Any time spent with your child is partly a damn sad time, the sadness of life a-going, bright, vivid, each time a last. A loss. A glimpse into what could've been. It can be corrupting.

That passage is from Richard Ford's Independence Day, the second of three novels that center on the character Frank Bascombe, a not wholly likable short-story writer turned sportswriter turned real estate agent, who is supremely skilled at disguising himself from himself. Coincidentally, yesterday, as I was skimming an article called "On Bad Reviews," I learned that "Richard Ford once responded to a negative review by taking one of the reviewer’s novels outside and shooting a hole through it." That sounds like something Frank Bascombe might have done, which interests me because I had never thought of Frank as being much like his creator. I don't really know anything at all about his creator except by way of his author photos. Also, he lives somewhere on the Maine coast, or used to live there, or lives there part time, or something. In a state like Maine, it's not difficult to get noticed as a writer; so I've always assumed that Ford prefers an indistinct public persona. But shooting a hole through a reviewer's novel is not at all indistinct, so clearly I've been missing something.

Anyway, I like these novels, even though I don't much like Frank; and one thing I particularly like is the precision of their settings. New Jersey, not Frank, is my favorite character.

By the way, I've been thinking about yesterday's post, which mentioned the Vida statistics et al., and one thing I want to make clear is that I have also had the good fortune to work with journal and book editors, both male and female, who like my writing style and have asked to see more of it. I expect that several of those publishers would not test at all well on Vida's gender exam. But to me, as an individual female writer, they have been both encouraging and demanding, and who, really, could ask for more?

Change is incremental; and no doubt, in the larger scheme, this particular gender change is too incremental. On the other hand, these editors didn't know a thing about me, and nonetheless they read my nonscholarly, unmasculine, unfashionable work and chose to publish it. I could be a fluke. But I hope I won't always be.