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The Course of Words

Judge Date by Her Cover

Here are three articles claiming with scant evidence that women are fiction and men non-fiction. The earliest comes from the March 24, 2008, edition of The New Yorker, which started out as possibly a look at where the two literatures overlap in either memoir or false memoir. But near the end it dives into a Women/Venus Men/Mars dichotomy. That in turn got the attention of a Salon Broadsheet blog, as it seems to both reaffirm and contradict the magazine’s author. Last, the always diverse weekly books essay in The New York Times discussed the old know-me-by-my-bookshelves trick of dating.

Most of the men I know who read books, admittedly a small number, read fiction, going by conversation at get-togethers. The minority who prefer non-fiction go for history. Now, the women I know, including writers, are all over non-fiction but especially these three, how-to, self-help and spirituality or new-age, all tellingly neglected in the three articles above. I’ve heard mentions of history, science and current events as well but, in strong fourth place, memoir. In my crowd, both sexes enjoy poetry.

Thus the claim that women prefer fiction and men non, is wish-fulfillment by these refined major media intellectual essayists. Here’s another theory: A lot of women fear possibly having been short-changed by college and life experiences in general and want to level the field with more and better knowledge through self-education. They don’t feel they have time to relax into made-up / let’s pretend / derring-do / boo-hoo escapism. Men do, which would prove this feminist point.

I used to be a bachelor who checked out women’s bookshelves and cast judgments. I never did that to My Beloved when we dated; I was too smitten to think that mattered. It didn’t, but as it happens she had a shelf or two, mostly of the self-help order. For her part, she mocked my hundreds and hundreds of volumes. At rare times she does still.

MB’s collection has grown tremendously but they’re generally in that top three, very few fours (memoir). While she loves movies and the better TV dramas, she sees no point in getting involved in the prose lives of other people if they don’t exist. After 15 years of marriage, as of last month, I realized something: We can converse in detail about books, because we read different ones. If both read Cormac McCarthy or Suze Orman, that can last only a sentence or two, right?

Mostly I listen, though. Ask me about dollar-cost averaging! MB really sees no point in my telling her that Suzie Salmon’s dad just had a heart attack in Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones. Like The Constant Gardener or The Golden Compass, which I read or heard (as audio books), she always loves the film when it comes out. -30-

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