The book also tackles the taboo topic of competitiveness among women.
Ruth Rothwax is dismayed about how aggressive and competitive women are with each other. Men have more straightforward relationships, she says. They don’t hang up phones in a huff with each other. They don’t feud and not speak for months over insignificant issues. Men don’t weep at something another man says. Or hate them for years because of it. I tend to agree with her.
Hitler, who I don’t usually bring in as an ally, said that women had a talent “for giving a kiss to a woman friend and at the same time piercing her heart with a well-sharpened stiletto.” Do you recognize that picture? I do. I recognize it in myself. A bitchiness. And a certain pleasure in that bitchiness. Even when I should know better.

How did your interest in words and language come about?
I was the first member of my family to learn English. I was very aware that being able to speak English was highly valued. It’s a very strange thing to have parents to bring you up and not speak to you in their mother tongue. It was crucial to me to listen carefully to what my mother and father said because their English was not great. I spoke very slowly and was very aware of choosing my words very carefully. I had no other language in common with them. I always was very conscious of being clear and that is still so important to me today. I never want to be one of these writers that whose sentences you have to read ten times to work out what it means. I’m not impressed by that and I don’t enjoy it. But I think that absolute need to transmit things clearly came from knowing that I wouldn’t be understood at all from the time I was very young.
I was also very conscious of the power of words because I watched people treat my parents as less than human. If you’ve got a very thick accent and a vocabulary that’s much smaller than you need, people assume you’re stupid. I knew if you spoke well you would be respected. I had other examples of how language saved lives. My mother was absolutely sure that being able to speak German saved her life in Auschwitz and in Stuthof, the death camp she was sent to after Auschwitz. So I always knew that language gave you power, it gave you a voice. more

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