But I think that goes back to the belief that declaring yourself in the camp of women is to put yourself in the provinces, or on the farm team, or to suggest you're not playing in the big leagues. Well, everybody reads in a gendered way. Your book The Other Side is about four generations of an Irish-American family. My grandmother was Irish, and the whole subject of immigration was intensely appealing to me. I thought that people were very sentimental about it.
Immigrants are very tough people.
You can't experience that much loss on the whole without suffering emotional loss. Some immigrants prospered and some really didn't. I'm talking about people who were really uneducated, and who stayed in Irish ghettos at a time when other ethnic groups were mixing and talking. The Irish were still pretty silent. Freud once said that he didn't think psychoanalysis could work on the Irish.