Women's books are for women

In an information age, you should filter new information by asking these two questions:

1. So what?
2. Is it true?

"So what?" usually should come first, because it filters out more crap than a simple fact-check does. Instead of 2), some will ask "Is it problematic?" Avoid these people like they have COVID-19.

We all know women dominate the fiction book market. Up to 80% of fiction readers are women. So what? Well, knowing the audience is the first step to writing what the audience wants. Knowing more about those women, and the men who comprise the other 20%, is important to the writer and the publisher.

I know this is obvious. Bear with me.

What if I told you these women readers were fairly uniform in terms of age, race, education, economic status, and social attitudes? It would matter yet more. But is it true?

That's the question Lucy Scholes keeps avoiding in this review for the Times Literary Supplement. Her subject is a book by Helen Taylor, a writer who wanted to know more about her audience, and so did some research. Scholes did not like her findings.

The image of Taylor’s composite woman reader really couldn’t be more stereotypical if one tried. We could look to the New York Times book critic Parul Sehgal, for example, whose reading habits can’t be mapped onto Lee’s binaries.

An aggregate of 428 women readers aren't like the New York Times book critic? Gee, what are the odds?

This wasn’t the only occasion I found myself wondering about the undeclared age range of Taylor’s interviewees; the thinking of many of them seems to be rigidly bound up in rather outdated gender norms.

Don't these sheep women know how much happier they could be if they were liberated?

Taylor veers from a Stepford stereotype to this: “Once a month I wake up with booze on my breath, guacamole in my hair and an ill-defined sense of shame”, one of her interviewees writes. “If I were 21, this might indicate a cracking night out. As I’m 43, it means I got drunk again discussing Jodi Picoult on a near-stranger’s couch. Because like 99.9 per cent of middle-class, middle-aged women, I belong to a book club.” On one hand, this is rather funny, but on the other, the cliché is pretty damning, and maybe untrue; Taylor seems all too willing to accept the often not particularly complimentary feminization of all things bookish.

"Maybe untrue"? What verbal sorcery is this? That's an awful big criticism of a nonfiction book to hang on a "maybe." Maybe Scholes merely wants Taylor's observations to be false because they conflict with her social and political interests. Maybe the Times Literary Supplement's lawyers put that phrase in there in case Taylor sued for libel.

Scholes wraps it up:

We like to think we live in a progressive world in which traditional gender stereotypes are slowly loosening their hold, but if the picture painted in Why Women Read Fiction is anything to go by, there is still a long way to go. What we see here is a literary culture that has been feminized to the point of strangulation, which is both demeaning to many women readers and could explain, at least in part, why women readers, when it comes to fiction, remain in the majority. Is it any wonder that more men don’t feel that there is a place for them in it?

If I had a nickel for every time I heard "there's still a long way to go," I'd be rich. At last Scholes reveals her true intent for this book review: to agitate for a new woman reader, a woman uprooted from family, home, and God so she can throw herself into the god of this age, Self.

What I'm curious about is how making fiction books more "progressive" attracts more male readers. As a male reader myself, I like my male characters masculine and my female characters feminine. I've found most people in the real world are hardwired that way. That's who I write for as well.

You can judge for yourself whether I've succeeded by reading the first 4 chapters of Seeds of Calamity for free. If it piques your interest, get yourself a copy at Amazon.

For a free digital copy of my debut book, Tendrils to the Moon, sign up for the mailing list on the right side of the blog page. Or, if you're viewing this on the mobile site, click here.

And as always, let me know what you think in the comments. I'll reply as soon as I can.