Are there any traditionally male authors or novels, stories about the male experience that you found yourself surprisingly identifying with as a woman?

4 comments

  1. There aren’t any “male” novels. Books themselves are not gendered. There are books by male authors or books that feature male protagonists or antagonists. There are books that feature and focus on men, but they’re still just stories.

    Living my life as a woman has included a very long and expansive list of reading stories written by male authors about their experiences as men or fictional experiences of men from their personal perspectives as men. Unlike men, women in my culture are fully expected to be able to read, empathize with, and identify with male characters in fiction. It’s not weird or unusual to do so. It’s the background radiation of life.

    So, many of my favorite novels focus on men by default. I enjoy science fiction, speculative fiction, fantasy, and similar stories. Many of the classics in these genres feature male main characters and male authors. If you want to enjoy the story, you have to be able to empathize or identify with the male character. Most of the women characters are often treated as accessories or plot devices, so it’s not as though you can really spend much time empathizing with them or feeling much for them as a character. Thankfully, more modern novels tend to have better representation, but it is a completely normal thing to enjoy stories written by male authors that feature male protagonists/antagonists as a woman because that’s what you are given to read and culturally expected to do.

  2. I typically enjoy books by male authors more than female authors. I’ll read anything and everything by James Clavell, James Michener, Andy Weir, John Scalzi, Frank Herbert, James SA Corey, Jim Butcher, Justin Cronin, Matt Dinniman, and that’s just off the top of my head. The last book I read by a female author was For You and Only You by Caroline Kepnes, and it’s written from a male POV.

  3. Most classic novels since most were written by men. Definitely Mark Twain novels… but I can’t say how I feel about him as a person or historical figure, I don’t need the Mark Twain subreddit coming for me!

  4. Coming of age stories like The Perks of Being a Wallflower and The Catcher in the Rye.

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