[life/writing] The way women think

I am in the midst of a rampaging read-through of Stephen King's The Dark Tower series. It's a great story, and I have just finished Wizard and Glass, which is in the main a flashback to Roland's past.

So I'm clipping along, enjoying myself, and then suddenly the book started to bother me. I couldn't figure it out - the story was fine, the writing was the usual accomplished yarn-spinning that I have come to expect from King, I was engaged in the concept of Roland as a love-sick kid. Then I was reading some scene between Susan (his sweetheart) and her maiden aunt, and it hit me.

King sucks at writing women.

He does best with young women, but even so there is always this sense of distance, like he saw a woman once and is trying to reconstruct the image from memory. I don't know that I fully expect a man to be able to think like a woman - god knows I have touble enough trying to write men - but there is also this weird melange of contempt and fear and hostility toward older women in his writing. Especially older women who have the care of young people. They are always shrieking harridans, hovering on the edge of madness, obsessed with sex (either frigid or desperate to be fucked) and utterly jealous of the young. They mouth words of love, and then send their charges off to terrible fates, their satisfied smirks barely concealed. Susan's aunt in the Dark Tower, Frannie's mother in The Stand, Ben's mother in It, Carrie's mother in Carrie, the list goes on.

All this is not to say that I think King is misogynist, or even a bad writer in any way, simply that I find him falling a bit short on this one area. It's not surprising I suppose that he should have so little understanding or sympathy for the middle-aged woman. (Although, hey, isn't he married to one?) It just makes me wince I bit when I stumble over one of these flapping, blind harpies in the middle of his otherwise well-crafted prose. And it makes me wonder what caricatures I am fond of using without realising it.