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25 July 2013updated 27 Sep 2015 3:57am

Katie Roiphe interview: “There is a lot of unexamined feminist outrage against other women”

Helen Lewis talks to Katie Roiphe, columnist and author, most recently of In Praise of Messy Lives.

By Helen Lewis

Katie Roiphe likes to provoke. The American essayist describes herself in her latest collection as an “uncomfortablist”. Considering her career began with a book suggesting that date rape statistics were overblown and asserting, “Rape is a natural trump card for feminism,” that is a small understatement.

In person, though, Roiphe has a demeanour that is quiet and watchful, although her defiant halo of tight curls and the loud print of her minidress suggest she is less of a wallflower than she might at first seem. “It’s the goal to get people to think about things in a new way and if that’s what you’re doing, you can’t then complain about people attacking you,” she tells me. “You know, we say that women writers have a harder time on the internet with the angry comments – but a lot of those angry comments come from women. There is a lot of unexamined feminist outrage against other women.”

Roiphe’s recent book In Praise of Messy Lives begins with an appropriately uncomfortable description of her divorce. Her unhappily married friends, she notices, are desperate to believe that she is miserable, desperate to think that her children are suffering; her happily married friends do not judge.

It is tempting to dismiss Roiphe as just another confessional columnist and some do. Hamilton Nolan of Gawker seems to write an angry blog every time she publishes an essay, blog with titles such as “Shut up, Katie Roiphe” and “Your rape fantasy is boring, Katie Roiphe”. (She responded with a piece about the site’s “autopilot Schadenfreude” entitled “Gawker is big immature baby”.)

Despite her personal focus and her tendency to enrage, Roiphe is more than a starspangled Liz Jones. For a start, her range is impressive. She has a PhD in English from Princeton and teaches at New York University and she seems as happy writing about why so many mothers are keen to replace their Facebook profile pictures with photos of their babies – “The choice seems to constitute a retreat to an older form of identity, to a time when women were called Mrs John Smith” – as she is close-reading a forgotten female author.

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She is brave, too. In her essay “The Naked and the Conflicted”, she casually picks a fight with a generation of male American writers, describing Dave Eggers, Benjamin Kunkel and David Foster Wallace as boringly guilt-ridden and emasculated, particularly in comparison to the “onanistic exuberance” of Philip Roth and John Updike’s ability to “do poetry and whorehouse”. (To compound the offence, she blames feminist critics for inflicting all this snuggling on us by being so hard on Roth’s and Updike’s bawdiness in the first place.)

Despite the negative reaction, Roiphe is unrepentant. “I am saying something that I think is common sense but other people think is really crazy.” She pauses. “That’s a position I often find myself in.”

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