My problem? I couldn’t find any female writers who wrote in this way. Even Cixous’s ultimate examples of écriture féminine writers were men: James Joyce and John Genet. I hadn’t discovered the postmodernist novelist Kathy Acker yet. I adored female poets like Plath and Sexton and Millay, but they seemed to assimilate into the male canon rather than defy it. But listening to Tori Amos’s 'Boys for Pele'—twenty years old as of January 22nd—felt like the purest expression of this mode I’ve been able to find. And it was a revelation.