SOURCE: French, Marilyn, and Janet Todd. “Marilyn French.” In Women Writers Talking, edited by Janet Todd, pp. 69-78. New York: Holmes and Meier Publishers, 1983.

In the following interview, French discusses her body of work, the masculinity of language, and the critical reception of her novels.

The room was elegant, expensive, overlooking Central Park; the interview formal, businesslike. It was my first meeting with Marilyn French and there was no intimacy or memories in our conversation.

I asked her about her first published book—on James Joyce's Ulysses—and why she chose to write on this topic. “It was my doctoral dissertation,” she replied, “and it was a problem. I love Joyce, but if you're going to write a dissertation on something that's been written on a thousand times it's no fun; yet nobody had ever really been able to talk about what lies at the center of Ulysses...