For centuries literature has been something that men wrote and women read, but the balance may at last have shifted for good. For the first time, women writers outnumber men in the Guardian's Fastseller list for 2001, the definitive guide to the year's hottest paperbacks.

Led by JK Rowling - whose gross from Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire alone almost reached £13m - six of the top 10 books are by women, while a similar slice of the 20 most popular authors are also female.

Zadie Smith joins the gilded circle of Maeve Binchy, Joanna Trollope, Patricia Cornwell and Marian Keyes who have come to dominate the charts. But alone among the top 10, her novel White Teeth was the only one with a major literary award under its belt.

The explosion of chick-lit spawned by Bridget Jones's Diaries shows little sign of abating either, according to the list's compiler, Alex Hamilton, though it already seems to be metamorphosing into a more mature genre called "mum-lit".

But perhaps the most startling feature of the list is that two volumes of the American Dave Pelzer's harrowing three-part autobiography have made the top 10. That a man who admits he is "no great shakes" as a writer should have sold more than 1.5m books in the last year is quite a turn up, as most British publishers felt that A Child Called "It" and The Lost Boy would not work here.

Pelzer's early life in the San Francisco suburbs makes Angela's Ashes sound idyllic: locked in a garage by his abusive mother who referred to him as "It", he had to scavenge from his siblings' leftovers in the bin before she took to dusting it with ammonia.

Bill Bryson's reign as the king of travel writing has been challenged by the actor Pete McCarthy, whose amble around the pubs of Ireland that bear his name, McCarthy's Bar, got within six places of Bryson's 10. The late Lorna Sage's frank memoir of a dysfunctional vicarage childhood, Bad Blood, took more than £2m, mostly from supermarket sales.