Books by men with female main characters...

[TrilllianAstra]

... what do you think?

Sorry, I thought you were just asking for suggestions of books by men with female protagonists - I didn't know we were supposed to be suggesting only those books where we approved of the depiction of the protagonist!

But Hardy didn't hate Tess, however.

She's Come Undone - Wally Lamb.

Wicked - Gregory Maguire.

Actually I was wondering what people thought of male writers writing women in general and how it was done well or done badly and what they tended to get right and what mistakes were commonly made. I was expecting a discussion not a list of books.

But everyone seemed to think it was "name books in which men have done well at writing women".

That's a good thread too. :)

PG Wodehouse had female characters who were actual people rather than just adjuncts

Agree re Pratchett

Iain M Banks has a female protagonist in Against a Dark Background

I think the main thing male writers get wrong is when they hate women either explicitly; Philip K Dick is a prime example of this or a bit more cunningly through misogynistic characters; Martin Amis is a good example of this. Or just treat them as adjuncts to men; Brian Aldiss is the most recent example of this I've read.

You get in to very difficult questions about what's a man and what's a women if you start thinking about it in much more depth than this. But then not hating women seems a pretty low bar to jump.

She's Come Undone by Wally Lamb made me so fucking angry that I literally threw the book in the trash. The arrogance of a man imagining that he knows the intimate thoughts of a woman that way. I know fuck all about what men think and wouldn't presume of pretending otherwise.

And he made his character utterly unlikable. Almost a caricature of a mentally and emotionally troubled woman.

Grrrrr. That book pissed me off so much. Yes, I am aware that the book is fiction. But he got it so wrong.

I find I cannot read books written by a man, when the lead character is female.

Memoirs of a Geisha, The Other Hand etc, makes me cringe.

I bet good money I could actually tell from ANY book with a female lead if it is written by a man.

Somehow it shows, sadly, that men and women do not "get" eachother 100%

I was going to say Thursday Next. But I suspect that's because it doesn't really matter that she's a woman in these books.

some things men don't get is female sexuality, it never chimes with me. They make weird assumptions, such as women getting turned on enormously by the sight of a cock, any cock. I think this is NOT how most women get turned on. It is male fantasy. This is just a small example.

also, these women NEVER have a (messy)period.

The Sopranos by Alan Warner

Not about women as such, but teenage girls. Apparently he gad a very close relationship with his little sister. But still I can't understand how a man could so accurately portray what it's like to be part of a friendship group of adolescent girls.

In general I don't think there is any particular issue with writing characters of another gender, but the world of teenage girl friendships is utterly closed to boys. How could he know so well what it's like?

I'm very wary of books written by men with a female POV, although some of the above are pretty good. Douglas Kennedy gets it right in some of his, although not all (actually, in A Special Relationship, it was the male character that I found utterly unbelievable). I don't think they're either all good or all bad enough that I could generalise about how I felt, though. Usually the ones who get it wrong, it's not so much that they get a particular thing wrong, as much as the character doesn't feel really properly developed; she's just doing things, one after another.

Actually, much as I like Ben Elton's books, the only one where I liked the female POV was Inconceivable, and I think he probably spoke to his wife a LOT about that before writing it. Most of his female characters, even the ones who are main characters, are just vehicles for the plot.

Steviesmith, do you get the feeling that Martin Amis actually just really hates women, and tries (badly) to disguise it by writing 'unreliable narrator' misogynists all the time? I do.

I lovce the Tiffany Aching series from Terry Pratchett - Tiffany is a true hero./

variable. too often in crime fiction the female protagonist is drop dead gorgeous/very keen to sleep with the dysfunctional male borderline alcoholic detective protagonist.

I think Amis is a woman hater too Tortoise.

It is an interesting subject. I really disliked The Other Hand as well. I felt it was really arrogant for a white English man to assume the voice of a black Nigerian woman. But then it's a bit ridiculous if no one can write outside of their own experience. I think Richard Ford actually writes women very well and not as if he's SHOWING OFF how well he knows women.

Is writing across gender essentially harder than other examples of the writer's need to make an empathetic projection into someone not him/herself? I'm not sure. Possibly it is. But that projection is so important to what reading and writing novels is about that I'd hate the thought of problematizing it too much in the case of gender.

Atonement pops into my mind as an example of a very successful piece of cross-gender writing, and I'm sure there are lots of others. An example of it that I hated was Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow, which I think at one point has the female character loooking in the mirror and thinking how goddamned sexy she is, in a way that just felt like the male writer allowing his perception of her to be presented as her own self-perception.

Actually, perhaps that's what does make men-writing-women especially hard: our society institutionalises men's projection onto women of men's own desires. To take the most horrible examples, when men see a woman as attractive and call her a whore, or when men feel frustrated by a woman and call her a cockteaser, they are misperceiving something relational (their reaction to her) as something intrinsic in her; they don't see her they see themself in her.

That is a reduction of women to (a small subset of) their relational properties rather than something 'in and for itself', and so the creation of a fictional woman in a male novelist's imagination is more likely to fail to generate something plausibly autonomous?

I still want male novelists to attempt it though.

Robert Heinlein seemed to think he could 'write' women; read quite a few of his books in my early teens until I realised that the women were all just manifestations of his sexual fantasies. I look back on them with horror.

Thready Is writing across gender essentially harder than other examples of the writer's need to make an empathetic projection into someone not him/herself?

I don't know.

But there was a thread on "reading only books by female writers" and it made me think of this.

BellaBear I was going to say Thursday Next. But I suspect that's because it doesn't really matter that she's a woman in these books.

I think that's part of what makes the books great. Because really when you are being a detective doing detective things (albeit in a very weird situation) it doesn't matter if you are a man or a woman. I think some writers write as if gender is really really important at all times and everyone walks around in their daily life being hyper-aware that they are male or female.

Trillian - absolutely

Patrick Gayle and Mike Gayle (no relation) I think write female characters very well.

An astonishingly good example of success at this is Mating by Norman Rush. Chandon, yes, she does have a messy period! Typically, during one of the most difficult conversations of her life. Funny how that often seems to happen.

It's written in the first person by a female American anthropologist in Botswana. Does that sound off-putting? It is brilliant.

I could talk about this book all day. I would love the book club to discuss it, partly because I would love everyone I know (and don't know) to read it, and an excuse to read it again myself.

I struggle with male writers writing from a female perspective fairly often, but DH always moans about females writers, too.

I think a man writing as a women or a white person writing as someone black is always going to be more problematic than the other way around because of the power relationships. I also wonder if the dispossessed are a bit more observant when observing the powerful than vice versa.

vezzie, sounds like an interesting book! Will look it up.