In 1997, Anita Diamant's The Red Tent smeared historical fiction in menstrual blood. Women, especially Jewish women, read it breathless with recognition, awe, and sometimes, outrage and disgust. Little women, like myself, read it at midnight out of the bathroom cupboard, so our mothers wouldn't catch us (maybe that was just me). I don't remember men reading it. I don't remember conceiving of either historical fiction or women's fiction as genres before I read it, but after I read it and listened to the adults around me, I knew it to be both. At the time, I didn't question that there were such genres as historical fiction and women's fiction, and Jewish fiction. I didn't question that the depiction in The Red Tent was grossly ahistorical. I loved it, but I knew our foremothers couldn't have worshipped pagan gods or held arcane rituals around their menstrual blood. The attack on Shechem could not have been about anything other than the rape of ...
Life, Books, and SFF