Nicola Griffith - Ableism and Book Reviews

The brilliant author Nicola Griffith has written a new book, So Lucky. As the reviews roll in, she's been talking online and now blogging about the ways that ableism intersect with sexism in the response. She writes:

In How to Suppress Women’s Writing Joanna Russ lays out eleven methods to belittle the work of women (and, I would argue, of members of other oppressed groups). Labelling fiction as ‘autobiographical’ could be assigned to either Denial of Agency or Pollution of Agency. From a male-identified author (for example, Karl Ove Knausgaard), autobiographical fiction is Art. From a female-identified author, it is merely a transcription of real life with no creativity involved: Oh, she wrote it, but it’s not really art because it’s the story of her life. She just, y’know, transcribed what was actually happening.