Yesterday I reviewed Magee’s stunning debut novel, Never Wave Goodbye. Today I’m happy to host a guest post by Doug. In Never Wave Goodbye, one of the key main characters is a female. In his guest post, Doug discusses whether or not male authors can successfully and effectively write about female characters.
Can men write women?
Leaving aside giants such as Flaubert and Tolstoy, who could probably have gotten inside the heads of codfish if their stories dictated such, are mortal male novelists capable of limning the interior world of females? After having just published a novel in which I, a male, have attempted just that, I’d have to answer, uh, I hope so.
I didn’t really make a conscious choice to ply these risky waters. I had an idea. A woman puts her daughter on a bus taking her to camp, the woman goes back in her house, fifteen minutes later the real bus from the camp arrives. The idea gave me little choice but to see what happened to this mother in the aftermath of this horrible deception.
I suppose I could have had her act like a stereotypical male, strap on some sort of firearm, saddle up a posse and light out in search of her daughter. But instead I hewed to a realism and watched as this woman, imprisoned by media and lack of clues as to where her daughter was, suffered and persevered. Two things were operating for me in this. I’m woman-raised (my dad died when I was one, my mother never remarried, and my only sibling was my older sister) and an earlier non-fiction book I did informed much of went on in the novel. That book was one of profiles of families of murder victims, and the family members who were most able to open up and speak of their experiences were almost always women.
While I understood what such an abduction would mean from a male perspective (I’m the father of three boys), I believe I also had a sort of innate understanding of how a missing daughter would affect the interior life of a mother. Call this hubris or misguided intentions, but I really had no choice. Once my central character got that knock on the door, I had to follow her through the tragedy.
To me there’s often a fine line, if any line at all, between male-thinking and female-thinking. Maybe that’s because in being woman-raised I tend to straddle the two camps. But I do think we often make a false dichotomy, Mars/Venus and all that stuff, between the way men and woman think about the world. Their actions and expressions may differ considerably due to expectations and conditioning, but, especially in times of crisis such as the one in my novel, they can be quite similar in thoughts and feelings. Both, I believe, can experience a fierce attachment to children and suffer equally when that connection is broken. I certainly had no political agenda in my novel, no interest in making a case for gender parity, but given who I am, what I’ve experienced, and the story I was telling, I simply had to see this story mainly from a woman’s perspective.
Can men write women? The proof, I guess, is in the pudding. Let me know.
Thank you, Doug! To learn more about Doug, please check out his web site, http://dougmagee.com.
On to the giveaway! To enter, please fill out the form below. You must fill out the form to be entered; comments will not be counted as entries. US and Canadian residents only, please. The winner will be announced Monday, July 19th.
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