Last weekend's Seattle Times has a nice interview with local writer Nicole Hardy on her soon-to-be-released book, Confessions of a Latter-Day Virgin: A Memoir, a book based on a great piece she wrote a few years ago for the New York Times Modern Love column.

I've met Hardy (I don't know her well) but the Seattle Times interview captures her charm:

“There was a lot of weeping,” she remembered. “I have put all these stories and feelings aside. Opening that Pandora’s box was intense and awful. It was really hard. But you have to give yourself that lecture and remind yourself that you have the right to say these things out loud.”

Once she got through that, well, Hardy had to write her first sex scene, about her first time. No pressure there.

“The verbs were excruciating,” she said. “And the adverbs were worse. That part, just in terms of making it not read like a Fabio romance ... I wanted it to be real and emotional. I wanted people to feel something.”

My one quibble with the piece—or rather, with Hardy—is something she says at the end:

“I want to say, without being an angry, militant feminist, that there are worse things than not being married and being on your own.”

Maybe holding up this pitchfork speared with dicks for years has skewed my feminist perspective, but it seems to me that the point she makes is pretty unmilitant. Mainstream, even. And not at all angry. Off the top of my head, I can think of 10 worse things than being single: tooth decay, female genital mutilation, bank overdraft fees, using Hitler as a rhetorical device, Paul Constant, gout, fetal alcohol poisoning, cliches like "angry, militant feminist," cantaloup, and dog gas.

Ta da! Hardy should rethink what it means to be a feminist before her next interview.