Anna Clark talks with Robin Black about making older women complicated heroines in fiction:
Rarely are older women centered as protagonists in American fiction, a fact that mirrors their marginalized role in society. In If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This, her new collection of stories, author Robin Black pushes back against this trend. Black’s bright and nuanced tales make protagonists of those who, in life as well as in art, are more often caricatures. We meet a 70-year-old artist who grieves the end of a romance while painting a dying man’s portrait, a woman in her mid-60s who makes an unexpected connection with a stranger in Italy, and another older woman who lies about her recent stroke while coming to terms with her daughter’s marital infidelity.
Black talked with TAP about feminism, the political implications of narratives in which older women play central roles, whether social change can be instigated by art, and what it means to her to be a widely heralded debut author in her 40s.
