Tammy Letherer A few days before the No Kings rally, my husband and I are standing in the craft aisle buying poster board. By morning, I have a small arsenal of sign ideas, each one angrier than the last. One of my favorites is: Someone please punch Stephen Miller in the face.
Scott looks at my ideas, then at his own. “Mine is philosophical and erudite,” he says. He’s chosen a Plato quote: The price of apathy is to be ruled by evil men. “Yours are all so angry.”
“Maybe that’s because I’m a woman,” I shoot back. “And I’m more affected by what’s happening in our country.”
He looks sheepish and has to agree. He understands that, as a mother, I’m especially sickened by the trafficking and abuse of children. As a woman, I’m terrified of losing my vote, my voice, and my healthcare.
Still, that kitchen-table moment feels like the whole world in miniature, an example of the difference between the man who can afford philosophy and the woman who is done being polite.
As I work on my signs, I think about another place women are taught to hold back their anger: on the page.
We’re trained to be likable.
Not just in life, but in our writing. We’re told our narrators need to be sympathetic. Our outrage should resolve into something hopeful by the final paragraph. Our anger, if we must include it, should be “earned,” carefully contextualized, softened at the edges so the reader stays comfortable. A woman who writes with open fury risks being called unhinged, shrill, unreadable. A man who writes the same way is called fearless.
This isn’t an accident. It’s a pattern, and most of us absorbed it so young we don’t even feel the flinch anymore. We just pull the punch. We round off the sharp corner. We add the qualifier — I don’t mean to suggest, perhaps I’m wrong, of course there are two sides — and keep writing, a little smaller than we were before we started.
When we sand down our anger on the page, we don’t just lose heat. We lose specificity. Rage, when it’s real, is particular. It knows exactly what it’s angry about and why. The writer who lets herself stay in that particularity produces sentences with teeth. The writer who smooths it into something palatable produces sentences that float away.
When did you last write something you were actually afraid to publish? Your most dangerous sentences might be the ones you deleted.
Who Are Our Angry Writers?
When I tried to think of women writers who model this kind of unguarded rage, I struggled. Not because they don’t exist. Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch gives us a mother so consumed by fury and erasure that she literally transforms into something feral. Naomi Alderman’s The Power imagines women developing the physical capacity to hurt men, and doesn’t flinch at what follows. Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge—one of my favorite characters—is sharp, withholding, sometimes cruel, and one of the most fully realized women in contemporary fiction precisely because Strout never once asked her to be likable.
These books exist. So why did I struggle to find stories of angry women? I’ve probably been conditioned to want comfort even in my reading.
Not long ago, I read All Fours by Miranda July. I found it unconventional and surprising, and I also found myself judging the protagonist as irresponsible and unaccountable. In the story, she blows up her domestic life for her own desire, refuses to apologize, takes up space unapologetically — all things we readily forgive in male protagonists. We call them complex. We call them searching. We call them human. I called her selfish.
An invitation:
Go back to a piece you’ve been working on, or one you abandoned, and look for the places where you went around something instead of through it, where you softened a word that wanted to be hard, where you explained your anger instead of just letting it land, where you protected someone who maybe didn’t need protecting, certainly not at the expense of your own truth.
You don’t have to wave it in the street on a poster board. But you can stop leaving it in the draft folder.
Tomorrow I’ll be at the rally with my sign, surrounded by thousands of people who are also done being quiet. To the women who will be there: notice what it feels like to scream, to hold something over your head that says exactly what you mean, to stand shoulder to shoulder with other women who are furious and unashamed of it. Take that feeling home. Bring it to the page. Let it remind you what your writing sounds like when you stop managing it.
Until next time,
