I still have the hand-written manuscript, in pencil no less. Once I got to college and began taking writing classes, I came to see that, for many, my writing for women would make me seem less serious as a writer. I kept doing it anyway—determined to figure out a way to interweave women and seemingly masculine concerns like architecture. I also decided to keep writing about grandmothers. I’d heard classmates disparage grandmother poems, and it rankled me. Stubbornness? Independence? Yes, but I did it mostly because I am a daughter of my mother.
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