An essay that ostensibly begins about anxiety and Sudjic’s response to the response to her first novel (the excellent Sympathy, highly recommended), but quickly morphs into something a bit more interesting - the way female authors are read compared to male authors. It’s a subject I’ve long been interested in. There was a strech in 2020⁄2021 of reading a lot of contemporary female authors - Sudjic, Naoise Dolan, Megan Nolan, Lauren Oyler, Patricia Lockwood, inevitably Sally Rooney - where it really felt like they spoke to me in a way, or at least were writing about subjects, that contemporary male authors weren’t. Sympathy, for example, so precisely captures the feeling of staring at a locked Instagram account of someone you… fancy? Have a crush on? Semi-obsessed with? That limerent feeling. Capturing that in a way that e.g. Ben Lerner is not particularly writing about. In the face of, as Sudjic puts it in Exposure, the chorus of male voices in the back of female authors’ head about what right have they to assume people will relate or that this is worth writing, against the male authors’ ability to presume a standard world view without being assumed to simply be recounting their own lives with names changed, I hadn’t considered truly how hard those novels must have been to write. But they are, potentially, all the more affecting for it. It’s been a few years now since Sympathy Road; I hope Sudjic is soon able to overcome whatever anxieties might be present in writing her next.