Did Sontag need to be more ‘momish’? And if she had been—or if she had more children to drop off with the in-laws or the babysitters—would she have been the same writer? Would we have the legacy of her provocative ideas, in criticism and fiction? The grey-streaked eminence of Sontag aside, how do the rest of us mortals negotiate the balance between selfhood and motherhood? Is stopping at one child the answer, or at least the beginning of one?
What do Susan Sontag, Joan Didion and Year in Reading alumna Margaret Atwood have in common? They’re all great writers — and they all had only one kid.
Well, women turn out to events more than men do. Men are more likely to be secret readers, as it were—I don’t mean that they’re furtive about it, but they are less likely to go out to an event, and that’s across the board, even for male writers, too. And women are much more likely to stand in a line. Men do not like standing in a line.
Your eyes do not deceive you, Rumpus readers — Margaret Atwood sat down for this week’s Sunday interview. She talks with Gina Frangello about her novel-in-excerpts, Positron, along with the art of responding to readers on Twitter. (You can also check out her piece for Year in Reading.)
I made a rule for myself: I would not include anything that human beings had not already done in some other place or time, or for which the technology did not already exist. I did not wish to be accused of dark, twisted inventions, or of misrepresenting the human potential for deplorable behaviour.
Margaret Atwood revisits The Handmaid’s Tale.

Source: Guardian