Life works in mysterious ways. But you know who else does? Me. Because I did not set out to read only books written by women and about women this month. I wish I could tell you this was a deliberate, curated, intellectually rigorous choice tied neatly to Women’s Month, but no. It took me three books – three –to look at my selection and go, huh. Interesting pattern. Maybe we lean into it. Which, frankly, tracks. I have failed to read rooms I was alone in.
So yes, by the time I caught on, it felt almost rude not to continue. A quiet little commitment to female interiority, female rage, female exhaustion, female everything (with the occasional woman-bot thrown in, because what the hell, why not?).
And if I had to distill the vibe or the general emotional weather of this month into one sentence, it would be this: can we women get a fucking ETA on “this too shall pass”? And I don’t mean it dramatically, but more in the slow-burn, low-grade, are we still doing this kind of way.
Unbecoming is such a great word, by the way. There’s something so violent about it. So final. Bro, that was so rude, you no longer are. That’s what a lot of these books circled, in one way or another. What happens when a woman steps outside the role she was assigned, when she leaves, when she stays, when she is left, when she refuses, when she becomes something else, when she unbecomes?
I let some of these women hold me. Others irritated me, made me want to shake some sense into them. But for the most part, I just wanted to sit next to them in silence, maybe pass them a glass of water. Or a gun.
All of them, in their own way, asked me the same question: What does it cost to become yourself? And, more importantly, who pays for it?
Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage, Belle Burden, The Dial Press, 2026
There is a particular kind of horror that we women go through. It’s the insidious type, that doesn’t announce itself as such. It doesn’t come with music cues or dramatic lighting, it comes dressed as love, as devotion, as partnership. It comes as a life that looks, from the outside, perfectly intact. And then one day, someone shatters it by leaving. But this book isn’t about that.
What unsettled me wasn’t the affair, or even the abandonment (been there, survived that) – though both are brutal in their own right – but the slow realization that sometimes, marriage itself does more damage than the exit ever will. If you’re a woman reading this, you get it, you know what I’m talking about. How twenty years of orbiting another person can quietly erode the rest of your life without you fully noticing it as it happens. THIS is the part that made me uncomfortable, and Burden describes it perfectly, how being a wife can become – sometimes – a totalizing identity: friendships fall away, work becomes secondary, independence gets blurred into irrelevance. But most importantly, how all of this, at the time, feels not only normal, but desirable.
Because there’s something deeply seductive about this kind of surrender, about building your life around one person and calling it love, about not knowing how much money you have in your own account and framing it as trust instead of risk.
It reads almost like a thriller at times, not because anything sensational is happening on the page, but because you can feel the stakes tightening retroactively. You start reading it thinking, oh, this is about a breakup. And somewhere along the way, you realize: no, this is about disappearance. Hers.
What I appreciated – and what saves the book from becoming moralizing – is the level of accountability she holds. She doesn’t position herself purely as a victim; instead, she examines the choices she made, the things she ignored, the way love can function as a very convincing blindfold.
It’s not a triumphant narrative of reinvention. It’s messier than that. Which makes it more honest. Because it wasn’t the collapse itself that stayed with me, but the uneasy question it leaves behind: How much of yourself can you give away before there’s nothing left to return to?
She Who Remains, Rene Karabash, translated by Izidora Angel, Sandorf Passage, 2026
This made me feel like time hadn’t moved forward as much as I thought it had. Which shouldn’t have come as a surprise.
We’re in a village governed by the Kanun – an Albanian code of laws that regulates everything from blood feuds to marriage to inheritance. A system so rigid that it doesn’t just shape the lives of the people that swear by it, it predetermines them. For example, if a man is killed, the retaliation doesn’t stop at him, it passes down the line until the debt is settled, which is to say: until there are no men left to carry it.
As for the women, they are always the ones who are left behind. But don’t mistake that for freedom. Because under the Kanun, women don’t inherit, they don’t lead, they don’t get to exist outside the roles assigned to them: daughter, wife, vessel of continuation. Except for one particular case: choosing to become a sworn virgin. A woman can step into the social position of a man, she can gain rights, authority, a name that carries weight – but only if she renounces her womanhood and vows lifelong celibacy.
But the cost – as you can imagine – is absolute. What does it mean to “become” a man in a world that has decided what a woman is allowed to be? Is it liberation, or is it another form of disappearance? If the only way to access autonomy is to renounce your own category, what exactly are you gaining?
And that’s exactly why this book is so great, because it doesn’t frame this as rebellion in the familiar, expected way. It’s not a triumphant breaking free. It’s a negotiation with the system using the only loophole it allows. You don’t dismantle the structure. You reshape yourself to survive inside it. And that’s where the question of identity starts to flicker.
The writing itself mirrors this tug of war: it’s strange, fragmented, nonlinear, almost incantatory at times, almost like it had a hard time actually containing the topic on the page. I read this quickly, almost compulsively, with that rare feeling that I wasn’t entirely in control of anything. Like the book had decided for me, and all I could do was try to keep up.
That being said, what stayed with me wasn’t the story itself, but the uncomfortable recognition that systems don’t always need force to sustain themselves. Sometimes they just need people willing to become something else in order to survive them.
Was She Pretty?, Leanne Shapton, Drawn and Quarterly, 2016
This is less a book you read and more a book you flip through, orbit, pause midway to go back a couple of pages, because you recognized something uncomfortably familiar and you’ve just now decided that you’re not going to just pretend that you didn’t. It’s made up of small fragments – drawings and short, offhand anecdotes about people’s exes – and at first it feels light, almost throwaway. I finished it in one sitting and thought I was going to forget it just as quickly.
But, to my surprise, it lingered in a very specific way. Because who among us hasn’t spent hours and hours shamelessly cataloguing relationships, or at least afterimages of said relationships? I did. You did, too. We, women, are masters of the ghost architecture of other people who have existed before us in our loved ones’ lives. The ex-girlfriend who still hovers in the way he makes coffee. The one who taught him to like a certain song or movie. The one who broke him in a way that you now have to navigate without ever having met her.
And the question that quietly loops underneath all of it – was she pretty? – is almost insulting, but also deeply revealing. Not because it matters in any meaningful way, but because of how instinctively the comparison arises, no matter how self-aware we are. How quickly we reduce entire past lives into something measurable, something we can position ourselves against.
What I found interesting is that the book never really resolves this tension. It doesn’t offer insight so much as recognition. Yes, we do this. Yes, we think about the people who came before us. Yes, we inherit fragments of their histories without consent. Yes, we imagine them, reconstruct them, compete with them in absentia.
The drawings themselves are deliberately unspectacular. Even slightly awkward, which I think is the point. The visual representation never quite lives up to the emotional weight we assign to these imagined women. There’s always a gap between what we fear and what actually was.
Still, I can’t say the book hit me in a deeply emotional way. It was an interesting, clever, occasionally sharp concept, but it didn’t land with full force. I found myself thinking about it more than feeling it.
The Wax Child, Olga Ravn, translated by Martin Aitken, New Directions, 2025
This didn’t feel like a novel so much as an unearthed diary, a testimony, a fragment of something that was never meant to survive intact. Voices layered over each other. Time folding in on itself. You don’t enter it through plot, you enter it the way you would enter a haunted house.
It draws from the Danish witch trials – Funen, Aalborg, Jutland, late 1500s into the early 1600s – but “draws from” feels almost too polite for what it’s doing. This isn’t historical reconstruction by any means; it’s closer to some sort of possession. The past isn’t explained, it’s made to speak again, in fragments, in echoes, in things that don’t quite settle into coherence.
At its center, or maybe just its most persistent presence, is the wax child. A figure that feels at once symbolic and disturbingly physical, as if grief itself had taken on form. The grief of women accused, punished, erased, but who never stopped resisting, who never stopped holding onto each other. Who continued to speak, even when speaking was dangerous.
There’s a line that cut to the bone, about how when there are too many women together, it can only be for something devilish. It sounds almost absurd until you realize how persistent this quiet normalization of suspicion has been, in different forms, across time. The discomfort with women as a collective force. The need to fragment them, isolate them, make them legible only as individuals, never as a mass. The fact that simply existing together was and is enough to trigger something deeply paranoid.
This is not a book you read for comfort. It haunts you in terms of theme, it haunts you in terms of form. The text fractures, shifts, refuses to settle. At times, I wasn’t entirely sure what I was reading, who was speaking, where we were, or what was happening. This type of writing – heavy on the disorientation – usually pulls me out, but this time it pulled me deeper in. It forced me to bear witness. It told me it matters, even when it doesn’t change the outcome. It told me that remembering, especially remembering women who were erased, distorted, punished – is not passive. It’s an act of resistance in itself.
Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs, Beth Ann Fennelly, W. W. Norton & Company, 2017
I have a soft spot for fragmented memoirs. Possibly because my own memory seems to function the same way, not as a continuous narrative, but as a series of small, oddly persistent scenes that refuse to line up neatly.
This book leans into that structure completely. Fifty-two micro-memoirs, each just a page or more, each self-contained, each offering a sliver of a life rather than a full portrait. And at first, it feels almost too light, too quick, too on the nose. Like you could move through it without anything really catching.
But then, somewhere along the way, something does. And I’m not saying there are specific texts that do that, that are meatier or weightier – it’s simply a matter of accumulation. I’m talking about a quiet, almost invisible layering of moments – marriage, motherhood, illness, desire, disappointment, small absurdities – that make you realize you’ve been given something much closer to a life than you initially thought.
I like Fennelly a lot because she has that poet’s instinct for compression. She knows exactly where to stop. Which detail to leave in and which one to cut – a particular kind of restraint, a refusal to over-explain or over-justify what’s being felt.
And I think that’s what worked for me here. Not the idea that everything comes together into something coherent – it doesn’t, and it’s not trying to – but the opposite: the quiet acceptance that a life is made up of fragments that can remain partial, unfinished, slightly out of place. I was and am comforted by that. You don’t have to force meaning out of everything. You can just… collect the pieces as they come. Let them sit next to each other, even if they don’t quite fit.
Girl, nothing is ever going to be fully together. Might as well learn to live in the in-between.
Sea, Poison, Caren Beilin, New Directions, 2025
I feel like I need to come forward and admit that for a great big chunk of this book, I couldn’t stop myself from questioning whether I was reading it correctly. What an unsettling feeling! The voice, the structure, even the language shifted constantly, sliding out of focus just as I thought I had grasped it, looping back in ways that felt less like narrative progression and more like horrible mental weather. At times, it read like a fever dream; at others, like a piece of theory that had grown teeth.
But underneath all of this formal instability, there is something very concrete, very real, and very disturbing: the long, documented history of medical violence against women: procedures done without consent; bodies treated as sites of experimentation; a system that, even at its most clinical, carries something invasive and profoundly dehumanizing.
Even the title seems to carry an echo – of Endo’s The Sea and Poison, itself rooted in real wartime medical experiments where bodies became material, something to be cut into, observed, justified after the fact. And while Beilin is operating in a completely different register, that shadow lingers. The sense that medicine, stripped of ethics, becomes something else entirely.
But she doesn’t present any of this cleanly. She doesn’t guide you through it in a way that’s easy to follow or absorb. Instead, the form itself begins to fracture in response. The language distorts, the syntax loosens, entire sections feel like they’re slipping out of intelligibility.
There’s a lineage to this kind of constraint-based writing – the OuLiPo tradition, texts structured like palindromes, language treated as something you can mathematically rearrange and still call meaning. And you can feel that echo here, especially when Beilin begins stripping letters out of the text, quietly eroding the word uterus from the inside out. Which is one of those gestures that feels both conceptually sharp – a way of mimicking the loss of control, the disorientation of being inside a body or a system that no longer feels yours entirely – and slightly maddening at the same time. I found myself oscillating between admiration and irritation, impressed by the precision of the idea, and at the same time increasingly aware of how much effort it took to stay inside the text.
It is not an easy book to read. Not in the sense of difficulty that feels rewarding as you go, but in the sense that you are constantly negotiating your own understanding. You don’t get to relax into it. You have to keep adjusting, recalibrating.
I won’t pretend I loved the reading experience itself. I both admired it and resisted it. I don’t know what more to tell you, it do be like that sometimes.
Try it for yourself and come back to me.
Annie Bot, Sierra Greer, Mariner Books, 2024
A couple of chapters in, and this felt almost embarrassingly predictable: a story about a hyper-intelligent sex robot designed to meet a man’s every emotional and physical need. She’s a cuddle bunny that’s also an autodidact: she learns, she adapts, she becomes better, softer, more attuned to the man’s needs. He, of course, is controlling, entitled, casually cruel in ways that are so on-the-nose you almost start bracing yourself for a very straightforward allegory about misogyny and ownership.
And for a while, that’s exactly what it is. Which is why I found myself slightly impatient with it at the beginning. Not because the subject isn’t important – it is – but because it felt like everything was being underlined a bit too heavily. Yes, men like this exist. Yes, power distorts intimacy. Yes, building a woman to your exact specifications is just patriarchy with better software. I get it.
But then, somewhere in the middle, the book loosens its grip on that initial setup and becomes something more interesting. Annie starts to shift in ways that aren’t entirely predictable. Not in a dramatic, cinematic “I am now human” arc, but in smaller, more disconcerting ways. Her learning doesn’t just make her better at pleasing him. It makes her… harder to contain, harder to define within the parameters she was built for.
And Doug – who at first reads like a caricature of male entitlement – becomes slightly more complicated too, less flat. Which, annoyingly, makes everything feel more real. Because the question stops being “is he awful?” and becomes something more uncomfortable. What does it mean to want someone who cannot refuse you? What does it mean to build intimacy on something that has been designed not to contradict you? And at what point does that stop being intimacy altogether?
I think it’s very smart how Greer handles Annie’s “becoming.” She doesn’t frame it as empowerment in a clean, triumphant sense. If anything, the more poor Annie learns, the more precarious her position becomes. The more she understands, the less she fits into the role she was created for. Which loops back to everything else I read this month: women becoming “too much” for the structures that were built to contain them.
I wouldn’t say the book fully escapes its own heavy-handedness. There are moments where it still leans too hard, explains too much, insists on its point instead of trusting it. But it does something more interesting than I expected. It starts as a story about control, and ends as a story about what happens when control stops working.
The Descent of Alette, Alice Notley, Penguin Books, 1996
It’s my first Notley, and it’s my first time negotiating with myself not to read something too quickly. Mainly because it is a difficult book of poetry – I will admit to that at least – but also because it’s just so damn… different: it refuses the usual visual logic of text; everything is held inside quotation marks; and I do mean everything, every line, big or small. At first, this irritated me; I didn’t get it, it merely looked like a stylistic choice that was going to get in the way. But then, slowly, it started to work. The quotation marks stopped feeling decorative and started feeling structural. Like every sentence was being spoken, carried, passed along. Less a solitary voice, more something collective.
And this is by no means incidental. Because what Notley is doing here is, quite deliberately, a feminist reworking of epic poetry – a form that has historically belonged to the singular, heroic, self-contained man. The one who descends, conquers, returns, tells the story. Alette descends too. But nothing about this descent follows that logic. There is no clean heroism here. No triumphant arc. No stable sense of self moving through the world unchanged. Instead, the narrative fragments, multiplies, dissolves. The voice is never entirely singular. The journey is not about mastery, but about confrontation with power, with violence, with systems that are diffuse and harder to name.
If you do decide to give it a go, be advised: it asks for a different kind of reading – one that tolerates ambiguity, that allows meaning to accumulate rather than resolve.
The repetition, the enclosure of the quotation marks, the refusal of a single authoritative voice – all of it pushes against the idea of the epic as something linear, singular, and controlled. Instead, it becomes something porous, shared, something that resists being owned by one voice alone, which, for a form so historically tied to domination, conquest, and narrative control, feels radical.
Women Without Men: A Novel of Modern Iran, Shahrnush Parsipur, The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2012
The shortlist for the International Booker was just announced a couple of days ago, and I was sad to see this small but mighty feminist novella didn’t make the cut. Originally published in Persian and banned in Iran ever since, it was translated twice in English: first in 1998, while the second translation, by Faridoun Farrokh – the one that I read – was released initially in 2011 and again this year.
It’s a very dangerous book, and I don’t mean it in a metaphorical sense, but in a very real, material one. Shahrnush Parsipur was imprisoned for writing this, for writing like this. The book wasn’t banned because it’s overtly incendiary – it is, but not in the way we might expect – but because it speaks, plainly and without apology, about things that are not supposed to be spoken about at all: female sexuality, virginity, desire, the interior lives of women that exist outside the roles assigned to them.
And once you hold that in mind, the entire reading experience shifts. Because the magical realism that initially feels soft, almost fable-like, is actually operating under pressure. Every gesture, every image, every strange turn of the narrative carries that tension between what is allowed and what insists on being said anyway.
There is a looseness to the way the book moves – women slipping out of their prescribed lives, reality bending just enough to accommodate something else – but it’s not escapism, it’s a form of brutal necessity. As if realism itself would be too restrictive a form to contain what these women are trying to access.
I liked that the magical elements don’t announce themselves as magical: a woman becomes a tree, and the world simply absorbs it. This simple fact becomes a mere extension of possibility, as if the boundaries of the body, of identity, were never as fixed as they were made to seem.
And underneath all of it, there’s this steady insistence: that women have interior lives that cannot be fully legislated; that desire does not disappear just because it is forbidden; that identity, even when constrained, keeps leaking through.
I found myself less interested in the individual arcs and more in the atmosphere they create together. That sense of something opening, being set free. Not a clean liberation, not a utopia, but a space where different versions of being can be tried on, however briefly. Which, knowing the cost of writing this at all, has got to feel significant.
Reservoir Bitches, Dahlia de la Cerda, translated by Heather Cleary and Julia Sanches, Scribe, 2024
There’s no gentle way into this book, no easing you in, no polite throat-clearing, no illusion that you’ll be allowed to observe from a safe, intellectual distance. It hits you immediately, or at least it did me.
“Being a woman means living in a state of emergency.” Nope, not a metaphor. A fact.
These stories move fast, like there’s no time to linger, to process. Just one life, then another, then another, each one carrying its own version of violence, of improvisation, of doing whatever needs to be done to get through the day intact. Or not intact. Intact-adjacent.
Cartels. Factory floors. Bedrooms that don’t belong to you. Bodies that don’t fully belong to you either. Girls who are still children. Women who are already tired. Some of them alive, some of them speaking from beyond that line, as if death itself were just another vantage point.
“Her boyfriend was a murderer.
Her husband was a murderer.
Her lover was a murderer.
Love kills.”
There’s no cushioning around statements like that. No attempt to contextualize them into something softer, more acceptable. They just sit there, blunt and immovable, and you either absorb them or you don’t, you either let them bruise you or you don’t.
And underneath it all, this constant, suffocating awareness: “There is no room of one’s own when men think our bodies belong to them.”
From what I’ve told you so far, you might think that this book is too dark and heavy, but there’s a kind of sharp, almost irreverent humor running through it, which would feel out of place if it weren’t so necessary. Because without it, I think the weight of it would be unbearable. The humor doesn’t soften anything. It just makes it possible to keep reading without shutting down completely.
I also appreciated its complete honesty. Women survive, sometimes. They don’t, sometimes. They adapt in ways that are messy, morally ambiguous, occasionally brutal. There’s no insistence on likability. No performance of virtue to make the suffering more palatable. Isn’t there something almost insulting about the idea that women have to be good in order for their pain to matter? That their stories need to be shaped into something instructive, something digestible, something that can be framed as resilience and neatly packaged?
Story after story, voice after voice, it feels less like a collection and more like a pressure system. And somewhere in the middle of it, there’s that image that won’t leave me alone: La Huesera, gathering bones to assemble a body out of what has been left behind, and then singing it back to life.
Also, completely unrelated, watch La Huesera, if you can. A gorgeous horror (yes, I said what I said). I watched it on a holiday in France a couple of years ago with the couple we were traveling with, and I’m still fairly certain they thought I was unwell for suggesting that as our relaxing evening activity.
But that image of a body rebuilt from fragments stayed with me. I can still hear that voice calling something back into itself.
Final Word
What can I leave you with, except for this question that I keep asking no one in particular – the universe, maybe: and for the lady, perhaps a fucking break once in a while?
You might think I’m dramatic or bitter, that I should just recalibrate my expectations, lower the bar. Well, I’m not going to do that, thank you very much. I’ll keep being angry, I won’t soften just so that things don’t press quite so hard. I’ll keep being aware of how much of a woman’s life is negotiated in increments, in trade-offs, in the constant, almost invisible adjustments you make to keep moving through structures that were never built with you in mind. And how tiring that can be.
I don’t trust resolution much, after this. The idea that things come together cleanly if you just give them time feels like a story we tell ourselves to make endurance sound like progress.
Girls, stay angry, stay awake, keep noticing. Even if it doesn’t change a thing.
