Joanna Biggs

When​ is the right time to ask for what you want? One of the strange things about the feminist movement is that what women want hasn’t been that much of a mystery at all. (Mary Wollstonecraft, Sojourner Truth, Simone de Beauvoir: century after century, girls just wanna be human, not other.) But finding the moment to speak and the words to use? Reading Breanne Fahs’s collection of...

Almost​ from the moment she published The Second Sex in November 1949, Simone de Beauvoir was asked why she’d never written a female character who lived a free life, the sort she imagined in her final chapter, ‘The Independent Woman’. If the mother of 20th-century feminism couldn’t imagine a free woman, who could? At first she would answer brusquely. ‘I’ve...

Iwas a little woman​ the last time I read children’s books, but this autumn, inching out of depression, I went back to the ones I loved as a girl (Ballet Shoes, A Little Princess) and read others (The Secret Garden, Little Women) for the first time. I am accidentally on trend: the Sunday Times recently declared ‘Civil War strumpet’ – high collars, low hems, frilly...

Sometimes​ I think people who write autofiction are narcissists. But I know for sure, because I am one, that people who read autofiction are narcissists. I once thought that I read about other minds as a release from my own until I came to the scene in Ben Lerner’s last novel, 10:04, in which the writer’s alter ego, Ben, is in a fertility clinic in Brooklyn to produce a cup of...

In February​ 2003, I spent a lot of time saying ‘liar’ to my computer screen. I was twenty, in Paris on my year abroad working as a translator of press releases about mechanical diggers and franking machines, while back home my country was trying to go to war illegally. I must have looked at the Guardian website every 45 minutes; for me, the 2003 online version of the Grauniad...