Turn to fiction to appreciate #MeToo

It does not feel reductive to read fiction through this prism

In The Friend, Sigrid Nunez’s 2018 National Book Award-winning novel, the narrator, a writing teacher, grumbles about her students’ personal essays on sexual violence. Always the same nouns, she complains to us (scar, bruise, blood), always the same verbs (choke, starve, scream). The dull, depressing sameness of these stories. Their horrifying number.

She has no way of knowing that she stars in a book that is part of a wave of its own: “#MeToo novels”, they’re called, these disparate stories of sex and power suddenly regarded as timely, and read through the lens of an unfolding movement — with happy results,