Why are you so angry? My husband frequently asked me why I was so much angrier than other women. It always made me smile. I was exactly as angry as every other woman I knew.

It wasn’t that we’d been born angry; we’d become women and ended up angry.

Anger is one of the last privileges of the truly helpless. Infants are angry. Have you ever sat all night holding a baby in the dark who’s screaming right into your face? It changes you, or so my husband used to say. He’d done that one night, sat and been screamed at. I was sitting right next to him, but he always told the story as if he’d been the only one there. All the other days and nights, it had just been me. But that one night had been the real game-changer, apparently.

My mother told me I’d been such a happy child. You loved everything, she said. I became angry early, though. I was precocious.

I pitied men for having to stay the same all their lives, for missing out on this consuming rage.