Sue Miller

is sort of affronted because I think his mistress is called Beatrice, turns her back to him, sort of presents her rump side to him.

And I was so struck by this, and Beatrice is divorced, I was so struck by the kind of cavalierness of it all and the fact that the child had no reality in the scene.

It was just the child came, the mother turns to him, and there's no sense of Bex perceiving the child as a person or having...

that this could in any way affect him or anything that seemed of utmost importance to me in the scene.

And I think that was in part some of the inspiration for The Good Mother, was the sense that I wanted to write a sort of more female version of life, I guess, where there's greater concern for all of the people, even the very tiny people.

Yeah, and there have been a couple of others.

I can't call them up at the moment, but I do feel that when I was sort of really beginning to read contemporary fiction within the 60s and 70s and so forth, and it was all men at that point for one thing.

The big writers of fiction in the States were Roth and Mailer and Updike and Cheever.

It just was this group of people whose fiction I was very interested in, but I felt always that they were trying to write the big novel.

And I wanted to write a smaller novel, I guess.

I was reading a little bit of history.

Henry James, and there's a response he makes at one point to, in his The Art of the Novel, to a critic who said, you know, first of all, if you're writing fiction, you have to have, you can't do it without adventures.

And James says, why not without adventures?

You know, why not with green spectacles?

Why not with marriage or celibacy or parturition or childbirth or

And then you list a few other things.

Just, you know, that fiction can be about anything.

Anything is his point, as long as you do it beautifully.

And I felt I just was reading a very particular kind of male fiction.

It sort of mildly pissed me off.