Only partly finished this book, but the opening chapters and the introduction made it clear that these women need to be read more and that more women need to write.

I will put this book back on my to read list for when I have more time, because these writers lives deserve closer scrutiny, particularly as an aspiring novelist myself. ( )

Only partly finished this book, but the opening chapters and the introduction made it clear that these women need to be read more and that more women need to write.

I will put this book back on my to read list for when I have more time, because these writers lives deserve closer scrutiny, particularly as an aspiring novelist myself. ( )

I loved this book so much. It has pushed me to try writers new to me (Madeleine L'Engle, Jane O'Reilly). I really love the diversity and beauty of women's voices.

Madeleine L'Engle, on the consequences of her husband's smoking, which was so fashionable once: "Consequences: cancer is a result of consequences. It is not sent as a punishment. I do not have to make the repulsive theological error of feeling that I have to see cancer as God's will for my husband. I do not want anything to do with that kind of God. Cancer is not God's will. The death of a child is not God's will. The deaths from automobile accidents during this long holiday weekend are not God's will. I would rather have no God at all than that kind of punitive God. Tragedies are consequences of human actions, and the only God worth believing in does not cause the tragedies but lovingly comes into the anguish with us."

Lucille Clifton: "Things don't fall apart. Things hold. Lines connect in thin ways that last and last and lives become generations made out of pictures and words just kept."

Feeds right into my current obsession with family photographs. ( )