Quick note: help me finetune the newsletter by taking a short survey (7 questions, a few minutes at most). I’d love to read your thoughts.
Word
Literary fiction has long been the province of male writers. Except, that’s not quite true. The literary past is full of female writers who used male pseudonyms for various reasons. Victorian powerhouse George Eliot is Mary Ann Evans, the influential nineteenth-century George Egerton is Mary Chavelita Dunne Bright, the Bell brothers are the Brönte sisters, and so on.
More and more, their novels are being republished with the real author names.
Ah, balance has been restored to the literary cosmos.
Except, again, not quite true. In the last decade or so, something has shifted.
In 2021, author Elizabeth Strout worried about the lack of young (<35 years) male authors in literary fiction1. In her words:
I don’t know why this has happened. Those women work hard to get where they are and they are good at their jobs, but do I think it’s a good thing? Well, I think that it makes it too narrow. I mean, if it was all male-dominated that would be a bad thing. And if it’s all female-dominated, then that might be just as bad. We need to mix it up. I also wish there were more male readers of fiction; we need to mix that up.
More specifically, 57% of hardbacks and 62% of paperbacks are written by female authors, and the remaining 43/38% are mostly men with already established writing careers. Those numbers may have changed a little in the last two years and they depend on which publishers you include but let’s assume they illustrate a trend.
This is reflected in literary awards too. As The Guardian Observer reports in 2021:
Over the past five years, the Observer’s annual debut novelist feature has showcased 44 writers, 33 of whom were female. You will find similar ratios on prize shortlists. Men were missing among the recent names of nominees for the Costa first novel award. Here, too, the shortlisted authors over the past five years have been 75% female.
So, where are the young male writers of literary fiction?
Tangles
It’s a question (young male) writer Barry Pierce also asked in a follow-up to the Elizabeth Strout interview. That follow-up has its own 2023 follow-up, in which he writes:
The [2021] piece was met with accusations of everything from misogyny to racism, and sparked response pieces in which people listed every young male novelist that came to their heads (the majority of which didn’t actually fit into the parameters suggested by The Sunday Times, nor my piece).
Let’s set aside the women vs. men rhetoric. Let’s set aside asking whether this lack of young male authors is good or bad or irrelevant. Let’s simply try to see if we can find clues for their disappearance.
In the simplified version, publishing a book through traditional channels works like this: write a manuscript —> find an agent —> find a publisher. This implies that the mystery has three sub-mysteries:
Are young men less likely to write literary fiction?
Are young aspiring male writers less likely to be picked up by an agent?
Are young male writers with an agent less likely to be published?
1. A tale of vulnerability
Are young men less likely to write literary fiction (or perhaps even less likely to write in general)? That’s hard to answer. We only see the writing that has been finished, after all.
But literary fiction is character-driven and concerned with examining the human condition and the emotional turmoil that comes with it. To do that well, you need a hefty helping of introspection, deep emotional honesty, and vulnerability.
I smell a clue. I hate to tumble into the manosphere rabbit hole, but male vulnerability is a topic we don’t really know how to handle well. Consider this 2022 Slate essay by writer Rachel Connolly on how we applaud vulnerable essays by female writers, in which she points out:
Male vulnerability is still wildly underdiscussed. Men could write essays… about feeling brokenhearted at losing a relationship with a woman who wanted children at a different time, or emasculated by earning less than they wished, or even disappointed by their girlfriend’s unenthusiastic response to their success. But they don’t, because everyone would laugh and make fun of them. In a patriarchal society, male vulnerability has no value, just as female vulnerability is too prized.
Or from Pierce’s earlier mentioned 2021 essay:
Men can write about vulnerability as long as it is masked as a comment on masculinity or class or society or trauma or identity. These are the ways we have made male vulnerability palatable. But really, all of this writing is utterly useless and says nothing. It is all too safe. Why would men, particularly young men, even bother? Why risk the backlash?
This, from my limited view, is true on Substack too. While there are men who write personal essays on the platform, the genre is dominated by (very talented) female writers.
In our current (Western?) society, are men less likely to develop or learn the emotional skills to (verbally) express their vulnerability? Are the men who have those skills less likely to display them out of fear of being mocked or dismissed? Both?
2. A story of resonance
Are young men less likely to be picked up by an agent? Sounds silly, it’s about the quality of the writing, surely? Hahaha. Oh, you were being serious? I’m half-joking, of course. We’ll return to this a little later.
First, agents.
The publishing industry in general is female-skewed. The 2020 Diversity Survey of the Publishing Workforce report from the UK Publisher’s Association finds that women make up around 55% of executives, 78% of editorial teams, 83% of marketing crew, and 92% of publicity teams in UK publishing (the only department where men were the majority was… IT). Agents are no exception. According to the 2023 Diversity Baseline Survey, almost 78% of literary agents identify as female.
Should that be an issue? No. But is2 it? Could it be that female agents and editorial teams find it easier to relate to stories written by women? Are marketing and publicity teams more likely to champion women they more easily recognize themselves in? This doesn’t have to happen consciously, I’m not suggesting there is a secret cabal of publishing women gatekeeping men from writing literary fiction. But could it be that the people who decide which author gets a shot at the literary limelight resonate more with female authors and stories?
I don’t know, but I can’t discard the possibility. (Then again, that might just be my male gaze. If so, hold me accountable!)
3. A book of (business) desires
Finally, are young male writers with an agent less likely to be published?
To think about this, consider the term ‘publishing industry’. An industry makes products to sell. Hell(o), marketing. Back to my semi-joke above, of course, the quality of the writing matters, but so does the marketability3. An agent’s wishlist is often a compromise between what they like and what they (think they) can sell.
Publishers receive mountains of agent-sent manuscripts and they have acquisition meetings (before or after talking to authors). In those meetings, editors pitch the books they’re interested in and the other departments weigh in. How much will it cost to produce and market the book? Who’s the target audience? Where does it ‘fit’ in the market? It’s an industry, remember.
Then, what sells? Or, in the publishing industry context, who reads books?
This 2021 Gallup poll suggests that American women read an average of almost 16 books/year, while men don’t even hit 104. If I dig into the results, I find that 12% of women haven’t read a single book in the year of the survey, compared to 22%(!) of men. So, compared to men, more women read and women read more. Supply, meet demand.
Add social media subcultures like BookTok and real-life subcultures like the literary ‘it girls’5 and you might see why female-oriented fiction might be high(er) on publishers’ wishlists. Could this lead to a vicious cycle in literary fiction? Fewer male writers, fewer male readers6, less demand for male authors… Or perhaps it starts at another point. Fewer male readers, lower demand for young male writers, fewer young male readers and fewer role models for aspiring young male writers…?
Does the average literary fiction-reading woman want to read about male insecurities and vulnerabilities? Is she interested in a male perspective on life’s challenges or do we have to admit that young men already get plenty of limelight elsewhere? Can we leave the gender divide behind and focus on universal human experiences?
I don’t know. You tell me.
Famous last words
Of course, I’m biased. I’m a not-quite-that-old (no further comment, your honor) man who tries (and fails) to see himself as a writer. Whenever you place the words ‘men’ and ‘women’ in the same essay, people get defensive. I’ve tried to approach the topic with care and nuance. Yet, I feel the need to spell out two things:
I’m not attaching value statements to anything I’ve written. I don’t know if the lack of young male novelists is overblown or good or bad or anything in between. I’m not at all saying female authors need to ‘make room’ for their male colleagues. Publishing is not a zero-sum game. Everyone benefits from a larger and more diverse readership and writing community.
Of course, gender is only one dimension in this whole discussion and even there it’s far from complete. Authors who openly identify as non-binary or transgender are so small in number that they don’t meaningfully budge the stats I’ve referred to, but I can imagine they are perennially underrepresented. And let’s not forget the intersections with age, ethnicity, social class, and so on.
So… what’s the last good book you read?
It’s hard to find numbers for other genres of fiction, but this diligent Redditor looked at science fiction and fantasy publishing trends in 2020, and, with the sole (unsurprising?) exception of hard science fiction, these genres and their subgenres are female-dominated as well, especially young adult speculative fiction (close to 80% female authors) — this, however, could be because books by female authors are (anecdotally) more likely to be miscategorized as YA.
And with that, I’ve given you a bite of philosophy. This is a twist on David Hume’s is-ought problem: you can’t make claims about what ought to be based only on what is.
For recent (satirical?) fictional treatments of the marketing/diversity aspect of publishing, I heartily recommend Yellowface by R. F. Kuang and the movie American Fiction.
This implies I’m several standard deviations away from the mean. Story of my life. Dear fellow men, read more fiction! It’s by far the best workout for your empathy and self-awareness muscles. Or, in the words of James Baldwin:
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.
If you are a literary it girl reading this (but why should you?), please figuratively adopt me. I’m not even joking. I’m so intrigued by that subculture — ‘intellectual salon with sparkles’ vibe and I’m here for it.
It’s a sad truth that men, if they read at all, are more likely to read books by male authors. (I got a bit worried here and checked my last 100 fiction reads — the ease of checking that is one advantage of an e-reader... 66 by female authors, which includes a brilliant little one, This Is How You Lose the Time War, by a female-male team. Guess I’m an outlier here too. Phew.)
This is so interesting to me for so many (personal) reasons:
-I’m a young woman reader and writer who definitely notices the lack of male peers.
-My parents were incredibly literary. An English professor mom and a newspaper editor dad — who both did their own reading and writing in their free time. So I was always exposed to reading and writing as something non-gendered.
-I now work in marketing for a university — two female-dominated environments. You mentioned marketing teams, but higher ed is another landscape where women are rapidly outnumbering men. And we’re not 100% sure why (lots of theories at this point..)
Why does it seem that young men are opting out of such big spheres of intellectual life: reading, writing, higher education? What are they doing instead?
As a strong feminist, I think it’s important to consider how the evolving patriarchy (a term that’s difficult to toss around) is making men shrink away from big and fulfilling parts of life. Fantastic post — great data.
I remember the advice I got from an agent back in 2011 when I was querying for a novel about a man with a weird job struggling with his identity in a masculine world.
Hell, not just one agent. A few.
"Men don't read fiction. This is good, but there's no audience for it. Women read. Men don't."
There's some stats to back this up, but I heard this from multiple agents at the time. I was nudged towards "if you're going to write, write things that men will read." I also essentially got an earful of "women don't want to read books written by men," which... I don't know.
As much as I'd like to claim there were a litany of other reasons as to why I went into writing specfic (namely SF), a big part of it hinged on that disappointment of basically being told (almost 15 years ago), "you're a guy and this space isn't going to be entirely welcoming." It made sense, especially considering agents felt increasingly to be women, and there are plenty of statistics around about reading and buying habits that point towards women being more avid readers.
Trust me, I know. I've litigated and re-litigated this advice and guidance so many times, and a part of me wishes I hadn't let it be so disheartening to me at the time.
But it was really... not great. So of course, here I am, trying to get past all of this and back into that world.