The Lit Hub girls are fighting!

Here’s a fun fact to celebrate Angela Carter’s birthday: the beloved feminist icon did not care for literary tote saint Joan Didion.

Need some proof? In 1986, Angela Carter sat down for a phone interview with Rosemary Carroll for BOMB . During the course of the interview, Carroll mentioned that she appreciated the “unique sense of real love for, and protectiveness towards, other women” in Carter’s work, adding: “It is something that I look for in women writers and almost never find.” Carter thanked her, and asked her what she meant. Here’s the resulting exchange:

RC

Women writers frequently adopt a tone or an attitude toward their female characters which is somewhat negative and ungenerous. It comes across as either whining self-indulgence or congratulatory, stolid self-reliance. There is so little compassion.

AC

To whom do you refer?

RC

Let’s say, Joan Didion, for example.

AC

Yah, boo, sucks.…