Who's Afraid?

Porter Square Books, at a reading. "Being a writer is heroic, really. You spend a lot of time sitting there by yourself, apparently doing nothing." Julia Briggs, the author, is wearing corduroy, is British to the teeth, is sparkling her way through an oddly upbeat gloss on Virginia Woolf's life and work. The emptiness of the chair next to me seems conspicuous. "He simply told them he wouldn't go back to Sri Lanka." You cannot bring Virginia Woolf to certain places. She addresses only certain inequalities. "In the story, you see her fascination with the things that women can't talk about with men, but of course for that very reason she couldn't publish them."