Labels? We don’t need no stinkin’ labels.

The other day a fellow writer and good friend of mine posted a blog in which he mentioned that he did not normally read books with a woman protagonist. This acknowledgement of exclusion, thrown out casually, as though accepted by most, if not all, men, shocked me a little. The blog post came a few weeks after another good friend, a male friend, used the term women’s fiction to describe one of my works.

There was a period in the ‘60’s when I read only books written by women. There were, then as...