30 May 2022
I wasn't surprised last week at a literary festival when the chair turned to one of the panellists, a well-respected popular journalist who's written a novel, and asked her: ‘You're writing for a Mumsnet audience with this book, aren't you?'. Implicit in it is the dismissiveness rife whenever women write and read fiction that isn't a) literary b) crime or thriller. (She also hasn't got the memo: Mumsnet is a hotbed of radicalism, haven't you heard?). In the audience there were audible murmurs of irritation. But as I say, I wasn't surprised. Seventeen years since my first novel was published I've grown wearily used to defending both commercial fiction by women and the habits and assumptions made about female readerships.
