I write about young men a lot: Seth, Gabe, Tanner, and now Griffin. For some reason I connect to male characters more thoroughly. I have a theory about this. First, I was raised among boys. My sister and I were the only two girls in a family full of boys, and since my younger sister is special needs, my boy cousins were my playmates. This gave me access to boy culture and the inner workings of boy life. A second factor is the patriarchy, and I don’t mean this in a political sense but a cultural one. The boys in my family had full access: sports, attention, time, fun. I remember hearing: “Leave the boys alone. They don’t want you around.” In my formative, childhood mind, this meant that boys must be better than me—a girl— which began the journey of shutting down my femininity (Yes. I know this is tragic; don’t be too worried for me, I’ve spent my adulthood reconnecting). This factor has led to me writing much better male characters than female ones because I have had to rediscover and re-empower the feminine part of me. So there you have my theory about why.
But I can’t say that my personal experience with male culture and my anecdotal understanding meant that I’m equipped to write male nuances. I am still a woman, after all, and we all know how awful lots of men write women. I sure as hell didn’t want to do that. When Griffin’s character insisted that I write his story, I knew I was going to have to fill in some gaps in my knowledge. I needed a better grounding in the why of Bro Code (which is introduced in The Stories Stars Tell).
Why take the time? I have lots of reasons, but ultimately, I think it comes down to being a responsible storyteller. I don’t want anything I write to mischaracterize, nominalize, or misrepresent another group of people.
So to the experts I went… Here’s a list of books I read on the topic.
Boys and Sex: Young Men on Hookups, Love, Porn, Consent, and Navigating the New Masculinity by Peggy Orenstein
The Man They Wanted Me to Be by Jared Yates Sexton
A Better Man: A (Mostly) Serious Letter to My Son by Michael Ian Black
Masterminds and Wingmen: helping Our Boys Cope with Schoolyard Power, Locker-room Tests, Girlfriends, and the New Rules of Boy World by Rosalind Wiseman
Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys by Dan Kindlon, Ph.D., and Michael Thompson, Ph.D.
There were other topics important to this story that I had to research which I can’t identify here because... spoilers…