The title of today's blog post best describes the question I get asked most about
The World without You, though it's rarely stated so directly. It's usually stated more like this: Your book is written from the points of view of many female characters. Is that hard for a male writer to do?
My answer is that it's a challenge for a male writer to write from a female perspective but no more so, it seems to me, than for a young person to write from an old person's perspective, a poor person to write from a rich person's perspective, or a gregarious person to write from a shy person's perspective. I don't see why gender should be a more insurmountable barrier than others. I believe good fiction can transcend difference, that it can take us out of our own experiences and allow us to inhabit the experiences of others. It's what happens, ideally, to the reader, and in order for it to happen to the reader it has to happen to the writer too.
A couple of years ago, I gave a reading from an early draft of The World without You, and I was reading with a woman novelist who read a section of her novel told from the perspective of a man. When the reading was over, she, too, was asked the gender question, and she said, "Are you kidding me? I spent half my life flirting with boys. I know them far better than I know girls." She was kidding, sort of, but I think there's a real truth there. In a lot of ways it's easier to write from the perspective of someone different from you. We're so close to our own experiences that we don't see ourselves as clearly as we see others.
As a side note, and at the risk of seeming like I'm contradicting myself, you might check out Lorrie Moore's "You're Ugly, Too," which is one of her very best stories (and she has many great ones). It's in her collection Like Life. It's a story about a single woman in her 30s who's living in the Midwest and who visits New York where her sister is holding a Halloween party and where she meets a man. But the story (or at least the story's protagonist) seems committed to the idea that men and women can never understand each other ? so much so that Deborah Tannen, in her bestselling self-help book You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation, dedicated a couple of pages to the analysis of "You're Ugly, Too."