I was amused to read that the authors of 50:50:

How Working Parents Can Have it All, believe that splitting household chores and childcare fairly is good for men. Doing their share, say Sharon Meers and Joanna Strober, will improve their lives and relationships.

Seeing that figure, the man in my house tartly said, "that'd be a reduction". He's right. Reading on, I learnt that I am one of a mere 13% of British women whose partners do more on the domestic front than they do. That's what happens when you can't cook. Or go through a carwash without someone holding your hand. Or deal with the autumn influx of tarantulas.

Something that has always perplexed my in-house chef is that when people talk about kitchen sink dramas, they expect them to be peopled by women. We had a fruitful discussion about this, while he seasoned the bouillabaisse and I waited for my nail polish to dry. And he has a point.

Some may have read last week's interview in these pages with Liam McIlvanney, who says that for him, domesticity is the most important thing for a novelist to tackle.

Nor does he understand why it's seen as an inferior domain, and thus something for women to cover, leaving more serious public matters to men.

McIlvanney's interest in the home is strongly reflected in his two novels. But while his outlook is rare in Scottish crime fiction, with the exception of Doug Johnstone, whose novel Gone Again inventively fuses crime detection with childcare, there is a strong tradition of domesticity in Scottish fiction by men.

None is more house-conscious than James Kelman, who since his first short story collection has proved himself the laureate of the home front.

I'm not just thinking of his recipes, as in The Busconductor Hines ("3/4lb beef links, 1lb of potatoes, 2 onions medium sized and 1 tin beans baked. And that's you with the sausage, chips and beans plus the juicy onions - and they're good for your blood whether you like it or no...

"And even if your mummy's sick to death of chips, what should be said is this: she isn't the f***ing cook the day so enough said, let her go to a bastarn cafe.").

Most recently, his novel Mo Said She Was Quirky ricochets between laundry, child-care and tidying up, by both his narrator and her domesticated boyfriend, this small flat as dramatic a stage as a Mexican barrio or Baltimore slum.

To name only a few, the work of those such as Kelman, Jonathan Franzen, Richard Ford, Dan Rhodes, Rohinton Mistry and even Bill Bryson (whose history of the house, At Home, is a paean to domestic space) rebut those who would see the world as divided in two, with men doing all they can to avoid chores and women consigned to drudgery; men writing about national politics and women about tumble driers.

In fact, on the evidence of almost all the writers I know, a woman seeking someone who'll go 50: 50 on the ironing should find a novelist, poet or journalist.

It could be read as a reflection of men's growing interest in home life that so many of today's writers are as comfortable setting scenes in the kitchen as they once were in late-night bars and streets. To that extent you could argue that the feminist dream of perfect parity has had a beneficial effect on literature.

That said, looking at the great books of earlier times, it seems to me that the male writer is by definition a home body, whatever his era. A few, such as Hemingway or Kerouac, don't fit that mould, but many of the finest male writers, from Chekhov and Hardy to Simenon and Updike, seem equally at home with the broom and duster as their womenfolk.

This is one area in which writers are well ahead of the curve. My advice to any man seeking his inner domestic god is to immerse himself in domestic fiction by some of the giants of modern literature. That'll offer a thrilling new perspective on the washing up and school run.