Male authors vs. Female authors

I think another part of the problem is the women authors who do get notice tend to write the stereotypical woman's book. Domesticity, family problems, etc. Again, the Oprah phenomenon. Women who write the types of books I'm interested in tend to do so in obscurity. AL Kennedy, Kathryn Davis, Kathy Acker, etc.

And I can argue both sides of the Oprah debate. But when it comes down to it, it is a very good thing that she got so many people to buy books. Period.

Jessa, you need some Patricia Highsmith in your life. Or even some Muriel Spark. No lovey-dovey allowed in their books.

I'm a big fan, so i don't think you can go too far wrong with any of her books. A Far Cry From Kensington is great too. You can usually find her stuff cheap used, so I would just pick something that looked good to you. How's that for a recommendation: Just buy one! :)

The question of how sexist is your writing seems rather facile, as I know it's meant to be, but the whole debate makes certain presuppositions that I don't agree with, among which are:

1) The gender of the person writing is naturally biased.
2) The gender of the writer can somehow influence his or her reader.
3) This influence is somehow not positive, if the gender of the writer is not the reader's gender. Particularly if the latter is a woman. (Poor, defenseless, helpless women.)

I think a lot depends on what you are looking for in a book. I am looking for good story. Stylistics can go by the wayside, reflecting "modern" life ditto that, and so can "my life is just like this person's." I think personally I hew towards stories with lots of plot, decent character development -- and shy away from interior monologues disguised as plot, or stories which have what I consider overused, expected, or cliched "twists and turns."

This means, more often than not, that I pick genre fiction. Genre fiction of the type I prefer is speculative, science-fictiony (minus most spaceship operas), fantasy (minus swords and dragons), horror, and crime (minus straight procedurals or one in a vast series). This means I am usually reading male authors.

Many women who write stories that are published today (the "which are published" being a crucial element -- I bet there's a lot of great unpublished fiction by women who don't fit into the pigeonholes) are telling stories I find repetitive and boring and circled around tired resolutions. Everyone has been molested, abused, run away, is in an unhappy marriage, just got out of an unhappy marriage in which they were abused or cheated on, their parents died, they have some form of female cancer or a friend who does who is soldiering through it all, and that's the extent of the story. And these are the things which not only substitute for character development; they also sub in for a story. If it's not one of those, it's about being a highly-sexed cosmopolitan "gal" who somehow can't find love -- the modern Harlequin novel.

Sometimes, those books are valid and interesting. But when what feels like all of them are telling those same stories over and over, it's no wonder readers shy away from stories written by many women. I'd prefer to read a story with a female character who isn't obsessed with getting married, or her bad marriage, or her horrible childhood for once. I think one reason I like David Mamet's stories (agreed, for the stage and film primarily) is that he seems to write them as if there's only one gender. Mamet's men go and have their adventure and tell their story and women are peripheral, at best, a great deal of the time. I'd like to read a female Mamet (I'd like to figure out how to write like one), so we can get to the story, right up front.

Anyway, all of this nonsense about gender and writing: For years no one knew James Tiptree was a woman. Okay, her work was of the sci-fi genre, but I wouldn't have known if someone hadn't told me. It just would never have occurred to me to look at the author before reading, to determine some kind of so-called bias.

(And I second Patricia Highsmith!)

Bridget's comment above ("I make it a point to read female authors in part BECAUSE I think their voices are suppressed") seems to be a pretty common attitude in academic circles, and is one of the reasons I stopped taking Women in Literature type classes in university. I'm not interested in turning my reading habits into the equivelant of pity sex. If I find your book interesting, I will read it, end of story. I do read more male authors than women, but that's not a conscious decision. Perhaps it's balanced by the fact that when I do read female authors, I tend to read more of a particular authors work. I've only read one book by DeLillo, Nabokov, Faulkner, etc, but I've read something like seven by A.S. Byatt, five by Carol Shields, and so on.

Re: Kathy Acker
I despise her writing like no author before or since. Empire of the Senseless tis the only book I've ever read that I actually regret reading.

My list of female authors isn't really huge, but I don't think it's really slim, either:

A.S. Byatt, Carol Shields, Sheila Heti, Diane Schoemperlen (sp?), Helen Hanff (sp?), Margaret Laurence, Amanda Davis, Helen Fielding, Virginia Woolf, Lydia Davis, Lisa Moore... and I think Pat Barker, but I never actually checked on Pat's gender, so I may be wrong.

I have little patience for Oprah-type books because frankly, I want to bitch-slap most of these women. Same problem for much of chick lit--stop whining, start doing! In terms of "guy novels" I also have a low tolerance for the kind of bloated White Boy stuff Jessa describes; I want good writing, not an overdose of ego. If there's both, the writing had better be exceptional.

Having said that, authors I'd recommend who are women? Besides the aforementioned crime fiction types, there's Angela Carter, Jules Hardy (ALTERED LAND is a women's novel, but the writing is flat-out gorgeous), Elizabeth Smart, Louise Welsh, and other crime novelists like Denise Mina, Val McDermid's work of the last five years or so, and Carol Anne Davis. Oddly, the last 3 names (Welsh too) are Scottish. What's up with that??

I kid, I kid!

So, a year after graduation, I read Sarah Vowell's Take the Cannoli, and in a letter to the prof wrote excitedly, "Hey! I found a woman who writes creative nonfiction who I really like!" (For anyone who's thinking that that represents a particularly sad state of affairs, you can read my defense of Vowell here: Sarah Vowell, anyone?)

I'm not a voracious reader by any means, but the only contemporary novels I can remember reading by women in the last ten years are the two Zadie Smiths, Proulx's The Shipping News, Byatt's Possession, and Minot's Monkeys. And that does sorta bother me (although to be fair, I think The Shipping News and White Teeth are both fantastic). But as I said on the Underworld thread on ILE (Underworld par Delillo), the novels I'm most attracted to incorporate social history and/or cultural criticism, and I just don't find that many women doing stuff like that.

All that stuff aside, I'm sure my collection/tastes would be considered sexist- but I'll put Zadie Smith (White teeth, at least- haven't read Autograph man) and Joyce Carol Oates, and yes, even Jane Austen, up against just about anyone. But those choices feel so obvious as to reveal the shocking core of sexist leaning from which they likely came. Damn.

Joan Didion to thread!

The Outsiders! Heck, i didn't know S.E. Hinton was a woman until i was an adult myself. But really, good books should appeal to anybody no matter who they are written by. There are a zillion examples of books where if you took the name off of them you wouldn't have a clue as to the gender of the author.

do it! slouching towards bethlehem and the white album are near perfect pieces of work - male or female, fiction or nonfiction, this or that.

at the moment, i'm reading through modern library's top 100 novels of the last century, so there's a bias there. as far as my preferences go, i suppose i generally read more men then women for fiction. it's not something i consciously do, just something i've done.

however, as far as poetry goes, i like both. i read a wonderful variety of poets.

I think my reading is sexist by default. Like Randee, I read mostly genre fiction (actually many of the genres she reads). My favorite is SciFi, especially hard SciFi, which is predominantly male.

And the group in question separating themselves, if you actually read my post, is the group that suggest that women writers (or any group of writers) should be read for any reason other than that they are good writers.

My post above also, if you actually read it, is very critical of the so-called canon, and in fact questions the entire notion of a received canon.

"well am i enforcing inequality if i try to read equal numbers of books by men and women? "

It depends. Not if you truly feel the books you are reading to be good books. *But*, if you read, say, a Daphne Marlatt novel and find that you hate it (I like her work, but this is an example), and then you pick up a Julian Barnes novel and love it, but deliberately read more Daphne Marlatt simply because she's a woman, than yes, you are enforcing inequality (although "enforcing" is a stupid term, because you don't have that much power). For one thing, it's patronizing.

Now that's actually a pretty extreme example, using two authors whose work I happen to enjoy, but I'm sure, provided you read this post more carefully than you seem to have read my others, that you will at least grasp my opinion.

And if you're really interested in how I select what books I read, I do so in several ways:

1) I wander through book stores and pick up random books, read the first few pages (and the dust jacket), and make a decision. That's how I discovered both Sheila Heti and A.S. Byatt.

2) I read books recommended to me, either by friends, professors, or other authors (this last one usually through reading interviews, books, and criticism).

3) Through reputation, either in the academic world, or in the media/awards circuit. This is how I discovered Carol Shields, Jamaica Kincaid, Daphne Marlatt, Margaret Laurence, and many others.

you mean if i work hard and get smart enough i will understand your nonsense???

wait are those real scholars or are they strawman thought experiment scholars like the 800 lb gorilla?

well, that's not the sense i meant *read more women writers* in. i meant that people who find that they read lots of books by men should make an effort to read more books by women. i wasn't suggesting that they read books by authors that they hate. unless of course, they hate "women's literature" or "oprah books" without actually having read very many books by women or books on the oprah book list. because that's just ignorant.

but you probably didn't read my post carefully enough, hmm?

That said, I'm more curious about the different perspectives that women might bring to non-fiction than to fiction. I thought Catherine Merridale's book on the culture of death in twentieth-century Russia was outstanding--would it have been different were she male? Etc.

well you already agreed that it's not!! your criteria is:

1) what you think of the first few pages
2) what someone else tells you to do
3) the canon

in the case of reasons 2 and 3 i'd say that if you're looking at these lists (all the books your professors suggest, all the books that are on awards lists or are reviewed in magazines, etc) and there's a suspiciously high proportion of men you'd better develop some other criteria ... like arbitrarily reading women instead of men just to balance out the proportion ... if YOU want to compile a list called "best books of the 20th c" and populate it 100% with men that's fine with me! but you'd better have read as many books by women as by men or you're lacking in credibility.

as far as the first reason goes if you already read lots of books by men then you may be influencing your subjective criteria in favor of the male voice. which suggests a reason to read women writers that isn't literary merit. i.e. what mookieproof just said.

For two or three years I was mostly reading philosophy, giving myself a historical overview. (I didn't get very far, actually.) Anyway, almost every author I was reading at the time was male, so when I mixed in some fiction, I tended to be drawn to female authors (preferably from other cultures, races, ethnic groups).

However, in my nonfiction reading about particular subjects, I really can't be concerned with whether or not most of the authors are male or female. I really don't care. I guess it could make more of a difference in certain subjects than others.

But I'm certain that if you called Dr. Linda Warley a straw man she'd probably boot your rooster.

but you have to understand how some of your claims come across ... for example, your implication that kathy acker's fanbase is deliberately segregating itself is patently offensive. kathy acker was an outspoken lesbian in california and i'm not sure that you understand the social reality of that situation. for god's sake, her books were banned in canada! now those are real levels of ideological seperation to worry about ... not the fact that her fans want her added to the canon because, yes, she is a woman and a lesbian (and a damn good writer too! but, yes, you are right - her fans ARE interested in her because she's a woman and a lesbian ... that's what makes her more interesting to me than say john o hara or steinbeck or any number of british "angry young men")

and then implying that i just don't get what you're saying?? that's patronizing! if anything, i'm reading your posts too closely!

I could go on, but I think I've dealt with some of your most obnoxious points.

"Poetry is cathartic only for the unserious, for in front of the rush of expressive need stands the barrier of form, and when the hurdler's scissored legs and outstretched arms carry him over the bars, the limp in his life, the headache in his heart, the emptiness he's full of, are as absent as his streetshoes, which will pinch and scrape his feet in all the old leathery ways once the race is over and he has to walk through the front door of his future like a brushman with some feckless patter and a chintzy plastic prize."

(And no, Vahid, since I have both an imagination and a sense of self the use of male pronouns did not fucking bother me in the slightest, thanks; had the author clumsily inserted "his/hers" everywhere I'd have slammed the book shut, since I like my eyes.)

I've never gone along with that attitude but that might be because as a 40-something music-loving, football-supporting white male I'd have to limit myself to Nick Hornby if I did.

i'm neither, lee.

I think this is the longest thread so far on ILB. Conclusions: some people prefer male writers to women and vice versa. Most don't care.

It's sad, though. I never thought I'd see journeymen like Brian Deane and Wayne Quinn wearing the claret.

Lee, any chance of having Lampard, Cole & Johnson back?

(Ugly American baseball fan having his fun)

No, but you can have Veron if you like.

Apologies to anyone who has no idea what we're talking about. Basically I support a crap soccer team.

I love your posts. Your quoting of WHGass clinched it for me. I can't believe that more people don't talk about him (ie., esp on ILB).

But, to get back to why I wanted to respond: I'm all in favour of spontaneous generalisations of the sort you added above (and think it got knocked on the head a little prematurely). I think it's fair to say that there's something melancholic attached to all of the writing that I admire; so much so that it feels linked in some special way to these writers' impulse to write (as you suggest).

People around here sometimes ask my best friend whether my goony falling-apartness as a person is somehow linked to writing... he told me he replies in the vein of "well, they're connected, but only 'somehow' is right: if writing went away for her the other thing would still be there..."

stay true... the pands

Just based on a glance at the bookshelf, I have probably a larger number of male authors, but more books per female author. I have one or two books by a Howard Norman (say), but ten or eleven by Iris Murdoch. Put another way, I probably generally read slightly more books by men, but when it comes to authors whose work I love passionately, women close the gap.

(To give you an idea of my tastes, female writers I appear to like a lot include:

• Margaret Drabble
• Iris Murdoch
• Virginia Woolf
• Margaret Atwood
• Joan Didion
• Annie Dillard
• Dorothy Parker
• Jamaica Kincaid
• Sylvia Plath
• Jane Austen
• George Eliot
• Mona van Duyn
• Katherine Ann Porter

Vs. male persons in the same predicament:

• Nabokov
• Shakespeare
• John McPhee
• Walker Percy
• Randall Jarrell
• Don DeLillo
• Michael Ondaatje
• Faulkner
• Joyce
• E.M. Forster
• Nicholson Baker
• David Foster Wallace)

Someone said upthread that he didn't think female writers liked to do the sort of writing he liked to read. While I wouldn't go that far, I must say that I have a weakness for something I'll call (as shorthand) trick-lit. I like narrative playfulness, unreliability, gimmickry, games, and self-reference. Postmodern metafictional concepts thrill me inordinately (even if I don't actually have the patience to read the resulting books)

And contrary to basically every sane person who thinks and writes about literature, I generally like it when authors break in and call attention to themselves. I like consciously fine writing, and will stop to smell the sentences to the exclusion of the virtues that more right-minded readers read to experience (character, theme, idea, plot, story).

The end result of this preference can be a very white and very male bookshelf. I try to work against it, but it can be a challenge.

lol, this thread...a blast from the past!

I am a crazy sexist reader.

so my english fiction shelves apparently have no female authors between harper lee and mary shelley. shall i start a recommendation thread?

year before last I read only books by women, after looking at my list of books read and realizing that it was overwhelmingly male. that was an an awesome experience! so the next year I did "only works in translation" since I noticed that was another clear bias on my list. then I figured this year I should just go back to "read whatever strikes my fancy" so now I have no reading plan but I kind of miss the "choose your next book from within these parameters" Catholic-freedom of the year-of-reading-only-x

did you read anything particularly unmissable by women with surnames beginning with M, N, O, P, Q, or R?

Measuring the sexism of one's reading affinities by which gender predominates among the authors of the books one reads is so laughably reductionist that it inclines me to jollity. It appeals mostly to those whose brains have been eaten by zombies.

JD you have discipline! This is the first year that I've even bothered with a reading list. I've conciously incorporated lots of Western/Central European and Latin American authors this year, but still mixed -- I'm much more bothered by the fact that I don't have many ideas about Chinese or African literature. Way more bothered about certain places than gender or race.

Would add Elizabeth Taylor to the list of female authors. I recommended her, on the basis particularly of Angel and Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont to a friend of excellent judgement, who couldn't get on with her, I forget for what reason.

For me, at her best she has a sort of savage humourous bleakness that reminds me of Patrick Hamilton's Slaves of Solitude and also, particularly in Angel, of Beckett's plays (that's a slightly weird comparison - but there's a particular scene in Angel that provokes a sense of an abysmal void at being unable to articulate one's condition, that I also get from, say, the backwards talking bit of Watt, or the bleak conventionalities of Happy Days).

Anyway, there's a biography out, reviewed in this week's TLS. I'm not sure how necessary a biography is for Taylor, but it's a worthwhile reminder of how good she was. Strong meat.

Just have to add my love for Elizabeth Taylor. She's wonderful.

thirded! she's tops. and needs to be better known in the states.

if some imaginary person asked me for the storytelling of pym and the bite of spark, i would point them to taylor.

Measuring the sexism of one's reading affinities by which gender predominates among the authors of the books one reads is so laughably reductionist that it inclines me to jollity. It appeals mostly to those whose brains have been eaten by zombies.

Who said anything about sexism? That's not what motivated my year of reading women. It just struck me that, looking at a list of what I'd read, I was getting a very limited sampling of the voices the world has to offer. For me, noticing the predominance of male writers on my "books read" list, I thought: "this is well worth correcting." You may not share my view that getting as broad a sampling of the voices of the world's people - men and women, from many different countries, translated from many different languages - is a big part of what will make your lifetime's reading feel worthwhile & rewarding. Luckily for us both, there's no reason for you to be affected in any way by what I want from reading books.

did you read anything particularly unmissable by women with surnames beginning with M, N, O, P, Q, or R?

(if this is a serious question btw I can go check the list - I am generally not a listmaker/keeper of records, it's really unusual for me to go about anything with any sense of method or plan, but I do keep a list of what I read each year)

haha yeah it's a serious question! admittedly it's also kind of a stupid one

toni morrison, yo

Barbara Pym

haha yeah it's a serious question! admittedly it's also kind of a stupid one

No it's not stupid! I just thought maybe you meant "do you also alphabetize/separate by height of spine/etc"

anyway, for R, try Alifa Rifaat, Distant View of a Minaret - it's short stories, very good

alice munro, lorrie moore

i can't find the quote but didn't nabokov say something about his "homosexual" preferences when it came to authors

Oh, I've read some Morrison. Just not kept them, for some reason. Song of Solomon (which was great, actually) and I think one of the other novels and 'Playing in the Dark' (which wasn't great, kind of showed it was a novelist's work of criticism: which is a shame, because parts of it were generally right-on ...)

I note Ozick (oh, Ozick, I should finish an Ozick book, someday) has called Munro 'our Chekhov'. Heh.

The Rifaat book looks interesting, will order it. Munro, Moore, and Pym I think should be in the library. I hope.

Also I was thinking for a while about how and why my reading habits are sexist today. I think they are less sexist than they were. I would not point to my posts in this thread as a shining example of how they are less sexist than they were.

grauniad review had a cover feature on women writers in the US, after ian mcewan apparently greeted updike's death with some kind of whither-now-the-american-novel-whither-now bullshit, unfortunately kind of boils down to 'these are my nine favorite' but oh well

i have read one of these writers.

also the piece is not great but a lot better than the last guardian thing on books i linked from here i promise.