“'I was planning on writing about a woman for 50 years. I will never be competent enough to do so, but at some point you have to try.' How arduous he makes it all sound – plumbing the treacherous, alien depths of a ladybrain.
"Women, I am repeatedly told, don’t like – don’t get – Cormac McCarthy. It’s the kind of patronising nonsense that gets levelled at us when we point out the converse: that McCarthy’s fiction doesn’t get – doesn’t like – women. When female characters do appear in his pages, they are cowards, victims and sexpots: sirenic doom-bringers, cheetah-owning dommes, simpering twits and bad mothers. It’s often possible to admire the Pulitzer prize winner despite his paper-thin girls."