Angela Carter, the British writer and feminist icon, delivered a withering critique of Joan Didion during a 1986 telephone interview with Rosemary Carroll for BOMB magazine. The exchange captures a moment of genuine literary friction between two formidable voices of twentieth-century letters.
Carter's dismissal of Didion, who has since become canonized as a literary saint in American culture, reveals the contingency of literary reputations. What reads now as sacrilege—criticizing Didion's prose or sensibility—was apparently fair game in the mid-1980s, when Didion's status remained more contested. Carter's bluntness ("Yah, boo, sucks") suggests she viewed Didion's self-presentation or aesthetic choices as unworthy of the reverence some readers granted them.
This incident belongs to a lineage of literary feuds that animate publishing history. Carter and Didion occupied different traditions. Carter worked primarily in fiction and fables, mining folklore and reimagining fairy tales with radical feminist intent. Didion built her reputation on essays and reportage, cultivating a persona of detached California cool. Their sensibilities diverged fundamentally—Carter favored the fantastic and transformative; Didion favored sharp observation of surfaces and systems.
The BOMB interview matters because it documents a woman writer declining to genuflect before another woman writer's altar. Feminist literary culture often demands sisterhood, yet Carter's independence here models something else: the refusal to subordinate honest aesthetic judgment to solidarity politics.
Today, both writers occupy secure positions in the canon. Yet Carter's comment preserves a moment when literary reputations felt less settled, when a major novelist could simply say she found another major novelist not worth her time. That honesty feels increasingly rare in an era of carefully managed literary brands.
THE TAKEAWAY: Literary sainthood is temporary until it isn't, and even feminist icons disagree sharply about whose work endures.