Art & Creativity Quote by Colleen McCullough

The line lands like a genial shrug, but it’s also a neat piece of cultural jiu-jitsu. Calling a novel “a woman’s book” isn’t neutral description; it’s an inheritance from a publishing world that treated women’s interior lives as a niche market and men’s as the default setting. McCullough, a wildly popular novelist who routinely exceeded the boundaries of “serious” and “commercial,” uses that label the way you might handle a slightly embarrassing family heirloom: acknowledging it, then quietly moving past it.

The second clause does the real work. “But I think the men will read it too” performs an inversion of the usual permission structure. Historically, women are expected to read across gender (women consume “male” classics, war books, political histories) while men are allowed to opt out of anything coded feminine. McCullough’s “I think” softens the challenge, yet the implication is blunt: the book isn’t smaller because women are centered; the readership can expand if men stop treating empathy as a threat.

There’s strategy here as much as ideology. Framing a book as “for women” can be marketing shorthand for relationships, family, desire - the very material that powers most narrative fiction. McCullough teases the gatekeepers with a wink: you can shelve it in the “women’s” aisle if you must, but the story is built to travel. The subtext is a dare to the culture’s thin-skinned masculinity, delivered in the polite language that makes the dare publishable.