In Praise of Messy Women (Bullets)

• I'm reading Katie Roiphe's collection of essays, In Praise of Messy Lives . It's better than I expected. Much better than I expected from someone inexorably tethered to the rape apologia of The Morning After. I guess she holds a certain libertarian (in the dictionary sense), individualistic appeal, but I can't imagine praising this book without a horde of feminists calling for my hide. The essays about Joan Didion and Susan Sontag are worth the time.
• Speaking of Didion, I found this post  yesterday. The distance -- the coolness, nay coldness -- is what I like about her writing. I think I've been unsuccessfully biting her style for a while, or instead, biting her style filtered through every other female writer who's bitten her style in the past forty years.
• Speaking of biting, I have an unreasonable (reasonable?) fear of plagiarizing. When I'm writing, I become almost hyper-aware that it too closely resembles something else. Usually something I hated.
• I have no idea who the audience is for this blog. When I started blogging almost a decade ago, I wrote diary-like posts because I thought that's what women were supposed to write. The only examples I had were a handful of local parent blogs (I'm not a parent), and pre-baby Dooce. I've never been good at making the minutiae of my daily life sound interesting, and I hate the perception that women must bleed all over the page for it to be worthy. Feminist blogs were the perfect antidote, but now it seems the only option for smart writing that happens to be penned by women. It's exhausting and limiting to consciously view everything through a feminist lens.