Despite a thoughtful and long career and good relationships with her nieces and nephews, when divorce threatens, the judge feels her life is empty and suddenly laments the lack of children. I say "suddenly" because that's how it struck me. Perhaps it's not how the author meant it, but I didn't find any support for the longing being a more gradual realization or any indication the judge had ever felt particularly strongly about procreating. There was no discussion of whether the judge liked kids of any age or whether, growing up, she'd imagined herself having kids, or had a happy childhood herself, or had friends who enjoyed childrearing. I found myself checking the publication date, wondering if the book had been published in the 1970s, 80s, or 90s, when it might be more likely a woman would feel the need to say she longed for children whether she did or not. But no, ironically, the publication date is 2014, the same year Time reported that "More women in the U.S. are childless than at any other time since the government began keeping track...."
Protagonist Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games |
In contrast, the author tells us in The Children Act that the judge and her husband discussed and considered having kids over the years, but between both their careers and other life events it never seemed quite the right time. There's no indication that as she neared an age when she might no longer physically be able to conceive that the judge gave the matter serious thought. And there's no indication that over the years she felt anything missing in her life until the author needed her to feel bad about not having children. It felt to me like a default. Woman - kids = sad.
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Men are not the only ones who write women characters this way. Another suspense writer I enjoy is Lisa Gardiner. What I don't like is that her single women characters tend to have no friends and spartan apartments, because apparently only married folk can shop at Ikea. (For a contrasting view of a single woman character, see Why I Love V.I.) And one of my favorite married characters plunges back into depression and alcoholism because she can't have a child. Gardiner does more with her characters than is done for the judge to show why they, individually, feel these strong desires. But something I heard Gardiner say when she was speaking at a thriller writing conference made me wonder. She said when she gets to know someone, she first asks if they are married, then if they have kids, then if they have pets. If the answer is No to all three, she doesn't know what to ask them because their lives seems empty to her. So perhaps authors who default to childless (or childfree, as some prefer) = sad and lonely are speaking from their own hearts. If what fills their lives and makes them happiest is a spouse and kids, then it might be easy for them to believe that anyone without one or the other of those must be terribly lonely.
Still, that's not much of an excuse. Authors are supposed to use their imaginations. After all, some of these are writers who create complex, nuanced portraits of serial killers. Can they truly not imagine a happy woman without children?
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Lisa M. Lilly is the author of the occult thrillers The
Awakening and The Unbelievers, Books 1 and 2 in the Awakening series. A short
film of the title story of her collection The Tower Formerly Known as Sears and
Two Other Tales of Urban Horror was recently produced under the title Willis
Tower. If you'd like to be notified of new releases and read reviews on
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Perhaps the best example of this is a science fiction book, I am blanking on the name, where the "main" character, a female cyborg no less, all of a sudden decides she absolutely has to have a child.
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