How Should a White Woman Writer Be?

While others have worried, loudly, about the death of white men in literary fiction — a generation lost to the trenches of internet culture wars, unable to write as victims or aggressors — I’ve watched from afar as white women danced on their graves. Each month, it seems, a new white woman writer receives a big book launch, “voice of a generation” allegations, and media coverage that links her glamorous, Googleable personal lore to her book itself. Her writing invariably sparks discourse, sometimes misogynistic, often written off as jealousy over her success. Take Madeline Cash, 30; her debut novel, Lost Lambs, an internet-era remix of the American family novel, was published in January to wide publicity, inspiring a fair bit of white-on-white crime wherein some Substack haters accused Cash of being a nepo baby or beneficiary of an industrywide conspiracy and others rushed to her defense.