But the women do. They write reams about The One, or the One Who Got Away. Sometimes, the student outlines in heartbreaking detail the lengths she went to maintain a relationship — transferring schools so they could be closer, putting up with poor treatment, and so on — all to no avail. At some point, the relationship ends, and she’s left mourning the person she imagined to be her great love. Another common theme — and this one never fails to shock me — is the young woman who discovers her boyfriend is cheating by reading his texts on his cellphone. So he’s cheating, but she’s invading his privacy. I have to still my hand from writing “WTF?” in the margins.

I resist the urge to critique the relationships as they are explained to me; I’m not their counselor, I’m a creative writing teacher, and so I focus on ideas like resonance, tone, use of language, narrative structure and the Sisyphean task of my job: copy-editing. But many times, I have wanted to write letters to these young women in which I explain my complicated feelings about what they are going through. How, at 48 and settled into a long-term relationship with the man I love, I wish for them greater adventures in their lives than simply falling in love. I do have female students who have written about other things: time spent overseas; learning how to pick up your life after your best friend dies in a car accident; life with an alcoholic parent; the camaraderie they experienced playing a team sport. But too often, it is the same story: He doesn’t love me. He loved me and then stopped. Why didn’t he ever love me?

It’s enough to make my feminist bristles stand on end. Why is it all about men? I think, rolling my eyes. Can’t they write about something outside of their world of two?

And then I remember what I was like at that age. If the younger me were to write an essay for this class, it might well have wrestled with the dynamics of a relationship. I have been writing about the men in my life for a long, long time.

I started keeping journals when I was 10. My first entries were about fights with my little brothers, or my desires about what I wanted to be when I grew up, or trying to figure out why my best friend and I were not getting along.

I have other diaries, too. They embarrass me, especially the ones from my late teens and early 20s. Who was this young woman who was so caught up in thinking about young men and what they thought of her? Who measured each part of her body so that, when she measured those parts again, she would be able to show that she had made progress in her desire to be stronger and thinner? Where were this young woman’s dreams? Was all she ever thought about was how she looked to men, or how she looked at men? It was what a friend of mine calls “me myopia.” Me, alone. Me, not good enough. Me. Me.

And that’s what I see in these young women’s papers. This fear of being alone and the desire to be rescued from the “me” in all of this.

So, I write in the margins about the style in which they’ve written something, or that they’re telling not showing, but I also want to tell these students that there is more to life than guys. That I wasted too much of my time thinking about men, and it was only the creation of a life that was my own — not theirs — that made it possible for me to let go of the obsessive thinking.

I want to tell them that they are in the midst of years that they won’t get back. That college is more than hooking up and drinking and hooking up and thinking about how to make this or that young man like you. That the heart that was broken your freshman year of college will undoubtedly get broken again, and it will, as has often been said, heal stronger at the broken places.

But, at age 20, would I have listened to my own advice?

I am now at an age where I am old enough to be their mother. And, as with my own experiences as a mother, I wish there were a magic formula for making a broken heart feel better. One of the most painful things I have experienced as a mom is watching my own children hurt from a broken heart. And, when I’m dealing with that, I don’t chastise my children for falling in love: I hold their hands, tell them I know how much it hurts, that I’m sorry.

With the students in my class, I always hope that simply writing down what happened will allow them to see — in black and white — that perhaps “Mr. Right” wasn’t so right after all. That’s not for me to say to them, but I always hope that the evidence narrated in the essay will become a form of self-teaching. It was through the process of writing that truths about my own life were revealed to me.

In addition to my other embarrassing diaries, there is the diary from 1985, when I went to live in France at the age of 22. In it, I see traces of the me I shall become. Yes, I struggled with loneliness. The total immersion program I was in forbade me to speak English, even with my fellow English-speaking students, and so I had to learn to communicate in foreign words and phrases. Eventually sentences and paragraphs. And, as each day showed progress in my language skills, something was happening to me, too: I had to learn to be in a foreign language, too. And as small as I had felt when I first arrived, I began to feel a stirring. I have never-sent postcards from that time in which I write about wanting to find a connection to something bigger than myself but which I could not name.

I hold onto these postcards, self-indulgent though it may be, to remind myself that discomfort and fear and loneliness are often the first signs of growth. I understand my solitude in such a different way now. It is a tool I use to get writing done, even when what I want to do is go in search of my children or my lover and see what they are up to. Being a writer is not just thrashing about trying to figure out why he doesn’t love you — though it can be that — it is also finding a place where you can be alone and it’s OK. It’s more than OK. It’s right.

It is raining outside as I return to my grading. Another young woman has begun her story about how the guy she met at a party last year seemed like he was going to be Mr. Right, and it’s taken her months to be able to write about this. I grip my pen tighter, take a deep breath.

The cars are making that noise, that sluuussssssshing as tires cut through water. It is a melancholy sound, and eight years ago, it was my accompaniment as I wrote my own tale of a wrecked heart. I have to remember that as I, once again, offer my editing tips on how to turn a single tale of woe into the universal tale of female longing that years of teaching have taught me it is.

I always believed I would eventually write my stories down, but then my talents in math and science compelled me forward into a more stable career path. I remember my joy when I was bumped up to the “honors” English class in high school, something that meant so much more to me that AP Biology or advanced Calculus. The most memorable compliment I ever received was from my English teacher, who expressed surprise when I told her I would likely major in biology at university — she responded, “I assumed you would be an English major,” and my heart leapt. Really? Me? Needless to say, that was too terrifying, so I stuck with my original plan and went all the way with it. I am not a great scientist, as I have never fully committed. That said, there are aspects I enjoy and it is the only thing other than writing I could imagine myself doing.

At one point a few years ago, the stories in my head became too insistent. I could not stop my brain from spending every waking moment that it wasn’t otherwise occupied going over scenes, tweaking, creating in an endless loop to the detriment of my work and relationships, so I decided to at least write down the particular story that was bubbling. It worked. Once it was down on paper, it stopped co-opting my mind. Yay! But then of course more stories popped up, desperate to be dealt with.

Writing fiction was an activity beyond anything I had ever experienced before. The mental focus was unprecedented — for the first time in my life, my brain was entirely focused on one thing (vs. desperately seeking a moment to drift off). It was thrilling and intoxicating in a way that I did not anticipate. I reacted physically as well. The sheer joy of it would send my body into an adrenaline-fueled high that would last for days. Sheer bliss. Addicting. It became all I could think about — when to find the time to write. I remember my husband expressing some concern when I first started along the lines of “I hope this won’t make your work and everything else dull by comparison.” Of course it did. And I spent even less time on my work. And then the time became less available, less justifiable. Work, children, husband, real life. I consoled myself with the idea that surely professional writers — those who get paid to create — must lose some of the magic of it. They can’t possibly be in that state of bliss every day, every week, every year. The body would wear out!  It likely gets boring, right? Just a job. The pressure builds, the joy fades. So I did my best to forget about it. It wasn’t terribly hard to do when the children were infants. Extreme sleep deprivation along with forced participation in life strips one’s mental function down to emergency-use-only mode. Even my daydreams trailed off for lack of interstitial moments.

But now the fog is lifting and my brain is storming ahead. This past year has been one of intense frustration. There is no time to write, barely time to think (but just enough to tease). I feel physically ill at the thought of postponing this for much longer. I have trouble reading novels because I get so annoyed at the authors and frustrated by stories that could be better. Television, movies, the same frustration, even anger. Of course they are (mostly) not bad and I likely could not do better, but the lack of enjoyment in these things is just a symptom of my dissatisfaction. So I have to do something about it. But how can I? This is the problem. I have a job, I have kids, I have a husband. To be clear, I do not have delusions of grandeur in this. What I could write will not be great literature. I am not the next great novelist of our time. Just because you love to do something with all your heart and soul does not mean you will be any good at it. Life’s cruelest irony. But I believe I could entertain.

So given that I have no delusions of gaining fame or money by this endeavor, it must then be a hobby.  People paint as a hobby, right? When they retire. They don’t have to be any good — they just enjoy the act of it. So can I do that with writing? Maybe. And I have taken some limited steps to make this possible. But it just takes so much time (for me). And it is such an individual activity. It is not a hobby that I can share with my family. And I fear I will withdraw from them. I fear I will want to withdraw from them. Now, before I start, I can still respond to the disappointed look on my husband’s face when I tell him I don’t want to watch TV with him tonight. I give in, forget the couple of hours of writing time, because I have not really started yet. But once I start, what will happen? I remember reading a story about the author of “The Help” — she said she used to arrange fake “girls’ weekends” and “girls’ nights out” so she could sequester herself in a hotel room to write. I could totally see myself doing that. Some time ago, I spent 30 minutes outlining a story (that was all the time I had). For the rest of the day, my heart raced with excitement. I felt high! I had a doctor’s appointment that day and was worried that they would bring in an EKG machine because my heart was racing so fast. Now it has been three weeks since that 30 minutes and I have not been back to it.  And I want to scream. But I am also afraid.

I need to write stories. I can’t quit my job. I can’t quit my family.  How can I do it all and remain sane? Do I just postpone the writing until years down the road when I will have more time? (Ouch.) Do I take my 30 minutes every three weeks and be constantly dissatisfied? Do I steal more time, but then risk it enveloping my life? Can one do this thing “a little bit”?

I would greatly appreciate any advice you have, practical and/or philosophical.

Signed,

A Writer Who Needs to Write

P.S. It would seem obvious to try to work my storytelling abilities into activities I could do with my kids. Making up my own bedtime stories, perhaps working on a children’s book to start. Thus far, I have not been terribly successful at this for reasons I can’t really explain (the types of stories that emerge naturally are not child-appropriate). But I could try to force it.  

Dear Writer Who Needs to Write,

Since you and your husband are scientists, I would argue that the urge to write is material. It arises in the network of neurons and chemicals we know as the brain and nervous system. Otherwise, it’s some kind of mystical, nonmaterial thing, and why would a scientist assume the existence of mystical, nonmaterial things? That doesn’t seem scientific.

So either you are telling the truth and this is a material phenomenon worthy of your scientific acknowledgment and scrutiny, or you are in the grip of mystical forces that as a scientist you don’t believe in. Or you are a lying insane person and your husband should divorce you because God knows what other deceits you are perpetrating. Perhaps you don’t really go to work every day but are carrying on with a European count on the Jersey shore.

So let’s assume that this material thing is occurring and then decide what to do with it.

I personally don’t favor writing just as a hobby because the external rewards are not powerful enough to sustain the behavior. Sure, as a brain in a jar, you would write night and day. But you are not a brain in a jar. You are an employee, a scientist, a wife and a mother. You require permission and support from your family. It is too hard to get that permission for a private hobby.

What’s Mommy doing? Oh, she’s locked in her room again, doing something weird.

If you’re doing it as a hobby, that’s what happens.

But look what happens when you have a book contract:

Don’t bother Mommy, she’s working on her book proposal! Don’t bother Mommy, she’s got a book deadline!

Everybody gets on board.

OK, there’s Emily Dickinson. But who has that kind of attic?

I have to write for a living because that’s the only way to gain enough time to devote to my disease. I have to sit in a room for hours a day alone working with words. I don’t have much choice about that. There are only a few ways one can be allowed to do that.

So my rule is: Make your writing socially useful in order to gain material support for it.

The urge is weak in some and strong in some. When you say, “It seems to be something my brain needs to do to relax. If I have more than 30 seconds, I am creating or revising a scene of some kind,” it sounds like the urge is strong. That’s good.

As Dr. Alice Flaherty, author of “The Midnight Disease,” says in an interview, “In psychological terms, it seems that drive is more important than talent. Dean Simonton at Stanford has argued that the composers who produced the greatest works, like Mozart and Beethoven, are simply the ones who wrote the most — they were composing all the time, as they walked down the street or sat at a dinner party.”

So when you wake up in the morning and find yourself compelled to write, that’s an augury that you can become good at it.

A scientist might ask, What is it for? If we had instruments sensitive enough we could identify this signal, decode it and perhaps see the very visions that are erupting organically in your brain; you wouldn’t even need to write them down. It would be just a few generations more sophisticated than voice-recognition software; it would be brainwave-recognition software.

Why are these neurological impulses being generated? Are they signals from another world? Are they memories? Memories of what? Are they organic patterns, a byproduct of the organic organizational principles responsible for the growth and regulation of the body? Are they species-specific?

Might these signals be the blueprints of human civilization? Might they be instructions for species cooperation?

What are poems for? What is song for? What is story for?

We could go on and on about that. The central thing for you, as an individual, is that this phenomenon is taking place and you ignore it at your peril. What is the difference between the compulsion to write and the compulsion to eat, or to have a baby? What is the difference between this brain activity that wants to write and the brain activity that wants to solve differential equations or build cathedrals? It is activity in the brain. Why not encourage it and see how it manifests? Why not listen and find out what it is?

Why not give birth? Why not find out what strange being it is within you, trying to be born?

That, to me, is not mystical or crazy. That, to me, is science.

In response to this “lowest common denominator” mentality, editors over at the satiric women’s culture and fashion site The Gloss  created an amazing slide show of how some of history’s greatest fiction books would look if they were “chick lit”-ed up. So Hemingway’s classic “The Old Man and the Sea” becomes “The Old Man and the C-Word,” with the blurb:

A saucy tale of gender discrimination set in the fast-paced world of fishing! Santiana is considered too weak and womanly to be a serious fisherman — partly because she hasn’t caught anything in 84 days, but mostly because she’s a woman! Will she be able to reel in a giant marlin and win the respect of her village? What about reeling in her handsome fellow fisher, Manolin?

All of the examples in the slide show are painfully funny, especially for those of us who actually read “The Devil Wears Prada” or “The Nanny Diaries” and are mortified that whole sections of bookstores are now relegated to this non-genre.

In a show of female writer solidarity (and also because I thought it’d be a funny exercise), I asked The Gloss editor in chief Jennifer Wright to help me do the opposite: I sent her slightly altered titles from famous chick books, and she’d have to summarize of the novel as if it was an esteemed piece of literature.

These were the titles I came up with:

“He’s Just Not That Hebrew”

“The Last Confession of a Shopaholic”

“Sax and the City”

“Bridget Jones’ Cowrie”

“The Devil Wears Pravda”

“Twilight, Big City”

And here’s what Jennifer created for descriptions:

One of the epic, heartbreaking works of our generation, “He’s Just Not That Hebrew” begins in economically depressed Germany of the 1930s. Amid the young men proclaiming their status as cameras, an Orthodox Jewish woman pines for a soft-spoken painter. His name? Adolf Hitler. He is not that into her. As time goes by, her quest for romance becomes a quest for survival.

————————————————————————————–

Often called “requiem for the American dream “The Last Confession of a Shopaholic” traces the slow devolution of a shopaholic. When Birkins can no longer fill the empty holes in her heart — as holey as the $1,625 Balmain T-shirt she uses to clean her 4th floor walk-up apartment’s toilet — the ever unnamed shopaholic slowly succumbs to a crippling Diet Coke addiction. Ultimately she’s forced to rediscover the soul she thought she’d sold — but, alas, all too late.

————————————————————————————–

 

Told entirely in the second person future tense, “Sax and the City” follows an aspiring jazz musician with a devilish morality in a City of Angels. As Cary constantly tries to overcome his provincial Midwestern upbringing, he’s drawn ever deeper into LA’s erotic, Nietzsche obsessed underworld. Long story short? He kills his landlady. With a saxophone.

————————————————————————————–

Sometimes likened to “The Goat: Or, Who Is Sylvia and My Dog Tulip,” “Bridget Jones’ Cowrie” explores the curious bond between woman and beast. Resigned to her spinsterhood, Bridget Jones pads through the house wearing one shoe and an increasingly decaying Sloane Street wedding dress. That is, until she finds her truest friend, the noble snail. A tale of human idealism that reaffirms that all that is slimy does glitter, albeit in its own slug like way.

————————————————————————————–

“The Devil Wears Pravda”: Much like Mikhail Bulgakov’s “The Master and the Margarita,” “The Devil Wears Pravda” explores the ramifications of the Communist regime upon the individual. With wit and subtle satire “The Devil Wears Pravda” examines the life of a homeless teenager — Andi — in 1918 Moscow. Shunned by society and forced to clothe herself entirely (and shabbily) in the revolutionary newspaper of the period, a chance encounter with Alexander Shlyapnikov precipitates her rise to power as one of the most beloved Soviet writers of the period. Her rags turn to riches, but in the process, does she become the Devil?

————————————————————————————–

“Twilight, Big City”: Runner up for the 1986 Booker Prize, Edward is a wunderkid “vampire” on an eternal search for Bolivian Marching powder in Manhattan. Bela is the stony-faced girl working the coat check at Tunnel who refuses to be sucked into his world. As her affections are ultimately captured by a biker “werewolf,” Edward wonders about life after the apple.

I don’t know about you, but I would buy all these books in a heartbeat if they were real. Certainly an improvement over the originals.

Her tumultuous and unmoored 20s are the subject of her new memoir, “Art and Madness: A Memoir of Lust Without Reason.” The male artists of her time embarked on their hero’s journey, fueled by whiskey and sex; meanwhile, she was motivated by her romantic belief in the supreme importance of artistic creation, and a lack of options. As early as college, she felt an “overwhelming desire to bring coffee to the side of a writer, to wash his socks, to stare down his enemies, internal or external” — to be his caretaker. Once married, she typed out the manuscript of her philandering playwright husband instead of hammering out her own masterpiece. At the time, she believed that the “wives and girlfriends of artists had a great task: to pay bills, to supply meals, to keep fear of poverty at bay so creation could continue.” Post-divorce, and with a child, Roiphe had flings with and fielded late-night calls from drunken, and married, authors.

It was better than the alternative. As she saw it then, “Women who had married doctors and lawyers, stockbrokers and dealers in real estate or politicians had settled, had lost hope.” Roiphe describes a fling with a man during a party at Plimpton’s house. “His wife was in the living room and her babies were home with the nanny and my heart was broken because this wasn’t what I really wanted — to be a dark thick-haired girl who was had in someone else’s bathroom,” she writes. “On the other hand I didn’t want to be a suburban housewife waiting at the train station for a husband who had taken a secretary to the bathroom earlier in the afternoon.”

It was hardly just a cynical weighing of options or self-sacrifice in the name of art, though. Her romantic regard for art became a sort of lust for those who were doing the creating. These were men of great charisma, magnetism and romantic allure. “These kings of the hill were jostling for prizes named and unnamed and sometimes I was one of those prizes which was fine with me,” she writes. That was true “even when I knew the man was a snake charmer and I was a snake.”

Roiphe, author of “Up the Sandbox,” tells a familiar story of a woman seeking to achieve through men, rather than on her own terms — simply because it was all that she could envision for herself at the time. But her book is also uniquely honest, emotionally complex and utterly readable. She is, after all, a talented writer — and this book tells the story of how she came to embrace that. It’s rather poetic that several decades later, her second daughter, Katie Roiphe, who published her first book at the ripe age of 25, lamented that contemporary male authors “are so self-conscious, so steeped in a certain kind of liberal education, that their characters can’t condone even their own sexual impulses.”

What kind of satisfaction did you find in these relationships with the male literary talents of the time?

Well, I suppose that I found the same satisfactions that any young woman of that age would find with whatever fellow she was hanging around with. There was a sense of excitement and there was a sense that something important was happening — as opposed to if I had married a golf pro, for example. I felt this was an important endeavor, and there was a kind of excitement that came from the creative energies all around. In a feminist world, those same excitements would be coming from the women as well as the men, but this was a pre-feminist world.

It seems there are still faint echoes today of this tendency for women to look to achieve through men, or to at least gravitate toward the sort of male power that they want.

I really can’t speak to what’s going on today — you have to do that. I will say that it seems to me that women today have reason to expect so much more of themselves. They don’t have to delay or submerge their own ambitions and creative energies. The idea that you would grow up wanting to be someone’s muse today is fairly laughable. But that was a very, very different world. I had never ever met, seen or gone to a woman doctor. Just a simple thing like that. It was a very different set of expectations, so it wasn’t all that unreasonable that your ambitions would be explored through a male.

You say in the book that you had never had a conscious moment where you weren’t wanting to be a writer.

That’s true –until all of a sudden I forgot that.

And how did you forget?

Think about your average Jane Austen female character who, say, really, really wanted to be a writer — but along comes this entire society that takes her to dances, and everyone is looking at her expecting her to make her choice. Her fortune is going to be made, not by what she’s got in her head but by her choice here. The way I would explain it is I didn’t exactly do what was expected of me, but, emotionally, I did do what was expected of me, which was to attach my fortunes to a male. It certainly didn’t seem strange; at the moment, it seemed reasonable.

Right. You were a young woman who wanted very much to be a writer, so you surrounded yourself with these creative sorts and particularly male talents.

That’s right, and it wasn’t just me. There were a lot of women who were doing this. Let’s say you were interviewing a woman who had become a gangster’s moll and all her life she’d wanted to be near the center of power in her community. If she had the physical beauty, she might have married the top gangster. You can understand why she would do that, because she’s not going to become head of the mob. That’s essentially what was going on.

How was it that you transitioned from this total devotion to art and to someone else’s creation to actually creating your own work?

Maybe we call it growing up, and the times changed somewhat, though I think I changed slightly before they did. I was divorced, I had a child, I had to live a life. This was not an option. Now, I could have retreated and found somebody from my mother’s country club to protect me, but by that time I knew that there were things I could do. It’s the difference between being 21, which is how old I was when I got married, and 28.

Another interesting revelation in your personal storyline is that you go from having this romantic, almost religious, regard for art and its creation to being very businesslike and pragmatic in how you go about writing, that it’s just work. It loses its magical allure. Was that just a gradual change?

Romanticizing the act of writing or any other art is not very helpful to the artist or the art. It’s much better if one simply does. It worked better for me when I was just a writer, a working person. I’ve never felt that I needed a special desk with a special light coming in from the window at a special angle. It’s work, not so different from that way you fix dinner or you pick up a child at school.

I’m curious what you thought of your daughter Katie Roiphe’s piece about the flaccid sexuality of the male literary talent of today. It’s such a stark contrast to the period that you’re writing about.

I think Katie is a very, very keen observer. It seems to me that she was observing some of the fruits of the movements of which I had been a part. What we’re seeing is the difference between her generation and my generation and what my generation was able to give to all of you was a completely different sense of family life, artistic life and male and female relationships.

Someone runs a tally like this every decade or so, inevitably revealing that little has changed. The situation is distressing, yet mysteriously intractable; after the third or fourth iteration, there doesn’t seem to be much new to say about it. This time around, however, three women on staff at the New Republic decided to dig a little deeper. A common response to the complaint that few books by women are reviewed in major literary publications is to ask whether fewer books by women are published in the first place. As Ruth Franklin reports, this does seem to be the case.

Franklin and her colleagues Eliza Gray and Laura Stampler examined the fall 2010 catalogs from an assortment of book publishers, large and small. They eliminated genres not likely to be reviewed by such publications as the New York Times or the New Yorker in the first place (that is, self-help, cookbooks, art, etc.) and found that one publishing house (Riverhead) could boast that women authors were responsible for 45 percent of its fall list. For most of the rest, women accounted for around 30 percent of the list, with small independent presses turning out to be even more male-heavy than a behemoth like Random House.

Franklin, who was chagrined to find that only 33 percent of the books she reviewed last year were by women, concluded that “magazines are reviewing female authors in something close to the proportion of books by women published each year. The question now becomes why more books by women are not getting published.” Since publishing a book tends to burnish the reputation of a reviewer or essayist (just as publishing well-received reviews and essays in journals can lead to a book contract), the two situations are certainly intertwined.

The imbalance in books published is indeed a puzzle; book publishers, like any other business, want to make money, and multiple surveys indicate that women buy and read far more books than men do. (This fact has long been established within the book business, but since some Salon readers have questioned it in the past, please see the National Endowment for the Arts “Reading at Risk” report.) If women were only — or even primarily — interested in books by women, the logic of the marketplace would dictate that publishers should release more titles by female authors.

And here’s where we have to get anecdotal. There’s really no hard data on how many books by male authors are read by women readers and vice versa, nor are we likely to ever see any. But try this: Ask six bookish friends — three men and three women — to list their favorite authors or favorite books, without explaining your motivation. Then see how many male authors the women list and whether the men list any female authors at all.

A couple of researchers at Queen Mary College in London did something along these lines in 2005. They asked “100 academics, critics and writers” to discuss the books they’d read most recently. According to the Guardian, “four out of five men said the last novel they read was by a man, whereas women were almost as likely to have read a book by a male author as a female. When asked what novel by a woman they had read most recently, a majority of men found it hard to recall or could not answer.” When it comes to gender, women do seem to read more omnivorously than men. Publishers can assume that a book written by a man will sell to both men and women, but a book by a woman is a less reliable bet.

Conventional wisdom among professionals in the children’s book business is that while girls will read books about either boys or girls, boys only want to read about boys. Could it be that this bias extends into adulthood, with the preference among boys for male characters evolving into the preference among men for male authors? Or it could be that many male readers simply doubt that women have anything interesting to say.

Once traced back to the tastes of individual readers, the stubborn persistence of this imbalance becomes less mystifying. Editors can be shamed or pressured (temporarily, at least) into evening up the gender split in their bylines and book review sections, and some women have begun calling for subscription cancellation drives and other forms of economic protest after the release of the Vida survey results. But reading is a private, willful activity; good luck dictating to anyone which books they should read, let alone like.

We can, however, encourage our friends to try to broaden their horizons. Events like the Tournament of Books, soon to embark on its seventh annual contest over at the Morning News website, provide repeated examples of readers surprised to find themselves enjoying novels they’d assumed (on the basis of genre or subject matter or even cover art) they wouldn’t like. A novelist I used to know once defiantly informed me (apropos of nothing we’d been talking about) that he’d never read a Jane Austen novel and had no intention of ever reading one. Deeming him something of a lost cause, I kept my mouth shut, but it was clear he expected me to get indignant, and to scold. Instead, I could only look at him with pity. The loss was entirely his.

Further Reading

Vida’s survey on women and literary publishing

Ruth Franklin on women authors and book publishing

The Guardian on a survey by Lisa Jardine and Annie Watkins of Queen Mary College, London on the cross-gender reading habits of men and women

The announcement of the 2011 Tournament of Books