[...] The twentieth century, besides, was a century of radical change for women. Feminist thought and feminist practices liberated energies, set in motion the most radical and profound transformation of the many that took place in the last century. I wouldn’t recognize myself without women’s struggles, women’s nonfiction writing, women’s literature: they made me adult. My experience as a novelist, both published and unpublished, culminated, after twenty years, in the attempt to relate, with writing that was appropriate, my sex and its difference. But for a long time I’ve thought that if we have to cultivate our narrative tradition, we should never renounce the entire stock of techniques that we have behind us. We have to demonstrate, precisely because we are women, that we can construct worlds as wide and powerful and rich as those designed by male writers, if not more. So we have to be well equipped, we have to dig deep into our difference, using advanced tools. Above all we mustn’t give up our greatest freedom. Every woman novelist, as with women in many other fields, should aim at being not only the best woman novelist but the best of the most skilled practitioners of literature, whether male or female. To do so we have to avoid every ideological conformity, every false show of thought, every adherence to a party line or canon. Writers should be concerned only with narrating as well as possible what they know and feel, the beautiful and the ugly and the contradictory, without obeying any prescription, not even a prescription that comes from the side you’re on. Writing requires maximum ambition, maximum audacity, and programmatic disobedience.