'Sexual Reading' by Nicci Gerrard

This article by Nicci Gerrard (one half of Nicci French), first published in the Observer on 27 September 1998, explores the differences between the books read by men and by women.

The contents of my husband Sean's bedside table long ago spilled on to the floor: a pile of novels, some short stories, several volumes of poetry, a leaning tower of maths and science books, a thumbed Ancient Greek Made Easy, the New Testament, a sprawl of biographies and essays and philosophical reflections. Currently, I'd estimate Sean is 'reading' about 50 books seriously; their pages are marked with torn lengths of paper. A further 500 or so that he has started and intends one day to finish are kept in a special bookcase close at hand. He lies in bed surrounded by his books and his magazines, picks them up at random, browses, grazes, assimilates facts, reads a poem out loud to me, exclaims over new discoveries, learns a Swedish drinking song and chants it softly to himself, tells me about Montaigne in his garden or the Book of Job, navigates his way through the sea of words he has spread around himself.

Books are Sean's way of organising, understanding and to a degree controlling his world. In his bedroom down the hall, my son also lies in a circle of books - football annuals, adventure stories, chess manuals, joke books, an introduction to logical paradoxes. He loves it when Sean gives him quizzes. He loves knowing things and displaying his knowledge.

By contrast, I have one novel on my bedside table. I begin it at the beginning and read it to the end, immersed in its consoling narrative world. I want to sink down into fiction, abandon myself to it, forget about the real world above its watery depths - the world from which I have, for a moment at least, escaped. My eldest daughter does exactly the same. If I shout at her very loudly ('Time for school!') she will surface, dazed. Together, we read Little Women, adore the March sisters, and cry over their misfortunes. Swimming or sinking, waving or drowning. Men and women read differently.

I greatly admire Don DeLillo for his bravura set pieces, his razzle-dazzle of ideas about history and culture, his wit and his surrealism and his bleakness. I avidly read Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint as a teenager, to find out what boys got up to (and was solemnly appalled, failing in my young panic quite to get the joke or the pain). I read Nick Hornby in the same spirit of tourism, and want to be his friend because he sounds so nice. Phrases and scenes from Martin Amis's novels rattle in my head long after I have put the book down. But I have not felt that these books were written for me, to me. I am not their ideal reader - at home in the words, lost in make-believe.

When, at about 14, I first read Jane Eyre, I knew at once that it was written for and to me. I was the Dear Reader. It wasn't just a simple matter of identification with the plain, stubborn, misunderstood and unloved heroine. The novel has everything - it is like a masterclass in what women want from fiction (it mimics our favourite fairy-tales and it spawned tens of thousands of Mills & Boons). It has empathy ­ we are all Jane, all yearning for love and home, all in love with Mr Rochester. It has a narrative that takes us from loss to gain, desire to fulfilment, loneliness to community. It appeals to the victor and the victim in us. It has a happy-sad ending, the kind of sweet and melancholy ever after we want and can't get from real life. It has a lucid and robust style that allows us to forget its author and sink under its surface. And it makes its secret appeal to women: madness up in the attic and between the lines; a powerful sense of injustice and emotional hunger rippling the text.

There are other books that obviously set out to appeal to women because of their subjects: recognition-fiction such as Alice Walker's The Color Purple, Marilyn French's The Women's Room, Kathy Lette's Foetal Attraction. They often have quotations on their jackets that say things like 'This book will change your life'. They are consciousness-raising, gender-specific, culture-specific, often angry. But these novels - like Bridget Jones's Diary, which is fiction dressed up as fact (or should that be the other way round?) - don't really pull us down into fiction's deeper waters of self-forgetfulness. Their pleasures lie on the surface - 'me too' books, rather like Nick Hornby's or Blake Morrison's works. The novels that do this ­ the real 'women's novels' ­ are ones in which the self may be transported.

Women fall in love with Darcy, with Heathcliff. We become Rebecca, tremulous with fear and yearning. Sylvia Plath allows us to become raw and raging masochists (and masochism is a strong element of female identification: from gentle and self-sacrificing Anne in Persuasion to the terrifyingly complete victims in Jean Rhys's novels).

I always had an idealistic sense that literature cut through the gender divide. Yet when I think about it, I do feel that some books are essentially women's books; perhaps not surprisingly, all of these books are written by women. I have never met a woman who has read Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels (although I'm sure there must be a few around, just as there are a few girls who play War Hammer and learn football results by heart).

Men write satires and parodies; women usually don't. Men are sarcastic, sceptical, abstract; women are sincere and often sentimental. Men write novels that feel like fact. The heart of their books, its source, is often an idea, a theme. They thrive on aperçus, aphorisms, jokes, asides, digressions, nudges and winks to the reader. They feed us information. They like talking about cosmology. They show off in their writing, putting their logo on the text, never allowing the reader to forget them. Women draw us in close.

I always felt irritated and restricted by that old saying: 'Boys will be boys and girls will be girls.' I spent many years arguing with ardour and self-righteousness that differences were culturally determined. I used to be very stern and disapproving about the evils of biological imperialism.

But the evidence stacks up against me: girls concentrate, boys don't (five minutes is their apparent attention span). Girls play imaginary games and boys tumble and fight. Girls collaborate and boys compete. Girls are emotional and empathic; boys more abstract and judicial. Girls talk about feelings and boys talk about facts, ideas. Girls are interested in people and boys in ideas. Girls like stories, boys like lists. Girls like fiction and boys like fact.

Sean undoubtedly knows more than I do. He knows about logarithms and quarks and premier leagues and Bobby Fischer's best chess games and the dates of the Hundred Years' War and Wittgenstein's linguistic theories and when electricity was discovered and he can always remember the speed of light and the speed of sound and how many miles it is round the circumference of the earth and what the capital of Guatemala is. But I know what it is like to fall in love with Darcy, and I know what it is like to forget I am me, and that, I can't help feeling, is good enough.

Reprinted by kind permission of the Observer newspaper.

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