Much of her publishing career was an encounter with misogyny: in the 1950s, male critics called her talent “masculine,” “hardball,” and “virile”—and they meant these descriptors as insults! (This kind of confused insistence on gendered literary territories has still not gone away, sadly.) The implication was that as a meek and feeble female, she had no right to her aloof candor, her outrageous confidence. And it’s true that you’d have to think quite highly of your own ideas to express them with such austerity and melodrama, but that is the great paradox, and tension, of the equally rudimentary and audacious style of Duras. “People who say they don’t like their own books, if such people exist, do so because they haven’t learned to resist the attraction to humiliation,” she wrote in one of her journals. “I love my books. They interest me.”