Marriage Quote by Michael Chabon

Chabon stages a little courtroom drama where the “evidence” is overwhelming and the verdict still won’t land. Three women closest to the work in different ways - spouse, agent, editor - all respond with approval, yet his “fear” remains intact. The line is funny in that dry, self-incriminating way: he’s practically begging us to notice how irrational the anxiety is. But it’s also a tight snapshot of how authority gets gendered in a writer’s head even when reality keeps contradicting it.

The repetition does the heavy lifting. “Another woman, another woman” isn’t just a detail; it’s the point. Chabon is marking a pattern, almost like he’s building a case against himself: if the gatekeepers and first readers are women and they’re on board, what exactly is he bracing for? The subtext is less “women don’t get it” than “I’ve internalized the idea that I’m about to be judged for how I’ve written women, or what I’ve presumed about their experience.” It’s the anticipatory cringe of authorship: the fear that a book will be read not only for its craft but for its permissions.

Contextually, it sits in that late-20th/early-21st-century moment when male literary fiction writers became newly conscious of gendered scrutiny - not just from critics, but from the people who shepherd a manuscript into the world. Chabon’s candor is the move: he doesn’t perform innocence, he performs discomfort. That’s why it works. He’s admitting that endorsement doesn’t erase the older reflexes, it just exposes them.