Life & Wisdom Quote by Ann Beattie

Taste, for Ann Beattie, isn’t a loyalty oath; it’s an argument with the shelf. Her line walks into a familiar cultural trap - the assumption that admiring women writers must come packaged as solidarity, while admiring men is allowed to be picky, even fickle. By naming Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro, she chooses two canon-certified figures who are often treated as institutions: the kind of writers you’re expected to “support” in bulk, not read in parts. Beattie pushes back with a critic’s plainspoken heresy: she likes a lot of Atwood, much of Munro. Not everything.

The sly pivot is the second sentence. She frames her selectiveness with women first, then almost apologizes by offering a control group: she’s equally selective with men. That “Again” signals she’s been in this conversation before, likely with interviewers or audiences looking for gendered patterns in her reading habits. The subtext is both defensive and defiant: don’t audition me for Team Women Writers, but also don’t pretend men get a special pass where partial admiration counts as serious engagement.

In the larger context of late-20th-century literary culture - when women writers were gaining visibility but still getting flattened into category and quota - Beattie insists on the right to be an ordinary reader with discerning, inconsistent preferences. It’s not a rejection of feminism so much as a refusal of its most performative demand: that appreciation must be total to be legitimate.