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"  The phrase &amp;quot;dick for a day&amp;quot; used to be bandied about quite a bit by me and many other women I knew, mostly fellow writers, back in the 1980s, when we were young and ambitious but unsuccessful, our tone somewhere between wistful yearning and pugnacious wrath: &amp;quot;If I had a dick for a day, I&amp;#039;d show them&amp;quot;\u2014&amp;quot;them&amp;quot; being overrated male writers, ex-lovers who&amp;#039;d treated us badly, and, frankly, men in general. They had all the luck. We were stuck being women. I grew up in an all-female family\u2014two sisters and a mostly single mother\u2014and we often bonded, in part, by disparaging men and feeling superior to them. My charismatic, handsome, intelligent, crazy father, a Marxist lawyer, disappeared from our lives (led off by the cops in hand-cuffs for beating my mother; I was the one who called them) when my little sisters and I were young, three years after my mother had divorced him. After that, my mother struggled to raise us without child support or help, during a time when she was working toward a doctorate in psychology from Arizona State University. As my family saw them, men were \u00ADuntrustworthy, weak, and selfish. Our mother taught us to get along without them, to get along without much of anything, and to live well and have fun anyway. But even after he was gone, I still loved my father. I looked Norwegian, like him, with a long face, strong jaw, thin mouth, and flashing eyes. And, like him, I was \u00ADverbal, easygoing, and low-key on the \u00ADsurface, and, deep down, proud, socially paranoid, full of self-loathing, and prone to rage at injustice. Until I was nine, I was my father&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;son,&amp;quot; the one he could talk to. And after he left, I still felt like the boy\u2014the \u00ADambitious, hotheaded one. I never liked dolls or played house. I read and wrote, climbed trees, collected rocks, rode my bike, and befriended boys, platonically. \u00ADAlthough part of me yearned for a husband, a house, and kids, most of my brain was \u00ADsingle-mindedly determined to do whatever it took to be a successful published novelist, and that part of me felt male. In spite of my family&amp;#039;s attitude toward men, I loved, admired, and identified with them. I envied them, too\u2014their power and autonomy, their freedom to be selfish, to walk away, to start over, to get angry, to speak frankly without appearing to give a damn what anyone thinks. Men were assholes, women were victims; men were \u00ADactive, women passive. Given the choice, I would have preferred to be an active \u00ADasshole. Instead, I kept writing. After a lot of floundering around, post-MFA, with bad relationships and worse jobs, I published my first novel, In the Drink, when I was 36. Its first-person narrator was a woman, but I was writing in a consciously male genre I privately called Loser Lit. I wanted my female narrator, Claudia \u00ADSteiner, to join the ranks of Lucky Jim, \u00ADGulley Jimson, and Peter Jernigan. Claudia is a hard-drinking ghostwriter who&amp;#039;s in love with her seemingly unattainable male best friend, in debt, hapless, and bleakly, comically gritty. As I wrote the book, I was sure I was breaking new literary ground. \u00ADReviewers (all of them female) felt otherwise: When it came out, In the Drink was lumped with two other recently published, superficially similar books by women; ours were collectively hailed as the first wave of &amp;quot;chick lit&amp;quot; in America. This didn&amp;#039;t feel like a compliment to any of us. Naively, having expected everyone to somehow magically get what I was up to (&amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s the female Lucky Jim! Hooray!&amp;quot;), I was insulted and flummoxed. How could they not recognize that I was a secret guy? I had never expected to be put into a basket of &amp;quot;chicks.&amp;quot;  I was determined anew to prove myself as a serious writer; writing in a female voice was evidently not the way to achieve this. My second novel, Jeremy Thrane, is narrated by a man who, in the opening passages of the novel, describes his penis, in case anyone is in any doubt as to his sex. The persona of Jeremy allowed me to write in a way I couldn&amp;#039;t have otherwise\u2014a female narrator would have been too close to my own voice to tell certain autobiographical truths I needed to expose, especially about my father: Jeremy is me as a gay man.  The novel&amp;#039;s publication coincided with 9/11; the book sank into oblivion without a ripple\u2014but even worse, the city I had loved for so long as much as a \u00ADfamily \u00ADmember or a part of my own body was devastated. During the long, bleak \u00ADwinter of 2001 to 2002, I cried constantly and could not get out of bed and was catatonic with grief. Not being the suicidal type, and unwilling to go on antidepressants, I launched a two-pronged attack on my own neurasthenic disintegration: During the ensuing year, I wrote The Epicure&amp;#039;s Lament and trained for and ran the 2002 New York City marathon. In other words, I unleashed my inner dick. Conventional wisdom has it that depression is anger turned inward; my own rage emerged in the voice of Hugo Whittier, a 40-year-old failed poet and former kept man who, when the novel opens, has been a hermit for the past 10 years in an ancestral mansion on the Hudson River after the love of his life, a toxic blond he picked up hitchhiking and later married, cheated on him and left him. He&amp;#039;s determined to smoke himself to death, but meanwhile he stirs up energetic mischief, cooks anachronistic meals for those around him, and keeps a diary that he \u00ADsecretly hopes will be published after he dies. He is angry, unpleasant, frank, rude, sexually rapacious, and out of control; his voice \u00ADallowed me to vent my rage and spleen and thwarted ambition in a way that&amp;#039;s generally considered unseemly for women, who are expected to deflect overt expressions of ego with self-deprecating humor. Writing that novel made me feel unspeakably better. I considered publishing it under a male pseudonym. The male part of me knew the novel&amp;#039;s worth, and the female part of me knew it would be treated differently because it was written by a woman\u2014for one thing, only women would probably review it, since men don&amp;#039;t often review novels by women, and I was leery of female critics after earning the &amp;quot;chick lit&amp;quot; label\u2014but I \u00ADresisted the urge. My own name was \u00ADauthentic. And I wanted to swashbuckle straight into the fray on the theory that if we kept changing our name to George, we&amp;#039;d never get out of the &amp;quot;chick&amp;quot; basket. The Epicure&amp;#039;s Lament came out to critical admiration (from male and female reviewers alike) and poor sales, and my personal life continued to be difficult: an increasingly lonely, unhappy marriage to a man I deeply loved, a brief but destructive affair and the resulting social fallout, and the requisite therapy sessions while I tried simultaneously to save and to leave my marriage. During this time, I wrote The Great Man. Its third-person voice, neither male nor female, impersonal and omniscient, was a bracing, interesting challenge. Every morning as I awoke with my life in near-shambles, it was there to buoy me like a life jacket. When I got the phone call informing me that the novel had won the 2008 PEN/Faulkner award, my first reaction was, &amp;quot;Do women really win this thing?&amp;quot; (In fact, they do, but rarely: I was only the fifth in almost 30 years.)  I had just finished a draft of Trouble, a novel about female friendship in which the narrator, Josie Dorvillier, a middle-aged woman who has just left her husband, goes to Mexico City for a debauched five-day vacation with her troubled best girlfriend. When it was published, the reviewers (all of whom were female, unsurprisingly) treated it on the whole with critical fairness, both positive and negative. However, several reviewers disapproved of the fact that Josie was able to leave her husband so easily, without remorse or negative consequence. Some of them even wanted her to suffer and be punished, \u00E0 la The Awakening. I wondered: Would a male narrator have been asked to undergo such a fate for the crime of leaving a passionless, defunct marriage? It was, in my opinion, time for another first-person male narrator.  Meanwhile, in the wake of the award, no doubt spurred in part by the confidence bestowed on me by this windfall, I left my own marriage. Six months later, exactly two years ago, I fell in love with a much younger man and left New York to live in his farmhouse in the wild mountains of northern New England. I quit therapy, which had become more traumatic than helpful. Suddenly, my life was quiet and happy and calm. It was as if, after being in a decades-long hurricane, I could hear the leaves rustling in the sunshine.  It was out of this state of strong emotion recollected in tranquility, as Wordsworth famously described it, that the voice of Harry Quirk emerged to narrate my \u00ADlatest novel, The Astral. Harry is a 57-year-old poet whose wife of 30 years has thrown him out on the mistaken assumption that he&amp;#039;s sleeping with his female best friend. Unlike Jeremy&amp;#039;s romantic, dreamy yearning or Hugo&amp;#039;s disingenuous, sly cynicism, Harry&amp;#039;s voice is pained and melancholic, defeated, but not broken\u2014he&amp;#039;s scrappy and game. He castigates himself and \u00ADsuffers, but he doesn&amp;#039;t dwell; he finds a job and a place to live and a new girlfriend. Harry Quirk is experienced and guilt-ridden and determined to atone for his mistakes; through his perspective, I could reckon with my own recent past and come to terms with a life and place I&amp;#039;d left \u00ADbehind. I could write baldly about a \u00ADcomplicated, dark time in my life without having to make it about myself. Each of these men\u2014Jeremy, Hugo, and Harry\u2014was in part a crutch I used to get through various crises during fraught and troubled years. Now my life has changed. I feel an urge to relinquish my inner dick, at least for now, and fully \u00ADinhabit a female narrator who is as free\u2014as frank\u2014and as fully herself as any man. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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