Immersion as Empathy: Narrators Unlike Ourselves Have Much to Teach Us

I am puzzled by the Women's Fiction section of the bookstore. Perhaps you've never noticed that this common genre of literature often warrants its own designated shelves, its own designating sign—not in every shop, I'll grant, but in enough of them to be utterly unremarkable. But I notice, and so let me describe the common features.Women's Fiction is not romance, which has a section of its own. In Women's Fiction, you'll find drama. You'll find all the many X's Wives and the Y's Daughters book titles, as well as more soft-focus stock art than you can shake a stick at. You'll find some happy endings and characters obsessed with shoes, certainly, but also a ton of sharp edges, blades of injustice, abuse, divorce, grief, and mental health. And of course, the vast majority of these books are written by women and feature female narrators. They are books of the she/her/hers.On the other hand, I have never noticed a Men's Fiction section. There are tons of other sections which, at least on the surface, are unisex, for everyone, and under examination, the division makes absolutely no sense. Yet on the shelves, there are general books and there are lady books.Don't mistake me. I'm not calling the Women's Fiction section unfair or malicious. The books thus categorized have an undeniable cohesive tone and appeal, and if you enjoy such novels, of course there should be a section where you can find similar books. What confuses me, though, is how women are encouraged to and often do read from all the other shelves, but very few men venture into lady land.Exploring why this attitude exists can be a road toward discomfort, but as an avid reader and an author, it's a road I've travelled extensively in my mind, and I believe one root cause is the pronouns: the she/her/hers. Certainly not all, but many male readers do not easily immerse in the skin of a female narrator. They might not actively work to avoid such immersion. They don't have to. Our world is such that the omission can be created by accident—for men.Women, on the other hand, have very little choice about being exposed to male narrators and are well accustomed to them. I wouldn't have passed high school English had I not conversed with Hamlet, Raskolnikov, and Gatsby. The Invisible Man was not the Invisible Woman. Even younger, middle school offered the choices of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, A Separate Peace, and The Indian in the Cupboard. All these books are helmed by boys, but as a little girl, I could feel myself alongside Jim on a raft on the Mississippi. I could feel the eyes of the other kids as I stood on a tree branch over the Devon River, screwing up the courage to jump.Just to be clear, I'm not knocking any of these classics. “To be or not to be” is a question any reader can find profound and moving, but the fact is that women are far more accustomed than men to immersing themselves in the experience of a narrator with a different gender. Our hearts ache when men's hearts are broken; our imaginary legs fill the pants of pirates and the spandex of superheroes.Indeed, women readers are encouraged and often academically required to empathize with the masculine point of view, and we do so without shame. Men, on the other hand, perhaps read some women authors—we've come some distance toward parity in literature—but are never forced and rarely enticed into the points of view of women.

Show me your secrets, your shame, your pride, your mistakes, your evil, and you thereby help me understand my own evil and pride and shame.

Again, don't mistake me. This limiting behaviour doesn't anger so much as flummox me. Stereotypically, it's not very masculine to leave sections of the world unexplored, yet so many men choose—passively or actively—not to immerse in a character whose gender identity doesn't match their own, as if the skirts might pinch.Personally, I enjoy reading challenging characters and points of view as unlike my own as possible, even the unlikable ones (especially the unlikeable ones). Please, take me to other times, other worlds and other dimensions. Show me your secrets, your shame, your pride, your mistakes, your evil, and you thereby help me understand my own evil and pride and shame. Certainly all people are different, but that we are all different is something we share. When many men have no interest in trying on a woman's point of view, I see that as a loss of human experience. Also, a missed chance at empathy, because what is immersion if not empathy?As a reader, I think about that loss often, and wonder if and how a masculine lack of empathy for the feminine transcends the page into the real world. As a woman, I'm disappointed that my point of view is segregated and that mine is seen as the lesser life experience.As a writer, however, I became fascinated with the idea of immersive empathy when I created the psychiatrist Dr. Derek Verbenk, the character who spoke unbidden in my ear and became the core of my first novel, Transference, published in fall 2017.

For a mistake that ruined his life, the sex should at least have been good, but no. The orgasm that cost Dr. Derek Verbenk his job at his prestigious psychiatric practice had been mediocre at best. Seriously, he'd had better climaxes in his hand in the shower than with that patient, he lamented as, with a huff rather than a groan, he completed doing just that.

This shrink is a he/him/his of massive proportions and a #metoo nightmare. An odd choice for a progressive feminist, I'll admit, but authors do not always choose their characters. In this case, Verbenk chose me. He arrived in my head one day carrying that first sentence of the novel, and from there, his horrible and hilarious and human voice would not leave me alone.I hated him and I loved him.

For a mistake that had cost him the career he'd been groomed for since birth, she should have been gorgeous, or at the very least, young, but no. At 40, the woman had been only a dozen years his junior, averagely pretty, wispy thin with wispy hair. She'd been single and lonely—weren't they all lonely?—but also naive and insecure and fawning, the type of woman who wanted to fill all their hollow places with validation or perhaps a man. And he was a man, wasn't he?

I wanted to see what happened to this snarky, witty and often I-shouldn’t-be-laughing funny voice when I put a tailor-made challenge in his path.

What I found most interesting about this flawed man is that he's a creation of a woman, meaning me, and simultaneously, he did not understand women at all. The doctor, I feel safe in saying, would never even think to choose a book from Women's Fiction, oh no. Verbenk is a man who belongs on the Men's Fiction shelf, were there one, because he inhabits a world where he is a man and women are separate. They live their lives, he lives his, and the two only intersect in one arena: the sexual. Yet he's confused why his sexual relationships, including the unethical but consensual liaison with this insultingly-described patient, always bite his tender, saggy, middle-aged ass.

Sometimes the doctor saw his life as a parade of calamities caused by the fairer but untrustworthy sex, women who robbed a man of sense or his testicles or both at once. Women who then left as if they'd never been. The married women (two). His college roommate's sister. The salesgirl who'd sworn she was 22. All the games of "Use or Be Used."

Verbenk is the man-est man I might have ever imagined, but I empathized with him nonetheless because I, too, have had to lie in messy beds of my own making. I, too, have been blind to my own blindness, ambushed by my faults. I wanted to see what happened to this snarky, witty and often I-shouldn't-be-laughing funny voice when I put a tailor-made challenge in his path. I took the man who didn't understand himself or women and confronted him with a female telepath who sees Verbenk in a way no one previously has.

He felt dissected, as if she'd ripped him open and put what were supposed to be indoor organs on the outside of his body. He felt … so very much, all his buried bodies surfacing, and he didn't like that, had never liked that. Feeling things.

Oh, the joy of making him feel things for which he was unprepared.I only fully realized after the story was finished that writing Transference had been an exercise in empathy. My own empathy, that is, for someone who literally didn't understand me. My empathy for all the men of this world who live with the artificial divide between he/she, him/her, his/hers. Via telepathy and forced self-reflection, I dragged Verbenk, kicking and screaming, on an adventure that sought to widen his world to include a whole other sector of the population.For that's what the segregation of Women's Fiction creates: a smaller reading experience, a smaller human experience. A narrower adventure. In the end, my first novel was written from a male point of view not because I was trying to avoid the segregation of Women's Fiction, but because Verbenk's was an experience I'd not yet had, a person whose skin I'd not yet tried on for size. The experience, I hope, has made me a better person.So no, I'm not angry that Women's Fiction has a designated section. Nor do I denigrate those soft-focus covers hiding sharp issues, like razor blades inside throw pillows. Instead, I'd like to offer every reader an open invitation to widen their reading map into previously "here there be dragons" areas. Try another genre or another gender on for size. Let your heart ache when women’s hearts are broken, and let your imaginary legs, for once, fill our spanx. Increase your capacity for empathy, widen your adventure and, sure, maybe work toward that parity between men and women authors we haven't yet been able to reach. Maybe your efforts will walk off the page and into your life.After all, the whole bookstore should be for everybody. The whole world should be for everybody, and the more empathy we all have for one another, the better the bookstore and the world can be.