Jessa Crispin: “To be even more insulting, the femaleness that the anthologies want me to get in touch with is always of one particular type: the middle-to-upper-middle-class, white, married-with-children kind. The May Queen is especially homogenous, with a large chunk of the contributors writing about how to balance motherhood with their writing.”

Jessa must have read a completely different book than I did. Sure, there may be some essays dwelling on upper-to-middle class life in the book, but the copy of The May Queen I have has a gripping tale told by Flor Morales about crossing the border while pregnant — a decidedly working-class predicament. There’s Meghan Daum’s essay about not wanting to have children, wherein she expresses her frustration at the way society judges her by this decision. There’s Laila’s essay about coming to terms with her ethnic identity. And that’s all off the top of my head, without even flipping through the table of contents.

I don’t entirely disagree with Jessa’s sentiments, but it’s a pity that some people need to fabricate examples rather than use real and specific ones.