The Virgin Suicides: How Unreliable Voices Reveal Human Truths
Voyeurism can teach us more about ourselves than the objects of our desire. The boys behind the narration in The Virgin Suicides are incomplete. Their quest to know the girls, having failed, has stayed with them well into adulthood. And still, they are left with few answers, only the clarity of growing up to give their hindsight…
10 Fictional Books About Grief by Women Who Lived Through It
In many cultures, grief is named and sidestepped rather than explored and respected. But, whether in Toni Morrison’s Beloved or The Gathering by Anne Enright, the following books show that grief never truly leaves us; instead, it burrows inside, emerging in big and small ways throughout our lives. In this way, grief has an inherent…
Medical Gaslighting & the Horrible History of Women’s Healthcare
Women have always known when something was wrong with their bodies. But for centuries, they’ve been told otherwise—by healthcare professionals, priests, scientists, and husbands. Pain was not pain; it was hysteria. Bleeding was not a symptom; it was punishment. Fatigue, swelling, breathlessness, confusion—none evidence of illness but of weakness, neurosis, lust. The history of women’s…
10 Books That Reframe Menopause in Cultural Context
Whether through memoir, manifesto, fiction, or anthropology, these ten menopause books resist our cultural inclination to flatten this timeless experience.