What I like and admire about Adrienne Rich, poet and writer, is that her activism didn’t directly occupy public space, but inhabited the sublime spaces between behaviour and language. The 16th of May commemorates the eighty-eighth birthday of Rich, a woman who, more than many, has influenced my views on art, feminism and the archetypes of femininity. She was political and actively so, famously declining the National Medal of Arts, and protesting the vote by House Speaker Newt Gingrich to end funding for the National Endowment for the Arts in 1997.

Having your work of journalism sidelined into a memoir – a genre, nonetheless, worthy of good writing – still demonstrates that women’s personal writing cannot be commercially seen as journalism or ‘serious’ documentation. When women writers seek to share 'truth' – not confessions – it shouldn’t be sold off as memoir when those stories are about collective human experiences.