For Whom Do We Write?

In my post yesterday, "Boy among Girls," I riffed a bit on a conversation I'd recently had with my always dashing, never boring ballroom dance instructor, Jean Paulovich. He'd made a claim a week ago that turned on this fortissimo: men and women are two separate species; hence, the stories women tell about men have always and will forever devolve into a frustrated yelp of incomprehensibility.

I should say here about Jean that he is a purebred Belarussian and yet, since coming to this country less than ten years ago, he has become fluent in English, knowing more about root terms and grammar than most native speakers. He reads widely and deeply, is astonishingly quick witted, and he's an amateur psychologist to boot, a skill that, it seems, any ballroom dance instructor with aspirations for success must acquire and daily hone.

So that his comment caused me to step back and think, and now Kelly, aka September Mom, has thoughtified me (shall we say?) once more, with her comment/question: Beth, when you write, do you prefer writing to a primarily female audience? Does it change how you approach a story? I love the question so much that I yield this blog to it, and hope, of course, for your thoughts on the matter.

For me, the answer is this: I write the truest story I can find (be that memoir, poetry, fable, history, fiction) with the most-right language I can muster. I am by nature and by turns contemplative, ornery, outspoken, muted, at peace, distressed, entirely set on establishing a rhythm, then full of schemes to shatter the lyric's spell. I don't write for women, per se, nor for men, but for any who are willing to enter into the worlds I create. Much of the time, it is true, the willing are women, though I have heard from male readers of all my books, and I have treasured their responses to, say, Into the Tangle of Friendship, my memoir about friendship, and Still Love in Strange Places, my memoir about marriage, and Ghosts in the Garden, my memoir about growing up and older at Chanticleer, and House of Dance, a novel whose narrator is a 15-year-old girl. Flow, my autobiography of the Schuylkill river, was written in a woman's voice, and yet so many of its readers were men—men with whom I have had long conversations about time and love and hope and survival.

I have four brand new books on my desk to read. Two are by men, two are by women (more on these soon). I need, in my world, both men and women. I need their thoughts, I need their stories, I need their friendship.