The very strange thing

about this Guardian excerpt from Stella Duffy's contribution to a short-story anthology called Little Black Dress ("I have become the Baroness. I almost don't know how it happened, as if the time that passed did so on grandma's footsteps, creeping up to catch me out. One day I was Liesl, wet dress of palest pink clinging to my sixteen-going-on-twenty-one breasts, panting the possibilities of all things male beyond my ken (sure they were, Barbie) and the next, I am the Baroness") is that it seems to un-parody--some years after the fact--my friend Bruno Maddox's novel My Little Blue Dress. Which I thought had made it thereafter impossible to have artfully naive/nostalgic female narrators ever again meditate on the shapeliness of their comely breasts unless it was either (a) postmodern or (b) pornographic (or both). Possibly the Duffy falls into category (a), that's what the Barbie aside would seem to suggest (actually I quite like Duffy's novels, I shouldn't single her out like this), but it wasn't at all clear in context; I think there should be a literary moratorium on phrases such as "sixteen-going-on-twenty-one breasts."