It is to a lot of women writers, yes. Take that Meg Wolitzer article I directed you to in the previous post; she makes the suggestion that if Jeffrey Eugenides’s book The Marriage Plot (with its title, wedding ring on the cover, female protagonist, and relationship-heavy plot) had been written by a woman, it would have been labeled women’s fiction and promoted in an entirely different way.

She’s not the only one who notices this. In her interview at Slate, Elizabeth Gilbert notes, “It has not escaped my attention that when I wrote about a man’s emotional journey they gave me the National Book Award nomination, but when I wrote about a woman’s emotional journey, they shunted me into the ‘chick lit’ dungeon.” I could give you one example after another of women authors who feel this way.

Yes, I’m still talking about what publishing industry observer Porter Anderson calls “Madison Avenue’s obsession with gender.” That Madison Avenue thing is key, so hold onto that idea while I play over here in my sidebar.

Here’s the thing. In my work as an editor, my colleagues and I have a category we quite happily and with no sense of shame call women’s fiction. It’s different from romance, but it’s clearly aimed at a female audience. As a woman, it doesn’t bother me that it is fiction women readers, primarily, will read. I consider it a genre. (And I don’t think genre is a dirty word either.)

Guys won’t read the women’s fiction to which I refer. And neither I (as a woman) nor the authors penning these books are bothered by that. Again, it’s just a genre choice, in the way that thrillers or Westerns or science fiction is a genre choice. My editor friend Robert Doran says,

Even though I read a lot of women, I wouldn’t for a moment be seduced into reading romance or chick lit* for pleasure. But these books are so blatantly directed at women, both in content and in their marketing that, frankly, they exclude a male audience from the outset. … [But] in my staple reading, I don’t think of Donna Tartt, Zadie Smith, Emma Donoghue, Sarah Waters as being any different from Ian McEwan or Philip Roth or Hanif Kureshi.

I don’t either, as we’ve discussed. Even Meg Wolitzer makes this distinction, although she comes at it from the other side:

When I refer to so-called women’s fiction, I’m not applying the term the way it’s sometimes used: to describe a certain type of fast-reading novel, which sets its sights almost exclusively on women readers and might well find a big, ready-made audience. I’m referring to literature that happens to be written by women.

“But some people,” she says, “especially some men, see most fiction by women as one soft, undifferentiated mass that has little to do with them.”

So this is where the problem lies. There is an industry term that serves a very real function. A marketing, Madison Avenue function. And then there is the confusing term, this mythical, snipe-hunt-like concept that assumes anything written by a woman is a priori women’s fiction. Again, Wolitzer: “Exploring Amazon, I came across a category called ‘Women’s Fiction’ where I am listed, along with Jane Austen, Sophie Kinsella, Kathryn Stockett, Toni Morrison, Danielle Steel and Louisa May Alcott.”

Who in his right mind lumps together Danielle Steel and Louisa May Alcott? After noting the top three spots on the New York Times Best Sellers list at the time, Kate Harding, writing for Salon, notes,

Are you seeing the obvious commonalities among [Nicholas] Sparks’, [Jodi] Picoult’s and [Kathryn] Stockett’s books? Me neither. And are you seeing why Nora Roberts doesn’t count as an author of “women’s fiction,” despite the fact that her audience contains just as many vaginas? Me neither.

There it is again: marketing. The folks at the publishing company are trying to sell books. And since women buy more books than men (we have the data), can you blame them?

Well, yes, you can, if you’ve written a book that any human might enjoy. Think about this:

If I’m not mistaken, are there not many books written by men and marketed to all genders that include abuse, poverty, divorce, familial breakdown, and other social struggles? Philip Roth, John Updike, Jonathan Tropper, Jonathan Franzen, Jeffrey Eugenides, Pat Conroy, and Wally Lamb—to name a few. The prejudice is clear, but there is also a practical problem here. If ‘women’s fiction’ is a marketing device, it’s confusing as thus. Label a novel ‘women’s fiction’—is the message ‘not for men’? By carving and dicing books into thin-as-lox slices, women writers lose readership. With ‘women’s fiction’ are half the potential readers in the world blocked off before the books hit the shelves? (Emphasis mine.)

Still with me? I suspect this confusion arises because the people who click the boxes on the forms—whether they work for the publishing house or Amazon or Barnes & Noble—aren’t smart enough (and yes, I mean that) to discern the difference between true women’s fiction (which, after all, is, on occasion, written by men: hello, Nicholas Sparks) and fiction written by women.

And it’s not just those boxes to tick. It’s covers. Wolitzer herself famously wrestled her publisher to the ground over the cover of The Interestings (which I think is spectacularly ugly … but to each her own). Women authors’ covers can be subtly feminine (the egalitarian Doran says, “I’ve wanted to read Where’d You Go, Bernadette? for a while, but the girly cover really puts me off”); I’ve seen repeated mentions of Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding, with the implication that this—all font and no art—is a cover men will pick up. So why do we still have non–women’s fiction books by women authors with, you know, rain boots on the cover? Or bicycles? You won’t find anyone at Amazon ticking the women’s fiction box for The Art of Fielding. (Nor will you find a category called men’s fiction.)

So women writers resort to various … well, subterfuges. When J. K. Rowling chose a clearly male pseudonym (Robert Galbraith) to write a genre mystery (popular with men), she was pilloried for the “deception,” among other things. One of my friends in the industry, a woman, noted that the brouhaha only highlighted weaknesses in the publishing industry, including the difficulty of finding readership for a new author, the way established authors are pigeonholed and prejudged, and gender prejudice on the part of both publishers and readers. Yet at the same time, one of my men friends who enjoys fiction commented he was unlikely to pick up any book with the word cuckoo in the title. Galbraith’s The Cuckoo’s Calling can’t win for losing.

You see, it can get very complicated, this book-selling business. And selling books is what everyone involved—authors both male and female, their agents, publishers, retailers—wants, right? Thus the proliferation of articles accusing the book industry of sexism, when readers are as much to blame. At least this article from the Guardian attempts to defend the industry:

It’s clearly a marketing decision, I thought, so I asked Cathy Rentzenbrink, the associate editor of the Bookseller, if she could explain. “As a person, a feminist and a reader, I completely understand and feel the frustration, but practically, I also know there are vast amounts of real people who want guidance towards the sort of book they will enjoy, and that is what publishers and retailers are trying to provide,” she told me. “Even the dreaded ‘chick lit’* term is useful in that the reader who wants that type of book knows what they are getting. It’s a bit similar to the genre debate. I always enjoy lofty cries of ‘There should be no genre, there should only be books’, but those of us who understand the coalface of bookselling know that a large building with no categorisation other than ‘Books A–Z’ would be very difficult to navigate.”

Think about that. What if we just let authors—with help from their agents, say—choose their own categories? And anyone who ticks the women’s fiction box without written approval will be shot at dawn. That would solve it, no?

Honestly? I don’t like to get drawn into the discussion about “women’s fiction,” because I make no such distinction in my own reading. I’ve organized my Kindle into files: fiction, nonfiction, YA/middle grade, books I’ve finished, books related to the publishing industry (there’s quite a few of those). But fiction … nonfiction … that’s as far as I need to go. Nonetheless, I agree the term women’s fiction is currently not useful at best and destructive at worst—even if at the heart of the matter it’s just miscommunication, misunderstanding.

When I’m editing, I tell my authors a plot point based on a misunderstanding isn’t truly a conflict, that we need a more substantial setback, one that seems insurmountable. How can we turn this plot around? The industry—and readers—has gotten sloppy; we’ve turned “women’s fiction” into a dirty word.

* Chick lit also has a very specific meaning for me; for younger adults, with emphasis on fashion (and brands in general) and the single life. These days the term chick lit is out of fashion, though.

Read the other posts in this series:
1 Women, Men, Readers, Me
3 It’s Hard to Catch Up When You Start Out Behind
4 The Androgynous Mind

Tweet: There’s a difference between true women’s fiction & fiction written by women.
Tweet: Who in his right mind lumps together Danielle Steel and Louisa May Alcott?
Tweet: Is “women’s fiction” a dirty word? (Gender in Fiction part 2)
Tweet: So this is where the women’s fiction problem lies. There is an industry term & a confusing term.

Disclosure of Material Connection: I have not received any compensation for writing this post. I have no material connection to the brands, products, or services that I have mentioned. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”