My friend of Ernest Hemingway literary aspirations—whom I will refer to as Scott—once got into a discussion concerning female fiction writers.

I used to find it difficult to enjoy the work of women authors because I struggled to identify with the subject matter. Much of the work I was exposed to involved a repressed woman trapped by societal expectations or a chick lit heroine (who always works in advertising/marketing). I wanted something bawdier, something more ridiculous and outside the formula. I wanted to read about quirky women having real-life, modern day problems with real-life, modern day guys and meeting zany individuals. I wanted to be stunned by via dialogue, characters and scenarios that were hilarious, ridiculous, beautiful, sad and true all at once—the good, the bad and the ugly, the stuff worth underlining.

I wasn’t finding any of that in books by women and feared I was a traitor to my gender. If I wrote what I thought was a great story, was it because it was a good story or because I wrote like a man?

Although in the past few years I’ve discovered amazing women authors who’ve changed my mind (thank you for giving me faith!), I know I will always hope to write something the equivalent of High Fidelity. I cannot tell you how much I love that Nick Hornby novel. It was witty, self-deprecating and rife with pop culture references and analyzed relationships in a fun, true way, reminding me of the talks Scott and I have. In short, it felt like my real life.

To sum up this rant, I’ve since come to discern I no longer prefer male writers to female writers or books about men to books about women, but rather I enjoy people writing about people, plain and simple.

-Lux Zakari.