Life's Pleasures Quote by Marilyn French

French’s line lands like a compliment to genius and a demotion of herself, but it’s really a sly argument about what culture actually runs on. Wine is the prestige product: rare, discussed in reverent tones, associated with taste-making and gatekeeping. Water is what keeps the body moving. By calling her books “water,” she’s not begging for mercy; she’s staking a claim to usefulness and reach, the kind of reading that circulates through ordinary days rather than seminar rooms.

The subtext is a critique of literary hierarchy and the macho romance of “greatness.” “Great geniuses” reads as a loaded category, not just aesthetic but institutional: who gets taught, reviewed, archived, and mythologized. French, whose feminism was often treated as both urgent and aesthetically suspect, knows how quickly work made for mass audiences gets dismissed as “message” or “issue” rather than “art.” She flips the insult. If the canon is wine, it’s also optional, performative, and rationed; it can intoxicate, but it doesn’t sustain a public.

Intent matters here: she’s protecting ambition while refusing the terms of the game. The punchline is “everybody drinks water,” a democratic fact that exposes the quiet vanity of prestige culture. It’s also a writer’s credo for impact over aura. French isn’t denying that wine exists; she’s asking why we keep pretending it’s the only thing worth serving when the room is thirsty.