05 Feb 2012 01:52:05
Male and female authors in America are competing over who has it harder, with bestselling chick lit author Jennifer Weiner arguing the New York Times still pays more attention to male writers, and first-time novelist Teddy Wayne countering that most male authors are at a "financial disadvantage".
Weiner, whose bestselling novels include In Her Shoes, was at the heart of a storm which blew up in 2010 over the New York Times's focus on what the novelist Jodi Picoult described as books by "white male literary darlings". "NYT loves its literary darlings, who tend to be dudes w/MFAs," said Weiner at the time. "In summation: NYT sexist, unfair, loves Gary Shteyngart, hates chick lit, ignores romance." Slate.com crunched the numbers, finding that of the 545 books reviewed by the New York Times between June 2008 and August 2010, 62% were by men, and of the 101 books that received two reviews in that period 71% were by men. Research last February, meanwhile, showed the gender imbalance to be true across newspapers and literary journals on both sides of the Atlantic.
Weiner decided to take a look at the split a year later, finding last week that while things had improved – in 2011, the Times reviewed 254 works of fiction, split roughly 60/40 in favour of male writers – "if you're hoping for equality, the paper's got a long way to go".
"Of the works of fiction whose authors were reviewed twice (either with two full reviews, or review plus roundup) and profiled, one was a woman [Téa Obrecht] and 10 were men," she said. "So if you believe that PEN-prize winning Jennifer Haigh's new book Faith deserved better than a throwaway mention under the heading 'For the Ladies' in a Janet Maslin summer beach-book round-up … or if you notice that Tom Perrotta got two reviews and a profile within three days of publication, while Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus received a single review, three weeks after its pub date … or if you wonder why memoirist Meghan O'Rourke is posing in a Missoni sweater in T Style Magazine, while novelist Gary Shteyngart talks technology ... Speak up."
As Weiner braced herself for what she called the "inevitable 'your books suck/you're jealous'" feedback, her points were attacked by Wayne in a piece for Salon entitled "The agony of the male novelist", in which he claimed that "for the majority of male literary authors — excluding the upper echelon of Franzen, Jeffrey Eugenides, Don DeLillo and their ilk, plus a few younger writers like Chad Harbach who have scored much-ballyhooed advances — it's actually harder than it is for women to carve out a financially stable writing career".
Women, said Wayne, buy around two-thirds of all books and 80% of fiction. They belong more frequently to book clubs, which are skewed towards female authors writing about female experiences, "the publishing industry has noticed this trend in reading habits", and it's the "midlist male author who writes about males" who is suffering.
"Not only will you not get reviewed in the Times, but you won't get reviewed in the women's magazines that drive sales, like People and O, the Oprah Magazine. Book clubs will ignore you. Barnes & Noble will relegate you to the back shelves. Your publisher won't give you much support — if it even publishes your book in the first place. As a book-editor friend once admitted to me, 'When we buy a debut novel by a man, we view it as taking a real chance'," said Wayne. "Male authors are somewhat like male porn stars: getting work, but outearned and outnumbered by their female counterparts, who are in far greater demand from the audience (for very different reasons)."
Weiner, he said, is "doing just fine". She is part of the "literary 1%", he continued, quoting Brad Pitt in the film Moneyball, and has "uptown problems, which aren't really problems at all".
But the truth, responded Weiner on Twitter, is that "being a novelist is hard for anyone – male or female. You don't get to quit your day job. I had one until I'd published two books. But if you're a (rare and lucky) male author, you can hit the jackpot - critical acclaim + great sales – that still eludes your sisters."
