"The true power of her novel comes from the appalling social conditions she describes so vividly, the grim but heroic lives her characters live".
For my own part, I wanted The Fish Ladder to work on me the way Gunn's books had on her, for it to induce that piercing nostalgia for places unknown that she describes so very well.
HER car is a second-hand 1989 Acura, a bit of resistance on the part of Juliet B. Schor to the "competitive consumption" that she describes so vividly in her new book, "The Overspent American". The television set is in the coldest, least inviting room of her house -- another bit of resistance.
How else could she describe so convincingly how it feels to take laudanum, to be shot with an arrow, to eat raw venison on an empty stomach?
Having lived for two years without work, which she described so affectingly in passing to the legions of followers of her recipes, she now gets by as a writer, for the Guardian and elsewhere.
Who didn't want to think there was a way back for these kids she described so graphically, whose hellish childhoods had left them angry, anxious and worryingly desensitised to violence?
I asked Badinter about Parité last winter, because it seemed to me that, in the name of an eighteenth-century universalist principle — what her American nemesis, Joan Scott, calls "the principle of the abstract individual" — she had ignored the social and moral costs of inequality in this century, including the ones she described so scathingly in the book she had just written.
"I can confirm that she is no longer employed here," a spokeswoman said, adding that she didn't know when the departure had taken place or whether Ms. Armstrong had been replaced in the office she described so meticulously in court.
Specifically, Cinnamon Toast Crunch while wearing "the T-shirt I had worn to bed the night before" – a wolf-emblazoned number she describes as, "my so-ugly-it's-awesome T-shirt, but my parents didn't appreciate that, even after I explained it to them".
Whitman fondly remembers her first introduction to Graham's writing — it came in the form of a poem around Christmastime during "Parenthood's" run that she describes as "so genuine and hilarious and so, so smart, without being the least bit manipulative or saccharine".
Reviewing it for the Guardian, Anne Enright described it as "seven perfect short stories" in which "the hurts she describes are so ancient and keen that we find ourselves scrabbling for a timeline".
