Bittersweetheart

It is laudatory that McDowell has set herself against the tenor of much of the critical discourse on the price of female talent: even so idiosyncratic a thinker as Elizabeth Hardwick was inclined to look at victimhood as the natural habitat of creative women, especially when they teamed up with creative men. One might wish for a more mellifluous prose style and more bold speculation on the role of the eroticization of intellect, but overall this is a welcome addition to the lives of writers in love and lust—writers who sometimes manage to write peacefully together in the same room, and who are equally dominated by the same demanding master: literature.

—Lovers, Not Victims | The New Republic