I'm back! Of the drunken promises I made last night, this one is the easiest to fulfill. Absolutely? I am surprised. Many books are impossible to extricate from the spectre of the author's personality, not out of bad writing but because of the genre or style or content. I recently read Cat's Eye, which is the story of a woman growing up and examining her past, and I had several thoughts like, There is a certain age where it makes sense to write a book like this. Not to say Atwood had to be that age (she was, I think, about 45, slightly younger than her present-day protagonist) to write it, but that her age or not-age added a dimension to my reading. I encounter this frequently. This I do not often think about. Unless perhaps the cross-gender writing is jarring, but I don't often encounter that. It may be the types of fiction I read. Have you read Philip Pullman's Lyra? Or ... hmm. I will think about this more.If I stop and wonder how old the author is, then the book is a failure.
I tend to be more conscious of the author's gender especially if they are attempting to write in the voice of not-their-gender.