I love women, but reading books written by men helped me grow and understand myself better

August. I’d gone hiking with some friends in upstate New York. I was tired, heartbroken over some boy who didn’t love me back. My mind spun with disappointment, my body with too much sun. When I got home to my apartment, I checked the post: a book. Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton.

Inside my apartment, I kicked off my shoes, laid down on the hardwood floor and started to read. I’ve always found books to be the best solace for a broken heart. A paragraph in, and I was smiling. It was that hushed, holy feeling coming over me, the same one I always get when I read something I know is going to change my life. Goosebumps jump onto my skin, my mind goes absolutely quiet. All that’s left are the words in front of me. It’s why I read books about the history books, philosophy books, theology books and fiction books. To find those reads that will sculpt my very soul.

As a child, I was homeschooled and mostly read novels written by women. Anne of Green Gables, Jane Eyre, Little Women, The Secret Garden. They were stories about girls who conquered their faults and their circumstances and emerged victorious with joy - and usually husbands. But now, in my mid twenties, I find a shift happening. As my interests have broadened, I’ve started to read books predominantly written by men.

Men who write women well have held up a mirror for me, helping me to understand myself.

In fiction, men who write women well have held up a mirror for me, helping me to understand myself. A man will never know the grit and glory of what it feels like to be a woman, but his distance gives him an idea of the splendor of the view—and of the craters that marr its surface. Men know women’s vices because they’ve been mortally wounded by them. And they know their virtues because… well, we have so many and they are often obvious.

I think of Thomas Hardy’s Bathsheba Everdene in Far From the Madding Crowd. Fiery, brave, beautiful, vain. Here is a woman. She feels real because she is flawed. She inspires me and convicts me at the same time. And Tolkien’s Eowyn from The Lord of the Rings. A gorgeous balance of courage and grace. Even F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Daisy Buchanan from The Great Gatsby, cold and mysterious as she is, is written with such texture that she intrigues and beguiles. 

Outside of fiction, I find that reading the male perspective provides an interesting intellectual challenge. Books written by men often have different intellectual focal points than those written by women and I find that this helps to balance my thinking. I also have a special love for books written by soldiers. Lone Survivor by Marcus Luttrell and First Light by Geoffrey Wellum are a few stand outs. While many of us won’t have to face literal combat, the men who have been through it have some fascinating insights about courage and sacrifice. And their books have given me useful tools for how to face my own comparatively small challenges.

I’m grateful for the men who have written with honesty and have helped to form my perspective on life, faith and the world.

In a world where there is so much misunderstanding between the sexes, I’m grateful for the men who have written with honesty and have helped to form my perspective on life, faith and the world. But I’ll let the writing speak for itself and leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Orthodoxy:

“Some stupid people started the idea that because women obviously back up their own people through everything, therefore women are blind and do not see anything. They can hardly have known any women. The same women who are ready to defend their men through thick and thin are (in their personal intercourse with the man) almost morbidly lucid about the thinness of his excuses or the thickness of his head… Love is not blind; that is the last thing that it is. Love is bound; and the more it is bound the less it is blind.” G.K., I love you for writing this. I always will.