I don’t argue that there is an ethics for writing the autobiographical. However, those who are all agog that Marie C. wrote about a real, locatable person, insular in a literary scene, must not remember or know the history of modern literature, where this happened all the f-cking time (D.H. Lawrence sending up Bloomsbury in Women in Love, Mary McCarthy writing of her affairs, Robert Lowell’s The Dolphin, F. Scott Fitzgerald, the Beats, I mean, I could go on and on and on. And most of the time in modern literature it is the more famous man writing about his wife or mistress). What I don’t understand, or rather, I do understand all too well, and don’t like, is why in these situations it is almost always the girl branded as the criminal for the “confessional” and asked to feel bad, to feel guilt or shame for writing the truths of their experiences, are sometimes even diagnosed as being borderline, inappropriate, toxic, messy, etc., while men have written of their affairs and sexual relationships always and their ethics are rarely questioned. This to me is a form of discipline and punishment that we internalize, which is why so many women writers self-censor. You know what it’s called when male writers write of their sexual exploits? LITERATURE. And I kept on thinking reading through all the comments, essays, dialogues, etc., around this one girl and her story, a dialogue that was mostly moralizing or dismissive, as if her youth was a disease she would outgrow someday, is that if the Guy in question — the Marxist scholar, the pop-intellectual, had written his version, it would have been published in the best locales and feted. We would never have been questioning his ethics. We would never worry or wonder that he was writing these female writers or artists as ciphers, as muses, as opposed to embodied women.