Claire Messud, Novelist b. 1966
New York Times Magazine August 13, 2017

One of our foremost chroniclers of women's hidden appetites

Her mother attempted to go to law school but chose to quit when the pressures of her family and her husband overcame her.  She never spoke of it again, but her mouth would close into a thin line and she would leave the room when law school was mentioned  Later, suffering from dementia   she said "There's so much of life to get through after you realize that none of your dreams will come true." 

Messud too confessed dismay at the encroachment of day-to-day demands on intellectual life.  There are trade-offs.  But more life is more life.  And if you're in the business of life . . . I had a sense that the costs were high and I didn't want that to be my fate.  I had a sense that's I'd better not learn to cook, which I never did.  And I had a sense that you have to be ruthless in some way.  And she chose as her partner someone who was raised with the expectation that fathers share in the child care and housework, and who, as she puts it, would do "never less than 50 percent" with what she calls "very careful subconscious Darwinian selection." 

If Messud is angry about something, it's the social constructs that work against women's ambition and desire, rendering them invisible or even snuffing them out.   The literary taboo on women with "unseemly" emotions is just part of a problem female writers and readers have long been articulation:  a male dominated literary canon offering a restricted vision of women's possibilities.   Readers crave depictions of women as real, as flawed, as people who can't be constrained by a predetermined narrative, not just women in relation to men.  Her work quietly seethes at the idea that a woman needs to be "likable" - or that a man should be the judge of her liability.