It is inconceivable in The Sportswriter that a person who is a woman should strike Frank simply as a familiar, as another human being floating around in the world, lost, empty, shocked to the bone by the way it's all turned out. He feels compassion for women but not empathy. At bottom, they do not remind him of himself. The only character in the book who even comes close is his ex-wife, and she, incredibly enough, is called X. It is X who brought on the divorce, X who found the emptiness between them unbearable, X who wanted to take another stab at living her life and, although she looks like a busy suburban mother, X too seems to be floundering and suffering. We can only deduce this from the hints Frank throws out. We never see X straight on. She is a shadowy figure, always at the periphery of Frank's vision. One would assume that he would know her well. But he doesn't. She is the ex-wife. In his mind, the people who embody his condition are other men he runs up against in a random fashion. There are these men, who are like himself, and then there are the women, who can no longer give comfort against the overwhelming force of life.