Over drinks, while my date launched into an impassioned speech about Cormac McCarthy, I made some shrewd calculations: McCarthy hadn't come out with a book recently, right? Was it possible that his last novel was released in 2005? I confessed that I had read a McCarthy novel, but I couldn’t remember which one. He probed me for clues, but all I could come up with was that it seemed like an old Western, and maybe a key female character had died.

Last year, when I read the Cormac McCarthy book, I was preparing to move across the country, working 50-hour weeks, shedding a dysfunctional relationship, and experiencing more intense episodes of anxiety than I had in years. Reading was one of the only things that helped to quiet the din in my brain. I was constantly escaping into a book: Between the World and Me, The Folded Clock, A Little Life, Citizen: An American Lyric. “It was probably No Country for Old Men,” my date suggested, looking a little smug. I flashed a tight smile and took a sip of my beer, about to apologize for not recalling more.

But then I stopped myself. Why should I feel bad for not remembering the details of one of his reading picks when he didn’t recognize one of the most lauded female authors of contemporary literature? And furthermore, why should I regret not knowing more about a novel written by a man when my date was so quick to confess that he mostly read books from the lauded canon of Dead White Guy literature?

Unfortunately, this guy is far from alone, and the frequency of these sorts of interactions is troubling to me. Growing up, we’re assigned classic novels written by men in school, and are consistently told that those books are the most important works of literature. We get trained to think of men as true literary artists, and female writers wind up being overshadowed. But the real problem is that, beyond the classroom, it seems like many male readers continue to exclusively read male authors — and that they’ve internalized the idea that men’s ideas are more valid than women’s, particularly when it comes to literature.