Who says that men can’t write about love and domesticity, asks William Nicholson

At that magic twilight hour when the lights are on but the curtains are not yet drawn, I walk down suburban streets looking in on the lives of others. Not a Peeping Tom, I’m not looking for women undressing: I’m looking at the wallpaper, the furnishings, the pictures on the walls. I’m reconstructing, by observation and guesswork, the decisions that went into the making of that little world. I find these glimpses very moving. You could say I’m obsessed with the domestic.

I don’t quite know how it came to be this way. Maybe it’s just some neurotic insecurity. Even as a child the game I liked to play best with my little sister was called “Houses”. She would name some unlikely object – a watering can, a rocking horse – and I would invent a house for tiny people built inside it, complete with staircases and verandahs.

My invention expanded to encompass the family within the imaginary houses. The mummy, the daddy, the children. Into this mix, some time later, came love and sex. I longed for sex for the obvious reason, but I also longed for love and children and a little home for us all to live together in. You could say, if you go for the stereotype, that I was a girl.

In the event, I married very late, at 40; not because I cared little for marriage, but because I took it too seriously. In a way, I was afraid of it. I sensed that I lacked the maturity to be the father rather than the child. I wanted to get it right. I wanted to be ready. I didn’t want to lose it once I’d got it.

I’ve now been married for 23 years, we have three children, and the world we’ve made together is everything to me. So when I turned from screenwriting to writing novels, what other subject could I choose? I wanted to write about love and marriage, houses and children, school runs and shopping and ageing parents. In all these everyday concerns I find the stuff of drama: this is the actual life so many of us are living, and we’re living it as intensely as we know how. I titled my first novel in this sequence of books The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life, to assert just this claim.

The first publisher to read it said to me, “It’s wonderful. I’d publish it if you were a woman.”

This was my first encounter with a curious convention. Women read novels about sex, love and children – that I understand. But only women write them? That I don’t get. For a brief moment I considered becoming Willa Nicholson. But when your main claim to attention is that you’re offering truth, you can’t really turn up at literary festivals in drag.

As a man I accept that I have a different take on life. But that doesn’t mean all I care about is sport and war. I care as much about the home and family as any woman does; and I believe I know as much about that world. But I come at it from a different angle.

It seems to me this makes me uniquely valuable. If it’s women who read novels of domestic life, then here’s a golden opportunity to discover how men operate in this world. Because it’s not simple. Many of the clichés are true. Men do have a different way of regarding sex, and are entirely capable of enjoying it without any emotional connection at all. Men do tend to be more aggressive, and competitive, and power-obsessed. Men can be helplessly unable to communicate their feelings. But none of that means we aren’t deeply and passionately engaged in the business of being lovers, husbands, fathers and homemakers.

I have a suspicion that most men split themselves in two for the sake of the women they love. One self is acceptable: a decent responsible guy who is a good husband and father. The other self is unacceptable: a porn addict, an adulterer, a masturbator. Much fiction acts out this split, with a good male character and a bad one. But the simple truth is, all men contain both halves: even your very own dear timid beloved. You tell yourself he may not be exciting but at least he’s safe. And all the time he’s panting with secret dreams.

So the job of the writer is to tell the truth, to make us know with greater depth and sensitivity that’s going on inside other people. That’s what I want from writers, anyway. So that first publisher should have welcomed me with open arms. A man! In the kitchen! Tell us how it is for you!

The publisher who did take my book, and its successor, and now this latest one, has dressed my work in covers that might as well have embossed on them: For Women Only. Each cover features a woman looking wistful. But I long for male readers too, people like me. I want them to find in my books the possibility of honesty between the sexes, and real friendship, and love. Because of course I’m writing about women too.

Perhaps you think that men can’t write about women, because they can’t know what it’s like to be a woman. I reject this. I’ve written about dying of cancer without having died of cancer myself. By a process of learning and empathy I can get to feel what it’s like to be a woman, and a woman can get to feel what it’s like to be a man. This claim goes beyond the issue of gender sympathy. We are all capable of entering into other people’s experiences – of war, of hunger, of doubt and joy and despair. This is precisely the enterprise of great fiction.

And more than that, it should be the enterprise of our lives. I take as my motto a line I wrote for the film version of Shadowlands: “We read to know we’re not alone.”

As a man, I’m not cut off from women. As me, I’m not cut off from you. We don’t have to be alone.

l The Golden Hour by William Nicholson is published this week by Quercus, priced £17.99