Francine Prose sees the world with a laser-like clarity, which can make one feel—especially if one is asking personal questions—as though one is standing in front of her in a wet bathing suit. Nothing escapes her eye. One of America's most provocative, and impolitic social critics, Prose seems to delight in fearlessly slaughtering society's sacred cows in writing that is compassionate, funny, and unsparing. Whether taking on the woeful reading lists of American high schools in "I Know Why the Caged Bird Can't Read," in Harper's, or the way history becomes entertainment, with the Holocaust the ultimate tourist attraction, in Guided Tours of Hell, Prose makes enemies almost as quickly as she attracts new readers and fans. "If my fiction and the nonfiction have anything in common," Prose says, "it's the desire to say the thing everybody knows, but no one is saying."

Elissa Schappell: In 1998 you wrote an essay in Harper's entitled "Scent of a Woman's Ink: Are Women Writers Inferior?" in which you presented alarming statistics pointing up how women writers, though they sell more copies, are not taken as seriously as their male counterparts, and are woefully overlooked by critics and those groups that award prizes for literature. Do you think things have changed for women writers in the last four years?

Francine Prose: Do you?

ES: Do you think that if a woman had written The Corrections—a big domestic novel—she would have gotten the same kind of attention?

FP: Well, the interesting thing is when you look at the National Book Award nominees, Jonathan Franzen wrote the domestic novel that was taken seriously as the heavy hitter novel, and Jenny Egan wrote the political novel (Look at Me) that was read as the domestic novel—interior, psychological, whatever...

ES: Is the domestic novel just more interesting in the hands of male writers?

FP: I don't know. The sad thing and the reason why I have so little hope for it changing is that it just seems chemical to me, like hormonal—the way certain guys of a certain age, their eyes glaze over when they think that there is some "female" subject about to be mentioned. That's not conscious, that's just their hormones, or whatever is left of them.

ES: Like Norman Mailer?

FP: Right.

ES: The title of your Harper's essay is from a Norman Mailer quote. "The sniffs I get from the ink of women are always fey, old hat, Quaintsy Goysy, tiny, too dykily psychotic." Do you think he was serious?

FP: Of course... Do you know the follow-up quote? He was interviewed on some radio station in San Francisco and was asked about that and he said, Blah blah, blah, Francine Prose...and then he said, "Can you imagine what it is like to be married to someone like that?"

ES: One of the reasons you were a perfect person to write such a piece is that when discussion turns to women writers who don't "write" like women—others include Mary Gaitskill, Deborah Eisenberg, Helen Schulman—you are often mentioned. What does it mean to write like a woman?

FP: It means the same thing that those guys thought it meant in the fifties and sixties—sentimental, humorless, domestic, limited, narrow.

ES: How do you feel being referred to as "like a male writer"?

FP: It sends me straight to the mirror. What are they saying that I don't notice? It's just so annoying, and let me say that after that piece came out Harper's sent it to a number of women writers, Cynthia Ozick was one of them, and she said, essentially—as if I had been arguing for affirmative action, that sort of thing—she said, "I don't want to be considered a woman writer." Well, that wasn't my suggestion, that wasn't my idea.

ES: Do you find it insulting to be called a woman writer?

FP: Yes. I'd rather be called a writer.

(to read the rest of this interview, please find Tin House #13)