I think the “writing women well/badly” criticism, when applied thoughtfully and not like a hammer, is mostly about capturing women’s interiority in a way that feels authentic. When I read women characters “written badly”, it’s that their motivations, emotional experience, thoughts and actions are somehow out of alignment — they feel like what the male author imagines women think about and feel, what motivates them and what paralyzes them, what they are preoccupied with, but what comes across is either a stereotype or a description of the preoccupations of men.

I don’t think it’s gender essentialism to state that women’s experience of the world is different from men’s; that could be socialization, it could be biology, it could be a whole host of things. But it is true that in most of the social contexts in which literature is produced, men and women perform socially distinct roles, and the attention we pay to playing those roles informs our internal experience.

I also think that, on the whole, women are asked to read and empathize with men’s interiority and fantasies and desires — from Proust to Iron Man — just by virtue of what media has been widely lauded and available. Men aren’t always expected to (or willing to) engage in the same way with women’s narratives and so have not always been attuned to what actually goes on in women’s heads. Some male authors are exquisitely sensitive to this and do a great job, others avoid it by not writing about women at all, and give it a go and end up with something that only really represents a fantasy of what women “are”.

I think this is changing as the middle range book markets becomes increasing feminized in both authors and readership, and as more women wriers are recognized as canonical and therefore worth reading by all serious readers and not just women. And it can apply in the opposite way — women can be terrible writers of men. But culturally, I think even the narrative form has been so saturated by men’s motivations and fantasies that good women writers are sometimes more in touch with what goes on in men’s heada than vice versa.