![]() I can write: “The bat bounced on her head, her honey hair, with a sound that surprised him. ![]() The reading and writing of violence are always to some extent egregious, unnecessary for the plot. There would be much less interest in a film or story about a woman painting her bedroom wall, falling off the ladder and hitting her head than in the same woman in the same room suffering the same injury at the hands of a man with a baseball bat: the story we find most interesting is about power and abuse more than physiology. Unless you’re a doctor, it’s not the biology of violence that’s important but the structures that allow physical harm and the intergenerational trauma it creates. I didn’t want a poetics of pain, didn’t want to distract my readers from accumulating psychological pain by the bruises and screaming that are there for the taking on any screen near you. ![]() I thought about it carefully in Bodies of Light, where a girl is hurt between paragraphs. I’ve often written about family dysfunction and damage, but avoided describing physical harm. I wanted to write about violence in my new book. We all know that abused female bodies sell books. Writers object to the implication that someone is telling us what to write about some men object to the implication that violence against men is less problematic. The new prize has attracted the anger invariably raised by public mention of violence against women. ![]() T he Staunch prize, for a thriller “in which no woman is beaten, stalked, sexually exploited, raped or murdered”, is about to announce its first shortlist. ![]()
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