Amanda Craig Biography, Books, and Similar Authors

Interview

Amanda Craig describes the challenges for men writing books from a woman's point of view (and the laughable errors they usually make), and the equally challenging situation she faced writing In A Dark Wood from a man's point of view.

Gender bending is all the rage this year. With Nick Hornby, Sebastian Faulks and even the poet and scholar John Fuller choosing to write from the female viewpoint, the modern novel has entered the sex-war as never before. Cynics may wonder whether this isn't due to the simple fact that women buy far more fiction than men: according to literary agent Giles Gordon, publishers aren't interested in books about men any longer because these sell so badly. Yet at some point, any serious novelist is going to try to write from the perspective of the opposite sex, because the joy of writing fiction, as of reading it, is about getting outside your own head and into someone else's. Stepping beyond your own gender takes that process further. It's an irresistible challenge, but as I discovered last year, a very real one.

It shouldn't be so difficult. Many people, writers or not, cherish the illusion that they know the opposite sex better than their own simply because of having been to bed with individual members of it. In the imagination, we can surely be as hermaphroditic as the seer Tiresias, whom the Greek gods turned into a ...