Welcome to Literary Friction. I'm Carrie Plitt, here as always with my co-host Octavia Bright from London.

Hi, Octavia. How are you? From London. You're both in London and from London.

That's right, baby. I'm good. I'm a big old spring cliche right now. I followed your advice and have

daffodils all over my house, the cheap ones from the supermarket, and they are making me very happy.

The very few tulips that survived the squirrel massacre in my garden, as in the squirrels massacred

the tulips. I didn't massacre the squirrels, I did not

massacre the squirrels. They absolutely robbed me of my spring joy. But I have to say, the 10 out of 40

that survived are coming up absolute roses. It's very exciting to me to see. How about you?

How are you? I also have

tulips coming up and it is so exciting. There's, I mean, like, it still blows my mind that you can

plant something and then it can like emerge out of the ground. Yeah, it's amazing, isn't it? Magic.

Like, it's changing every single day, which is really exciting. And yeah, I'm

loving the daylight. That's how I'm feeling. Just loving the daylight. Yeah. But onto the show,

today we are really excited to welcome the writer, critic, and scholar Sarah Ahmed to the show.

Sarah's latest book, The Feminist Killjoy Handbook, shows how the label of Killjoy has often

been used to dismiss feminism by claiming that it causes unhappiness.

But Sarah shows that assuming the identity of the feminist killjoy is a path of liberation

and change, a way to uncover a deeper history of feminism and fight for a more equal future.

We've wanted to dedicate a show to feminism for a long time now. So today we'll also be talking

more generally about the intersections of feminism and literature, discussing the feminist writers

who have inspired us, and thinking through what books can do when it comes

to the continued struggle for gender equality. But before we get started, can you tell our listeners

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