Writing takes gall. I like to think that's true even for writers with several books under their belt, writers who have been doing it for years. It takes something—guts, gumption, self-delusion—to ask for a reader's time when we all know there's nothing new under the sun; that it's all been said, or written, before.

I always like it when writers posit writing as an act of empathy. It's such a grand turn of phrase, such a noble ideal; empathy is so worth aiming for in life that the same must hold true in art. But personally, I can't think too deeply about that when I'm working or I'd never get anything down on the page.

Rich and Prettypinterest

In the months I spent writing what will be my first novel (after a decade spent nurturing, then abandoning, three others), I tried not to think too deeply about this big question, much as I tried not to think too deeply about how I should have been doing the dishes. I was too frightened to. My book, called Rich and Pretty, is about the friendship between two women and how it evolves as the years pass and sees them become more different than alike.

I always saw this book as bigger than the friendship at its heart. I wanted to write about the lives of the women I have known, about the period in our lives that's not quite growing up but not quite not growing up. In The Group, Mary McCarthy dramatized the choices available to women of her generation by following eight women upon their graduation from Vassar. Times have changed, if not quite enough, and I chose to follow two women (that McCarthy managed eight is testament to her brilliance) and look at the choices that life presents when we reach our thirties. It's a book that is, by design, almost exclusively about these women, about womanhood: how the two think about politics, sex, money, family, career, happiness.

When I finished the thing, and finally started discussing it with editors and agents, everyone asked the same question: why would a man write a novel about women?

I understood that question was a way of asking: had I managed that all-important empathy? If a writer fails to get a character, a scenario, a turn of phrase just right, the reader is jarred from the story; if a writer is writing about a character who looks nothing like himself, as I was, and gets that wrong, that writer is unmasked as someone who couldn't manage empathy, someone who couldn't understand the world beyond himself. That's actually far worse. How dare I write what I so clearly don't know?

It goes without saying that in fiction, many men have written about women, and many women have written about men. In Mating, Norman Rush creates a female narrator with dazzling intelligence and fierce will, one who is often unpleasant yet impossibly alluring, so vibrant she doesn't even need a name. In A Little Life, Hanya Yanigahara depicts an intimate circle of male friends, and takes masculinity itself as part of the book's subject.

A Little Lifepinterest

There's Henry James, Willa Cather, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Hilary Mantel; it's a very long list. I took little comfort from this knowledge when I was writing. Talk about gall, to think that you can do something because Willa Cather and Norman Rush did. A few years ago, Jonathan Franzen published Freedom, a characteristically big, ambitious novel in which one of the cast of characters was Lalitha, a woman of East Indian descent. Not quite me, but close enough; brown people are rare enough in literary fiction that I feel a kinship with almost any who pop up. I was distressed by her incredible competence, I was put off by the descriptions of her skin tone, and I was deeply annoyed when she was dispatched from the world and the plot in the most ridiculous way possible.

I'm sorry to pick on Franzen, who's so predictable a target, and whose work I quite admire, but in truth, I thought of that poor dead made-up Indian woman a lot when I was writing my own book. I looked for Lalitha, and hoped not to find her. I studied the small details of the lives of my protagonists, their throwaway thoughts, their circumstances, and hoped not to find something that would make a reader question not the characters but me.

I knew enough to know that if I slipped, if the reader could divine in the work some sense that I had done a disservice to these characters then that would reflect a similar, indeed worse, lack of respect for the readers. I knew that if I treated my characters the way that Lalitha had been treated, it would have been a failure of empathy as well as a failure of art.

To tell the story that I wanted to tell I needed to reach very far from myself, my own life, my own experiences, well past the point of write what you know. I don't mind admitting that I found it very unsettling. Uncertainty is just a condition of my life—is the lasagna going to turn out badly, am I a bad parent, am I a terrible writer. But the particular uncertainty surrounding what I was writing was different.

Of course, generations of women have understood how language is one of the many ways men exert social dominance, but it was only recently that we coined the snappy term mansplain to describe one iteration of this phenomenon. Much as I tried to push forward in my work, I couldn't help stopping every so often to ask myself whether I was mansplaining.

I don't think this is a bad thing! The cultural conversation around privilege has grown vibrant enough that the ultimate privilege is to just ignore it altogether. Some decry this conversation as pernicious. I don't agree.

I couldn't help stopping every so often to ask myself whether I was mansplaining.

An awareness of the benefits that have accrued to me as a consequence of being a man is helpful in life and in art. If writing really is empathy, then understanding your place in society might actually help you achieve it. Of course, I also understand what privilege I lack as a gay man, an Indian one, one who is preoccupied with raising children, one whose children are black. I think this understanding about who I am helped me write about people who aren't like me.

I thought of the book I set out to write, at times, as almost an act of drag (not strictly the province of gay men, as anyone who's attended a college Halloween party will attest). And drag can be homage, but it can also be parody. But this awareness of what I was doing, that I was donning a mask, that I was telling a story not my own, was helpful. To write the book I wanted to write, though, it couldn't be merely an act; real empathy requires utter sincerity.

I reached détente with these doubts. I finished the book. I sent it out into the world. As is well known, the machinery of the publishing business is maintained by women; I find this a great comfort. My work was for so long a private delusion, and now it will be a public act; at the very least I know it's been vetted by women—my agent, my editor, essentially everyone involved in the publication of Rich and Pretty is a woman, save me. Naturally, it's not up to us but to the readers to judge whether I've actually reached empathy, whether I've actually avoided mansplaining, whether I've successfully told a story that doesn't belong to me. I'm nervous, but perhaps that's as it should be.

I wasn't writing what I know from firsthand experience, but I was still writing what I'd spent a lifetime researching.

It's only now, years after having finished writing the thing (book publishing is a slow business; unless your subject is truly timely, the gestation from manuscript to actual book is a long one) that I see a little more clearly how I was writing what I know. As an awkward effeminate boy, my friends were all girls. This held true as a slightly less awkward college student. I began my career in fashion magazines, then went to work in fashion advertising; my bosses, my colleagues, my clients, were almost all of them women. As a dad, I spend most of my time at the playground or on play dates chatting with moms (testament to the paucity of dads on the playgrounds of Brooklyn). I've always made a living with women in mind, packing shoes into trunks for fashion shoots, crafting sentences about dresses for print ads. In my book, I wasn't writing what I know from firsthand experience, but I was still writing what I'd spent a lifetime researching.

I am not a woman, of course, and there was much in my book that required me to think very carefully about how a woman might feel about things I can't quite understand—the geography of her own body, the experience of childbirth, the mechanics of heterosexual sex. It's probably fair to say that as a brown, gay man, I'm more likely to be granted permission to even attempt a novel like this than a white, heterosexual man; this is its own perverse privilege, I guess. But more to the point, I think, is that as a brown, gay man, I'm well aware how often people get wrong what it means to be someone like me, and therefore aware that I don't want, in my work, to do the same to others. That's what's missing from the tidy turn of phrase write what you know: in life, you can always learn something new.