One Man’s Novel In a Woman’s World
This little essay could go very wrong.
I don’t have a thesis or, frankly, much of an opinion, but I do have some questions and thoughts, and so I will set them down gently here and step back to see what I’ve made. What I lack in confidence in my ideas, I make up for in curiosity, so if you have thoughts, jump in.
The topic: The dominance of women in the world of literary fiction.
My experience: It’s complicated.
My question: How much should the market influence what I write about, from whose perspective, and about what kinds of experiences?
A few bits of context:
“Over the past two decades, literary fiction has become a largely female pursuit. Novels are increasingly written by women and read by women. In 2004, about half the authors on the New York Times fiction best-seller list were women and about half men; this year, the list looks to be more than three-quarters women. According to multiple reports, women readers now account for about 80 percent of fiction sales.”
There’s more!
“The publishing industry is suffering from a damaging gender imbalance. According to a recent UK publishers’ survey, 83 per cent of marketing, 92 per cent of publicity and 78 per cent of editorial staff in Britain’s publishing industry are female. Taking an average of those three figures suggests an industry whose employees are 84 percent female.”
I have encountered this world. While I usually can find a home for short stories in literary journals (huge thanks to those publications!), the novel is my white whale. I’ve written six of them and found agents for three of them. Editors read, praised (for the most part), and passed on all of them.
I am aware this all sounds like a complaint. Please know that it’s not.
First, I'm all for it. I really am. My cohort has been in charge of most things, and we've made quite a mess of it. Morris’ caveat is mine:
“To be clear, I welcome the end of male dominance in literature. Men ruled the roost for far too long, too often at the expense of great women writers who ought to have been read instead. I also don’t think that men deserve to be better represented in literary fiction; they don’t suffer from the same kind of prejudice that women have long endured. Furthermore, young men should be reading Sally Rooney and Elena Ferrante. Male readers don’t need to be paired with male writers.”
A second admission: the most logical, likely culprit for my struggles to publish these novels is me. Very likely, the books aren't good enough, the subject matter isn't compelling enough, and the execution isn't effective enough.
With that said, I do think a lot about how, as a deeply middle-aged white man who is otherwise employed, I might create the kind of novel that I want to write and sell in the world as it is now.
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For more than a decade, I taught high school English at an all-girls’ school in Cleveland, Ohio. I count them among my best years, mostly because I had more fun, made deeper connections, and felt myself grow more than in any other era as a worker bee.
In our classes, I did my best to ensure that the texts we read, the novels, plays, stories, and poems came from a variety of voices and reflected a variety of backgrounds, but inevitably, in the early aughts, I would teach Gatsby, Huck Finn, and The Sun Also Rises. And when we’d analyze them, we’d invariably interrogate them for their gender roles. We tended to use texts as archeological artifacts that we could analyze for what they revealed about a society that was both changing and also lingering, echoing, and transmutating.
If I were to go back to the syllabi, I am not sure it would include Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Twain, and Vonnegut -- in addition to Hurston and Morrison and Dickinson among others -- but maybe it would? The canon is both foundational and incendiary, and sometimes I think those two words describe the job of high school better than most other words.
On the other hand, we had a million conversations about the puppetry of fiction and how frustrating it was for those young women to see the lives of women approximated through the pens of men.
So, there’s good reason to conclude that my experience as a writer today indicates that we are in the world those young women sought. I’m all in for that.
My reading is almost entirely by women and about women. I loved The Guest, All Fours, Eastbound, and The Life of the Mind (a hidden gem of a book). I just finished Amity Gaige's Heartwood and think her Sea Wife is about as gorgeous and beautifully rendered a book as I’ve ever read. I do read some male writers; I'm in the middle of Adam Ross’ Playworld now and loved James, Such Kindness, and anything by Dan Chaon.
Mostly, though, I stick to women writers who pen novels about women’s lives because I am curious and because I am researching. It is clear to me that, as a writer, the lives that readers want to explore are largely the lives of women. The question I wrestle with is how to write in this reality.
The agent I have worked with most recently is not shy about emphasizing the need for any novel I write to have a strong female narrator or at least a female protagonist whom readers will root for, empathize with, and see themselves in.
Her advice echoes the sentiment (though not the specifics) of what Joyce Carol Oates recounted on Twitter in 2022: “A friend who is a literary agent told me that he cannot even get editors to read first novels by young white male writers, no matter how good.” Admittedly, I am neither young nor new, but her point feels at least plausibly relevant.
At the same time, I feel cautious about appropriating experiences that are not mine. It’s dicey work. The bet, though, is that, with enough careful study and with enough direct feedback, I can avoid inauthenticity and mimicry. I also benefit from having so many tremendously consequential women in my life -- friends, former students, sisters, bad-ass daughters, a catalytic wife -- whose experiences I witness and try to honor.
The truth is that I've borrowed so many stories from so many witting and unwitting people that sometimes I feel more like a stenographer than a writer. Some of my favorite ones come from women -- see “Soon” or “You Are Not My Mother, Missy Gallagher.” It’s useful work to decentralize my own experiences in the service of crafting a story. It’s useful work to focus on humanity first and the cultural constructions and constraints second.
The novel I'm writing now, The Architecture of Unfinished Things, tries to live inside that principle. It’s centered on a female therapist, Ella, who, reeling from a stillbirth and a faltering marriage, takes an unorthodox job as a live-in "Family Architect" for a wealthy family shattered by its own grief. While Ella’s pain is filtered through the specific lens of womanhood and maternal loss, her core struggle is a universal one: how do we rebuild a life from its ruins?
My goal isn’t to write a "woman's story," but a human story where the central, most complex, and powerful characters happen to be women grappling with love, loss, and the messy work of reconstruction.
Maybe this one will be the one. Maybe the answer to all of this is simply to write a better book. The intersection of commerce and craft has always been fraught. I suppose this is simply our version, and the only real feature that makes this moment distinct is that people like me are the ones who have to figure out how to play by new rules.
Fair enough. And good. But also -- I’d really like to publish a novel.
Sources
Burke, Paul. “Why So Few Men Take Up The Pen.” The Critic. June 26, 2024.
Morris, David. “The Disappearance of Literary Men Should Worry Everyone. “The New York Times. December 7, 2024.
Thomas-Corr, Johanna. “How Women Conquered The World of Fiction.” The Guardian. May 16, 2021.