M'ris, I feel like we're somehow missing each other on this discussion. I'm certainly not saying that you can't write father-son relationships, for example. I guess what I'm really saying is that writers who have had a particular experience, have something of an edge when they sit down to write it. I *know* what the roadside samosas in Sri Lanka taste like, and they don't taste anything like the ones I make, or the ones you get in any Indian restaurant I've been in in the U.S. That knowledge might help me when I sit down to write about it. That doesn't mean that, in the end, you might not write a more convincing or even more realistic depiction of those samosas. Just that I had an advantage when I started out. And that given that kind of advantage, it's not surprising that Audra might find some hard-to-define commonalities between women writers who write about mothering. And that given limited time, and perhaps experience with a lot of men doing it badly (as with lesbian porn, for a completely different example), she might find that mostly she gravitates towards women writers as being *likely* to give her the experience she's looking for more often. Now...her examples, I'll grant you, are not necessarily the best, and I do agree that A.I. in particular was a bit unfair of a choice for a counterexample. But I don't think she needed to prove that men couldn't do it...just that she had encountered plenty of male writers whose takes on mothering had been unsatisfying to her, unrealistic. I suspect she has, and just didn't do a great job of specifying such.
Anyway. Gotta go finish commenting on two more student papers and then head in. Long day today. See y'all later...