Why don't men read Meg Wolitzer?
Matilda Singer questions the gender-split in reading habits.
Last summer, Waterstones Uxbridge sparked controversy with a tweet: “I've worked here for a very long time. In all that time, never has a woman said to me, ‘I don't read books written by men’. However, at least once or twice a month, a man will say that he'll not read a book by a female author. Men are ridiculous creatures.” Unsurprisingly, there was backlash. The final sweeping statement may be an unfair conclusion to draw, but the initial observation rings true. If my boss were irresponsible enough to give me control of our bookshop’s Twitter account, perhaps I’d have posted something similar. Because in my personal experience, when a male customer purchases three books, they will probably purchase three books by men.
Choices vary - right now, Murakami has a novel out in paperback, McEwan’s written a satirical Brexit novella, and Bryson’s new book is all about the human body - but they don’t vary much. One author I find consistently absent from the boys’ club? Meg Wolitzer. At 60, Wolitzer has spent nearly 40 years writing stories about parents, children, sex, relationships, contemporary culture, and the anxieties of modern life. Her focus could not be more broad, yet she’s continuously characterised as an author of ‘women’s fiction’ and targets a predominantly female readership. This typecasting isn’t lost on Wolitzer herself. Writing in 2012, she narrates a social gathering at which a male guest hears a list of the aforementioned subjects, then calls over his wife because “she reads that kind of book.”
Before I join the ranks of Waterstones Uxbridge and receive complaints about what a massive generalisation this is, here is my ‘not all men’ disclaimer. There are plenty of female authors that reach readers across the gender spectrum. Toni Morrison, Zadie Smith, and Elizabeth Strout are a few that spring to mind. Two women won the Booker Prize this year: the oldest (Margaret Atwood) and the first woman of colour (Bernadine Evaristo). I have a male colleague in his fifties who will debate which is the better Sally Rooney book with me. But he is the exception to the rule - the rule that there is a gender-split in reading habits.
It’s a rule backed up by data. In August 2018, not long after a bookseller was presumably being reprimanded in Uxbridge, a professor at Berkeley was running numbers on the New York Times ‘By The Book’ column. Turns out that while female writers mention books by men and women at about the same rate (51.1% and 48.9% respectively), men endorse other male writers four times as frequently as they do female writers (79.2% vs. 20.8%). When I look at another metric, the gender breakdown of bylines in major literary publications, it’s a similar story. In 2018, the Times Literary Supplement, London Review of Books, and the Atlantic all gave women fewer than 40% of the bylines. At 27.1%, The New Review of Books shows an even greater disparity between male and female critics. Men get published, recommend books by men, so we all buy more books by men. Ad infinitum.
Literary critic Ruth Franklin suggests the root of this gender-split in reading habits is that we tend to think differently about books by men and books by women. “Men’s novels about suburbia (Franzen) are about society; women’s novels about suburbia (Wolitzer) are about women,” Franklin writes. Nowhere is this miscalculation more obvious than in the reception to Wolitzer’s ninth novel, The Interestings. An Entertainment Weekly review of the book assures us that Wolitzer is “every bit as literary as Franzen or Eugenides,” while the New York Times claim “she has written a novel that speaks as directly to men as to women.” In both cases, the critics write as if we’re supposed to be surprised.
The Interestings is about six kids who meet at an artsy summer camp in 1974, and drift in and out of each other’s lives over subsequent decades. The book asks universal questions: What does childhood friendship look like thirty years down the line? When is it acceptable to lie to loved ones? How do you stop envy consuming you? Is it possible for everyone to be interesting? Beyond the astute social commentary, it’s also damn good writing. Wolitzer writes dialogue that gives characters a voice in the room, she captures unspoken truths about relationships, and she’s wryly hilarious. Wolitzer is to novel writing what Nora Ephron is to screenwriting. (Incidentally, Ephron’s directorial debut was an adaptation of Wolitzer’s first novel, This Is Your Life). In other words, she writes great American novels. So why is her work reduced to the genre of ‘women’s fiction’?
There’s a fairly compelling argument that the problem lies in the way publishers market books. No matter how literary, novels by women are assigned pastel covers and objects of domesticity - a signal to potential readers that this is a book for them. I retrieve copies of Wolitzer from my shelf and find white fluffy clouds, a spilled glass of red wine, and a four-poster bed. It’s marketing to help sell books, yes, but it also perpetuates the gender gap in readers, such that “a writer’s own publisher can be part of a process of effective segregation and vague if unintentional put-down,” Wolitzer remarks. I can only assume she’s writing from personal experience.
I think even Wolitzer’s latest novel, The Female Persuasion (2018) - with its Franzen-esque cover of bold typeface and vibrant colours - hasn’t reached the broad audience it deserves. The book is about an intergenerational friendship between Greer Kadestsky, an ambitious college freshman, and Faith Frank, an icon of second-wave feminism. Greer is trying to find her way in the world; the relationship with her high-school boyfriend is splintering and she’s hypnotised by Frank’s power and success. It’s a familiar coming-of-age narrative, only the protagonist happens to be a young woman in the early noughties. A publication date in the wake of #MeToo also makes it an overtly political novel, one that several critics marked out as ‘zeitgeist’ because it opens with a sexual assault on campus and closes with a misogynist in the White House. I’m glad to see Wolitzer’s placement in cultural conversation, but once again she is penned in: timely rather than timeless.
And at the book launch with over 100 attendees, Ruth Franklin lamented that she could only see a handful of male faces. Perhaps there’s only so much clever marketing you can employ when a book has ‘female’ in the title; readers will still choose books they think are for them. We’re all guilty, and I’ve been known to veer away from the shiny commercial covers of chick lit. It’s partly snobbery (I think they’re not serious enough) and it’s probably partly sexist. Books don’t exist in a vacuum: how we write them and how we read them reflects whatever bias exists in wider society.
The truth is we could argue forever about why there is a gender-split in reading habits. Blame publisher marketing, or booksellers who post passive aggressive tweets instead of demanding change, or readers’ own biased choices. The problem is that there is a gender-split, and it needs to be corrected. (More) men should be reading (more) women. And they should start with Wolitzer.