Life & Wisdom Quote by Peter Straub

Straub’s line lands like a polite compliment with a knife behind it. On its surface, he’s “praising” women writers for their accuracy with male characters; underneath, he’s indicting a culture that treats that accuracy as ordinary while acting shocked when the traffic runs the other direction. The first clause sets up a norm - “nobody is surprised” - which is really a report on gatekeeping: women are expected to be fluent in men because men dominate the canon, the marketplace, and the set of “default” human experiences fiction is trained to recognize.

The sting comes in the pivot: “no doubt because everybody knows…” That mock-certainty is Straub’s satirical weapon. He’s mimicking the smug common sense of literary talk - the assumption that women are naturally better at reading men - while exposing the structural reason it feels true. Women writers have historically had to master male interiority to be taken seriously, to publish, to be reviewed without being shoved into a “women’s fiction” corner. Men, cushioned by being treated as universal, can afford the laziness of not looking back.

Contextually, it’s a writer’s gripe with an institutional spine: workshops, reviews, and publishing have long policed “believability” in gendered ways. When a woman writes men well, it’s invisible competence; when a man miswrites women, he often gets the benefit of “individual style” or “complexity.” Straub’s intent isn’t to crown women morally superior; it’s to spotlight the asymmetry of empathy-as-requirement. In that sense, the quote is less about gender essence than about who’s been forced to become bilingual in power.