Women's fiction still gets ignored

When I was first trying to write professionally, I had a very simple understanding of genre. I was writing science fiction and fantasy novels, and these books had their own section of the bookstore. When I went to the store, I exclusively shopped the sci-fi section. And this section made sense: if you had magic or the book took place in the future, then you belonged in this section.

In an American bookstore, there tend to be five fiction sections: Children's, Teen, Romance, Mystery, Sci-Fi / Fantasy, and...Fiction. Yes. it's different in different bookstores, but that's the general schema.

And the ‘Fiction’ section was always quite mysterious to me. This is a section where you'd find Tolstoy, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Bridget Jones' Diary.

Sci-fi / Fantasy authors tended to be somewhat obsessed with the Fiction section of the bookstore. Jeff Vandermeer's entire career is the story of his attempt to get from the sci-fi section to the Fiction section. Other authors started off in the Fiction section, like Margaret Atwood and Emily St. John Mandel, and sci-fi authors felt bitter resentment towards them for it.

What I didn't know is that even once you're within this section of the bookstore, there's also a lot of status anxiety. Many authors are in the Fiction section already, but these authors feel like there's some invisible divide between them and the other books in this section.

Fifteen years ago, there was a controversy called #FranzenFreude, where Jennifer Weiner, a chick-lit author, and Jodi Picoult, a women’s fiction author, got mad that women's books don't get as much attention as the books of Jonathan Franzen and Jeffrey Eugenides.

This was always a bit of a tough sell for two reasons. The first is that Franzen is a genius, who deserves all the accolades he got. The second was that it was unclear whether Weiner was mad about women not getting enough literary attention, or if the real problem was that there were certain woman-coded genres of fiction, namely chick-lit and women's fiction, that were considered unworthy of critical attention.

In the intervening years, literary fiction by women has started to get quite a bit of literary attention, but the genre informally known as “women’s fiction” has remained somewhat overlooked. It's not that easy to define “women’s fiction”, but basically it consists of books that are targeted towards women and are about serious themes, but which are somehow considered less sophisticated than literary fiction.

Unlike sci-fi, romance, thrillers, or mysteries, women’s fiction doesn’t have a set, determinate content. It doesn't even need to have female protagonists. It just needs to be: a) for women; and b) not worthy of the attention of serious literary people.

And this critical disdain persists even within our own little niche of fiction by transgender women. In this niche, it’s generally the high-brow books, by folks like Andrea Long Chu, Jamie Hood, Torrey Peters, that get all the critical attention.

But…in this little niche, just recently, there has come out a work of transgender women’s fiction. A trans novel that is recognizably branded as women’s fiction. And this book, which is from an independent press, and written by culture critic and TV writer Emily St. James, has been selling like hotcakes! I’m not saying it’s a New York Times bestseller or anything, but this book has been flying off the shelves. Which is somewhat astonishing when you think about it, because…I don’t know that there’s ever been a work of women’s fiction about a trans woman before.

Anyway, I read this book recently, and I loved it.

---

Woodworking is a novel about a closeted trans English teacher who works in a small town in South Dakota. This teacher—who calls herself Erica—finds herself sharing a school with a recently-out trans teenager, Abigail. And Erica ends up confessing her gender identity to Abigail, which means the girl is forced into the role of trans 'mom' to this thirty-five-year old person who seems, to all outward appearance, like a man.

It's a sweet book!

The highlight is really Abigail, who strongly resembles many young trans people I know: she's sarcastic, bitter, highly-online, very guarded, but also...she's gone through an experience that most young people haven't. She's been forced to assert herself, assert her own identity, and fight for something that most people haven't. She strongly reminds me of

Quiara Vasquez

, who is always calling me out and vexing me with her young-person knowledge just like Abigail does to Erica.

Abigail is somewhat frustrated by the responsibility of knowing about her teacher—especially when her own life is so shitty (she's been kicked out by her parents and is living with her sister). But she also feels a sense of responsibility to Erica.

And, moreover, although she is wise in the ways of transitioning, she's also highly-isolated, doesn't have many friends, is quite immature, and, most importantly, doesn't actually know that many trans people! Her whole experience with trans people is from online. So she and Erica have to enact some ritual of community that they've really only heard about online and have never experienced in person.

It's so much fun. I was really engaged by the book. It's also got a great setting. It's set in South Dakota on the eve of the 2016 election. And the funny thing is...back then, in the long distant past of nine years ago, people didn't have such strong opinions about trans folks. Trans people were an oddity. Most people hadn't thought that much about them. And this really comes through in the book—it was such a shot of nostalgia, from before this issue became so heavily politicized.

Not that everything is rosy. There is conflict, of course. A local state senator is trying to enact a bathroom ban. Erica, the teacher, is terrified of being outed. Abigail has a secret relationship with a boy whose mother is extremely religious.

The core of the book really consists of the relationship between Abigail and Erica. Their mutual frustration with each other is quite endearing. Abigail has no patience for Erica's equivocation about whether it makes sense to come out:

“Erica, you’re trans.”

“I’m not. But even if I was, don’t I get to decide if I transition or not?” The bitch smirks at me. “I read about it on Reddit.”

“If you were anybody else, yes. But you’re you, and you are being extremely irritating, and I, Abigail, get to decide that you, Erica, are trans and should start taking hormones so you become less irritating.”

Erica, for her part, rapidly becomes tired of the chip that Abigail is carrying around on her shoulder ("Talking to Abigail often felt like trying to convince a dog whose back legs had been replaced by a cart to trust you").

The writing is plain, but not annoying. The Erica sections are told in third person, and the Abigail sections are in the first-person. I much preferred the Abigail sections: they felt like I was reading an extremely good (i.e. not chirpily voice-driven) young adult novel.

In a novel like this, you always have to calibrate exactly how much bigotry the characters are going to experience. Too little and there's no novel; too much and it ends up being depressing. I feel like this book could've used a tiny pinch more bigotry. It's not that everyone is understanding—far from it. It's mostly a structural problem: Abigail is so helpless that if she was to experience more bigotry (from her classmates, for instance), it would be rapidly fly out of control and become intensely depressing.

This is something non-writers often don’t understand about writing a book. There’s a certain internal logic to a given situation. In the world that author Emily St. James has created, Abigail’s situation is quite vulnerable. The principal is quite transphobic. The community is fairly religious. If people choose to mess with her, there’s nobody in this world who can really stop them. But if you just elide or ignore her relationships with most of her classmates—as this book does—then you can avoid the situation coming up.

In contrast, the adult, Erica, would be more able to handle various forms of transphobia without being physically hurt or forced to leave town, but because she’s closeted for most of the book and nobody knows she is trans, it doesn’t come up.

As a result, the middle section of the book sometimes felt like it could’ve used more conflict. If I was writing the book, I might’ve either had Erica come out sooner, or made the principal less overtly transphobic, which would’ve then allowed more room for the kids to be transphobic.

But the focus of the book is really on the relationship between these two people, which mirrors the somewhat-contentious relationship that exists between older and younger transitioners (and between lesbian and straight transitioners) more generally. As such, I found it highly entertaining and relatable. I would say that after Nevada and Detransition, Baby, this is the trans novel that I've enjoyed the most.

---

Why do I call this women’s fiction?

I classify this novel as women's fiction because it's published by an imprint, Zando, that mostly publishes women's fiction. But it also doesn't feel like literary fiction. The writing is straightforward and doesn't call attention to itself. And it’s a high-concept novel that relies on its set-up to do a lot of heavy lifting (What if a younger trans girl had to mentor her closeted English teacher?). Moreover, it has many of the tropes (particularly intergenerational friendship) of women's fiction.

But it's hard to imagine this novel would be better if it had purple prose, overtly lyrical language, or languorous descriptive passages. The book seems perfectly itself. It's highly entertaining and a great use of time.

Of course when you talk about women's fiction and literary fiction, it's impossible to avoid discussing the term 'middlebrow'. The 'middlebrow' consists of books that the audience experiences as being intelligent and sophisticated, but which have been deemed, by the critic, as actually kinda shallow, somehow.

Many women's fiction books get dismissed as middlebrow. They're somehow trite or simplistic or unsophisticated. Even though the readers of these books are often college-educated and sincerely trying to better themselves, those readers are actually dumb. Crypto-dumb. Just smart enough not to realize they’re actually stupid.

The whole discussion seems silly. There’s no need to insult the audience. If a book is bad, just say it's bad. But that would require actually reading these books and taking them seriously, and that's exactly the effort that the women's fiction / literary fiction divide is meant to avoid.

---

What does it mean to say women’s fiction is overlooked?

I think it’s certainly the case that women’s fiction deserves more critical attention than it gets. But then you have a problem defining the border between women's fiction and literary fiction. It's so amorphous! Some writers basically live right on this border. Meg Wolitzer is a classic example. Her themes—divorce, mid-life dissatisfaction—are classic women's fiction. Her writing style is also quite accessible. But...she gets plenty of critical love, in part because she's embedded in the MFA system.

There are other authors of women's fiction, like Caroline Leavitt, who don't have that academic pedigree, and they don't get the same level of critical respect. With Emily St. James, she is somewhere in between. She wrote for magazines and the book has this diversity hook, so it’s gotten covered in the Washington Post and The Atlantic, but it still hasn’t gotten a New York Times Review and it almost certainly has less mind-share amongst the literati than the trans memoir I covered last week, The Trauma Plot.

I will say that whenever I pick up a work of women's fiction, I'm usually surprised by the quality. This isn't universally true: I found Where The Crawdads Sing to be hard going and I soon gave up. But Madeline Miller's Song of Achilles was pretty good, so was Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow And Tomorrow And Tomorrow were quite decent. And Gail Honeyman’s Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine was beyond good. It was excellent.

But...where's the dividing line? From the perspective of people outside the literary world, I just named three best-selling books. They don't necessarily perceive that there is any difference between these books and, say, Miranda July's All Fours or Meg Wolitzer's The Interestings. What am I even trying to say?

Nonetheless, within the industry, there's quite a stark dividing line between literary fiction and women's fiction. It doesn't make any logical sense. Many literary books are quite similar to women's fiction, and vice versa. It's just something that agents decide before the book is even submitted. When you’re pitching a book, you can either pitch it to high-brow imprints (FSG, Knopf, Holt, Scribner) or to imprints that specialize in more women’s fiction-y books (Putnam, Gallery, St. Martins, etc), and where the book lands really determines how it’s received by the critical establishment.

A great example right now is Homeseeking, by Karissa Chen. This is one of the most successful books to come out this year. It's a multigenerational family saga set in Taiwan, clearly being compared to Min Jin Lee's Pachinko. But because Homeseeking came out from Putnam, which specializes in women's fiction, it hasn't been reviewed by the major journals (The Atlantic, Harper's, The Cut, LRB, NYRB, etc) and it likely won't be in contention for awards. However, unlike most of the year’s highly-touted literary books, Homeseeking has been commercially successful: it’s sold many tens of thousand copies in the last few months.

I'm going to be honest: it is a baffling system. Pachinko was a breakout book that did get reviewed as a literary novel, by all these outlets, and it was a finalist for the National Book Award. Why would this other book not merit the same attention just because of its publisher and its market positioning? If Homeseeking is bad, reviewers should just say that! But instead it doesn't get reviewed at all (other than by the NYT and the trade journals).

Whenever I talk about stuff like this, my friends try to explain to me why books like Homeseeking get dismissed. They're like, oh these books are so simplistic and poorly written.

But...how do you know? My friends haven't read these books, because my friends don't read women's fiction—they only read literary fiction.

My friends have bought wholeheartedly into this dichotomy. But, personally, it does not seem at all incredible to me that some works of women's fiction might possess literary merit.

The real difference between a literary novel and a women's fiction novel is simple. Before the work of women's fiction was even sold to a publisher, the book's agent decided it wasn't a serious book, so they marketed it to a publisher that publishes books that people don't take seriously. And that's it. That's the difference. If you believe in this dichotomy, you basically just believe that agents and editors should decide, before books are even published, which ones are actually worthy of critical attention, and that nobody should ever revisit those judgments.

Why is that the system? How come there's no fall-back where, if a lot of people like a book, someone goes back and reevaluates it to say, "Hey, maybe this book is actually good?"

I guess the problem is America is just too big. Too many books get published. They can't all get seriously evaluated, so some have to be preemptively dismissed.

But what's weird is that books like Homeseeking get picked by book clubs. People discuss them. They learn from them. By their readers, who are largely college-educated and affluent women, these books are considered smart, serious books. But somehow the tastes of these women are dismissed a priori, as being unsophisticated, even as the industry makes considerable amounts of money catering to them.

It is a bizarre system. It only seems natural because we live it. In other countries, things don't precisely work this way. I'm always struck by how, in the UK, it's possible for books we'd consider 'women's fiction' to get awards. Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine won a first-novel award that was previously won by White Teeth, for instance. And Madeleine Miller is American, but while Song of Achilles got no awards love in America, it won the Orange Prize in the UK. In other countries, fewer books are published, so there's no need for this intense level of pre-sorting and stratification.

Anyway, my bias is that I think women's fiction is generally better than literary fiction. It's not universally true, but the average quality is much higher. That's because women's fiction is written more plainly—not nearly as pretentious—and it is more attentive to story. Women's fiction almost always offers a clear value proposition to the reader, whereas with literary fiction it often feels like the author is guessing: they've just thrown together a bunch of situations and images and are hoping it'll add up to more than the sum of its parts.

The best literary fiction is extremely good, of course, but the average literary novel is unreadably dull. The best women's fiction is also extremely good, while the average work of women's fiction is usually at least somewhat entertaining.

There's so much talk about the enervation of the novel, and how it's so insular and mired in first-person subjectivity, but that's only true of literary fiction, not women's fiction. There's also so much talk about how there's no polyphonic novels, there's no omniscient viewpoints, there's no novels that can speak to a broad range of people, there's no novels that are about people who don't live in cities—all of these things are not true about women's fiction!

There even exists a best-selling Millennial white male novelist, writing white male protagonists, but...he's writing women's fiction (Fredrik Backman).

The problem isn't with the fiction that people are writing, or even what they're reading—the problem is our aperture has been unnecessarily narrowed so that only a tiny subset of the fiction world is considered worthy of being read and discussed.

P.S. Emily St. James’s Woodworking came out from Zando on March 4, 2025. Get your copy here (Amazon) or here (Bookshop).

---

Calling for more reviews!

As evidenced by this review and by my recent review of Jamie Hood’s Trauma Plot, I have started to review front-list titles (i.e. new releases). In both cases, I purchased the book using my own money—I’m not part of any publisher’s PR machine.

I know that many of my followers have newsletters, and I’d like to issue a standing offer. If you post a review of any book I’ve written about in the last two months, then I am happy to link to it. Doesn’t matter if the review is positive or negative—it should just be substantive (let’s say longer than 400 words?). Hopefully we can get together an old-fashioned blogging circle, where we have a good time reading and discussing some of the same books.

To start us off, I have a post by

The Flood

, who recently read Uncle Tom’s Cabin. This is wild! I never thought I’d actually persuade someone—much less a young person—to read UTC. She seems to enjoy it quite a bit.

From this reading of Uncle Tom an understanding of Southern Gothic emerges that is distinct from the names we usually associate with that genre: Faulkner, O’Connor, etc. Southern Gothic connotes modernist influences, and stream of conscious narrative. Stowe’s Uncle Tom is older, and more pure in its influence of gothic literature, and the Antebellum South.

I think she’s very correct that Uncle Tom’s Cabin had a defining influence on how the South is portrayed and conceptualized in American letters.