Boys ‘mustn’t be afraid of female-led books’, says author Joanne Harris

Boys should be encouraged to read books about girls, said author Joanne Harris, because “a boy who is afraid to read a book with a girl protagonist will grow up into a man who feels that it’s inappropriate for him to listen to a woman’s voice”.

The author of Chocolat told an audience at the Hay festival in Wales that if violence against women was to be prevented, it “needs to be addressed really early, long before an actual crime happens”.

Harris, who taught in an all-boys school for 15 years, said “the way we educate our children” must change if we wanted to see fewer crimes against women. She said: “We have to stop girls being apologetic when they have done nothing wrong. We have to stop boys being entitled when they’re actually not entitled to have more than anybody else. We’ve got to stop teaching them differently as teachers, that will help a lot.

“Also we’ve got to stop giving them the message that it’s wrong for a boy to read books about girls. Because even schools are giving them this message. And this is where the problem happens, where women’s voices are perceived as less.”

Speaking during an event at the literary festival entitled Women of a Certain Age, Harris described her latest novel, Broken Light, as a “menopause Carrie”. Instead of giving her protagonist paranormal abilities at puberty, as Stephen King did in his bestselling horror novel, her character Bernie Ingram gains supernatural powers when she reaches menopause.

Menopause is one of “the things we choose not to talk about because we think people are going to judge us on them,” Harris said. Part of the reason she wanted to write about it was because issues we are encouraged to keep private “grow and grow unless we externalise some part of it”.

Harris was critical of the way the case of Nicola Bulley, who was found dead after going missing near a Lancashire river this year, was framed. During the search period, police released information that Bulley had been struggling with alcohol use and symptoms of the perimenopause. After that, “the narrative became less ‘a mother disappears in mysterious circumstances’ and much more ‘a menopausal woman finds her way into the river’,” Harris said.

“The implication is that if you are a young mother and attractive then you are valuable and therefore your death is a tragedy, but if you are a menopausal woman you are high risk and low value.”