In a series of recent tweets, novelist Ayelet Waldman bashed author Katie Roiphe–defending her husband, Michael Chabon, in the Twittersphere.
Here is the complete set of tweets: “I am so BORED with Katie Roiphe’s ‘I like the sexist drunk writers’ bull****. She happily trashes my husband, but guess what b****? … He not only writes rings and rings and rings around you, but the same rings around your drunken literary love objects … Really Roiphe? You seek ‘slightly greater obsession w/ the sublime sentence.’ My husband’s sentences are INFINITELY more sublime than yours.”
She ended the Twitter tirade with this note: “I do not like it when people insult those I love.”
In 2009, Roiphe wrote this about Waldman’s husband and his contemporaries: “This generation of writers is suspicious of what Michael Chabon, in Wonder Boys, calls ‘the artificial hopefulness of sex.’ They are good guys, sensitive guys, and if their writing is denuded of a certain carnality, if it lacks a sense of possibility, of expansiveness, of the bewildering, transporting effects of physical love, it is because of a certain cultural shutting down, a deep, almost puritanical disapproval of their literary forebears and the shenanigans they lived through.” (Via Dwight Garner)