I met Slavenka Drakulić about fifteen years ago, while writing my PhD on everyday life in women’s autobiographical texts. I asked my PhD supervisor, the Croatian literary scholar Andrea Zlatar, whether she could recommend any texts by women on aging. She couldn’t off the top of her head, but mentioned that the writer Slavenka Drakulić had recently asked her the very same question. Slavenka would go on to write about the subject in her long essay ‘Flirting with the stranger’ and the collection Invisible Woman and Other Stories. Our discussions about women’s aging were only the beginning of an intense and fascinating relationship.
Slavenka and I shared an interest in literature and women’s everyday lives. For a long time, a quote from her book How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed was pinned to my wall: ‘Women’s lives, by no means spectacular, banal in fact, say as much about politics as no end of theoretical political analyses.’ She often returned to her favourite writers – Marguerite Duras, Irena Vrkljan, whom she regarded as a role model, and more recently Zeruya Shalev and Annie Ernaux. She also loved Walter Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood around 1900 and kept it above her desk.
Soon after we met, Slavenka asked if I would help organize her archive. She opened a cabinet in her study, packed with unsorted papers: old, yellowing reviews of her books in many languages, interviews with her and interviews she had conducted, piles of literary magazines, videotapes, CDs, photographs large and small, faded letters written on fax paper, slides, and more. Slavenka wrote a lot, and her books have been translated into around thirty languages – including Chinese, Japanese, Armenian and Persian – and often received a plethora of reviews. Arranging the archive became a years-long adventure, a dynamic work in progress.
When she first showed me the archive, she sighed at the sight of the mountain of papers and said: ‘I’ve concluded that nothing will happen unless I organize it myself.’ I learned many things from her, but this was maybe the most important: do whatever you can yourself and don’t wait for anything or anyone, because there is never really enough time. Her long illness sharpened her awareness of mortality and writing was always her priority. She often said that ‘life exists to be described.’ With Slavenka, everything was eventually turned into text. Whatever she was thinking about became a novel, an essay, a newspaper article, or some combination of all three.
It was in the early 2000s, when I was a young feminist with a child I feared would overwhelm my intellectual life, that I discovered her collection The Mortal Sins of Feminism (1984) – one of the earliest contributions to feminism in eastern Europe (unfortunately still available only in Croatian). The essays are astonishingly relevant. The first, written in 1979 – the year I was born – advocates for introducing mandatory sex education in schools. This was a time when concepts of gender performativity and linguistic constructs were getting all the hype – and when feminism(s) tended to forget women’s biological determination. I was grateful to Slavenka for her concrete texts on the reality of women’s lives. She analysed patriarchy in the everyday: women’s magazines, children’s picture books, political speeches, domestic violence, and more.
She used to say that women must actively defend their reproductive rights and understand the dangers of politicians and governments all over the world who want to suffocate women’s emancipation by restoring them to their ‘natural’ caretaking roles. When she talked about this, she moved her hands energetically, with a sparkle in her eye, sometimes laughing and saying that perhaps women do not protest because things are not yet bad enough. She was worried that women would wake up only when it was too late, in some version of The Handmaid’s Tale, when they would no longer have a voice.
In 2020, she published a new edition of The Mortal Sins of Feminism, which included her more recent essays on women’s issues. In the afterword, Slavenka explained that she wanted to publish a new edition because, ‘if we expected a better situation, more respect, greater equality – that did not happen’. On the contrary, patriarchy is resilient, and women, because of their ability to bear children, can overnight become victims of nationalist or religious ideologies. The book is ideal reading for anybody who doesn’t otherwise read theory or feminist texts, because it addresses these issues simply and tangibly.
In our age of conflicts throughout the world, War Is the Same Everywhere (2022) – a collection of essays written over a period of some thirty years – is equally important. But my favourites among Slavenka’s books are Flesh of her Flesh (2012) and They Would Never Hurt a Fly (2004). The former explores the motives of people who donate organs to strangers, while the latter is a book of essays about ‘ordinary people’ who become war criminals. We often discussed how the two books revealed opposite aspects of humanity – the unimaginable good and the unimaginable evil of which people are capable.
They Would Never Hurt a Fly has been translated into many languages and is often discussed and quoted, but Flesh of her Flesh received less attention. Slavenka believed that it was easier to read about war criminals, since we imagine we could never be them, than about organ donors – because we could be them, but perhaps are not altruistic enough, which makes us uncomfortable.
I envied Slavenka for writing fast. As a literary critic, it takes me long time to write reviews, and not before I have filled notebooks with notes and read piles of books. Slavenka, on the other hand, could finish a lucid short text on a highly complex subject in only two hours. This fascinated me. She read constantly, almost greedily, following new writers as well as newspapers and magazines, both domestic and international. There were piles of books beside her bed. She liked to underline them and, to my horror, even fold down the corners of the pages (until a few years ago, when she became enthusiastic about colourful sticky post-its and used them abundantly).
Slavenka was especially interested in new books by younger women writers and journalists. She also reviewed their books, something quite unusual in Croatia’s small cultural circle, which is often ready to criticize but reluctant to praise. Slavenka paid little attention to any of that. She knew how important it was to look beyond the borders of a small country – to read not just the classics but also the most interesting and innovative contemporary writers, journalists and critics. She published her essays in some of the most prominent magazines worldwide, and books with major publishing houses such as Penguin USA. Once you consider the very best, mediocrity is no longer an option.
As one would expect, Slavenka was a complex person. She could be stubborn and emotionally demanding. But it was precisely that stubbornness that allowed her to overcome severe illness for so many years and continue writing tirelessly. At the same time, she generously shared her knowledge and readily supported other writers. She encouraged me to write and speak publicly, celebrated every article and book I published – though she never missed a chance to point out that I wrote too little. She treated many other writers the same way. She also showed great compassion toward various people suffering from illness, helping them both practically and financially.
It was fitting that the Croatian Journalists’ Association gave her a lifetime achievement award last year. She appreciated it because it came from colleagues, and because the Croatian cultural circle had often excluded her. But readers’ responses to her books mattered more to her than awards. I remember one deeply moving event. It was at the end of 2025, after Slavenka had presented her short story collection What We Don’t Talk About (2024) in Zagreb. The audience applauded for a very, very long time; in fact, it seemed that people could not stop applauding. They were thanking Slavenka not just for this book but for the accumulated work of a lifetime, for the profound mark her writing had left on all of us. She was deeply touched.
Slavenka was witty, curious, genuinely interested in people and the world around her. She cared about truth, about personal and social responsibility, and tirelessly searched for a more just and civilized society. She was a perfect example of Gramsci’s ‘pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will’. She liked to say that ‘optimists are simply uninformed pessimists’ – yet she behaved optimistically. Every day she pushed forward, enthusiastically talking about new books, new subjects, and kept writing and writing and writing. It was never difficult for her to write one more article about abortion, one more about abused women, one more about fascist tendencies in society, and then another one after that. When her archive eventually becomes publicly available, we will be able to continue studying her work and pick up where she left off.
I could write much more about Slavenka, but I can almost feel her looking at me and shaking her head in disapproval because I have praised her excessively and without restraint. I can hear her saying, ‘Cut half of it!’
A few days ago, the collection Why I Never Learned How to Cook arrived in the bookstores. She had been greatly looking forward to it. It is an intriguing combination of text and image, in which autobiographical stories about cooking are a starting point for reflections on social conventions (one might even say indoctrinations) according to which it is ‘natural’ for women to enjoy cooking.
I still cannot believe she is gone. What pains me most is the realization that I can no longer show or tell her anything – that I cannot send her this text. But her books are looking down at me from the shelves. They continue to encourage and inspire me.