I am one of those writers who, if given the chance, would continue to edit her writing even after it has been published. I know it’s ridiculous, but each time I read something I have written, my head is in a different place, thus altering the way I receive the material. What seems perfect wording…

Caroline Criado Perez, the British author who introduced us in “Invisible Women” to the gender data gaps in heart disease research and seat-belt design, takes a look in her January 18, 2026, newsletter at another gendered phenomenon: the economic illiteracy of excluding unpaid women’s housework in the nation’s GDP because it was “too complicated to…

I recently read an excellent psychological novel “Cape Fever” by Cape Town writer Nadia Davids about the struggle for power between two women in an unnamed post-WWI colonial town in 1920.  Soraya Mata, a 19-year-old Malay woman, is servant to an elderly widow, the patronizing Mrs. Hattingh, who has lost her wealth but not her…

I shouldn’t be surprised, and yet I was, at the number of men who identified with the invisibility of older women in Old Bean’s Last Fantasy. “Once you retire from your business or practice,” one 67-year-old man told me, “it’s like you never existed. No matter how successful you were in the past, you are…

Thanks to all of you who came to my book reading at Elliott Bay Books on March 10 and asked such excellent questions.