“And I’m Like, ‘I Don’t Care.’”

Do you prefer to write about women?

I sometimes get asked: “How come the men in your stories don’t have such strong characters?” And I’m like: “I don’t care.” I just want to find out about all the different lives a woman can live. But my feminism has never been against men. It’s not erasure; it’s just they’re not the focus. In real life, they’re quite nice.

I haven’t yet read any fiction by 29-year-old novelist Helen Oyeyemi, who wrote her first book, The Icarus Girl, at age 17, but her interview with The Guardian from this past weekend is as good an argument for starting now as you’ll find. Oyeyemi’s fifth novel, Boy, Snow, Bird, came out last week. [Guardian, via Lauren]