Category: Books

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 a kind of fond regret. But as a midlife reader, I think there is something valuable about nostalgia and uncertainty. I think that this novel is far more brilliant than I ever realized when I read it for the first time.

The Virgin Suicides is a spectacular novel. Dreamy and elegiac, the book subjects us to the narrow perspective of teen boys and their objectification of the girls they claim to adore. I don’t doubt that they loved the girls, in their way. They aren’t duplicitous. They are simply naive. And that kind of unreliable narration is some of my favorite in literature. I would say Mr. Stevens in The Remains of the Day is somewhat similar.

Unreliable narration forces us to uncover some hard truths about what we claim to know and how we lie to ourselves about the things we don’t. In Eugenides’ debut novel, specifically, we assume the role of unworldly teen boys, paired with the retrospective wisdom of middle age. Taking part in the voyueristic exercises the boys were once so faithful in upholding, we have to ask ourselves: what did it all mean?

The Virgin Suicides – A Collective Lack of Insight

I’ve talked about my love for Jeffrey Eugenides several times on TikTok. Middlesex is one of my favorite novels of all time. The prose is lyrical and compassionate, with a generational story so soundly built, you can’t help but feel deeply attached to everyone involved. But what he does with The Virgin Suicides is equally unforgettable.

We also get something wonderful with this novel that we aren’t privy to in many others: we know why Eugenides wrote it the way that he did. In The Guardian, Eugenides details an encounter he had with a teenage babysitter. While watching his nephew, she admitted to Eugenides that she, and all of her sisters, had attempted suicide. This was shocking news, especially considering the girl’s age and her seemingly “untroubled” attitude.

For Eugenides, this revelation birthed the beginnings of a story, in which a family of young girls all attempt, and (spoiler alert) succeed, to kill themselves.

Jeffrey Eugenides, the author of The Virgin Suicides, was inspired by a teen girl’s revelation about attempting suicide due to the “pressures” of her life.

With this being his first novel, Eugenides felt he had to place certain limitations on himself. As a man in his 30s, he sensed he was incapable of really getting into the minds of the girls to “present their inner lives.” So, he stuck with what he knew: what it felt like to be a young boy enamored with the mysterious allure of girls. He fixated on the roads in the neighborhood and community routines. He adopted a collective “we” narration of young males, who, like himself, possessed a limited understanding of the teenage girl psyche.

From their perspective, we join them in their obsession. We only know what they know, and as it turns out, that is very little. But the issue of ignorance isn’t forced. It’s more like an appealing feature of the narrative.

Because not knowing is a part of adolescence, and uncertainty is the hallmark of the high school experience. What hurts is when that limited knowledge continues to torment us into adulthood, as it does here.

Confronted by the Unknown: The Disappointment of Understanding Desire

When I was a teen, I was in love with Leonardo DiCaprio. Like most 90s teen girls, I had seen Romeo + Juliet, and I was hooked. I needed to know EVERYTHING about this man. I was buying copies of Vanity Fair and Teen Bop with every dollar I had. I watched every movie and TV appearance with a keen eye, connecting what was on the screen with what I’d heard in interviews. But even then, that’s only what he was willing to admit. Who knows what was fact and what was fiction?

Much like the boys, who piece together the girls from rumors and purloined grocery lists, I only knew what I had been able to scavenge from People Magazine and Entertainment Tonight interviews, without ever speaking to Leo directly. Much to my disappointment!

In 2018, The New Yorker columnist Emma Cline wrote that the boys were ultimately motivated by a need to validate their authority in telling the story of the Lisbon girls. And the only way to do that was to amass as much information about them as possible. I find this to be true, as no one had more DiCaprio memorabilia than I did, and whenever his name came up during lunch or recess, everyone deferred to my knowledge. Oddly, that felt pretty good.

The seemingly endless quest to know the unknowable is intoxicating. I guess we all have a need to discover. It’s why Elon is so obsessed with space and why hundreds of people still try to top Everest. There is an innate human need to KNOW.

But sometimes the knowing destroys the fantasy. This happens to the boys when they get to see the Lisbon sisters up close. Their imaginations are deflated by what they consider ordinary. Perhaps the boys don’t really want to know them at all. Maybe it’s much more satisfying to use them as blank canvases with which to project their desires. Why confront the unbelievable truth? The girls are just average girls, totally uninterested in the boys’ attentions.

When Leonardo DiCaprio started dumping his supernaturally gorgeous girlfriends once they turned 25, I thought it better to know as little about his true nature as possible.

Shattering the Illusion: Fetishization and Male Gaze

The novel’s enduring success is dependent upon the Male Gaze, penetrating and incomplete. When Lit Hub’s Emily Temple re-read the novel in 2018, she was worried that it wouldn’t hold up: “Honestly, I thought that a novel so dependent on the male gaze would annoy me in 2018.”

Luckily, that wasn’t the case, and Temple regarded the novel with the same affection as before. She realized that the male gaze was not just the cheap device of a novice writer. It was a sophisticated interpretation of how boys view girls, which was honest then and even more valid today.

Now, I can see why some people might find that gross. Why would I want to expose myself to the way men (because the narrators are adults by the time they share their story) view women, or in this specific case: why would I want to know what men think of dead girls?

I think it’s important to discuss the objectification and fetishization of the Lisbon sisters in the novel. The essential components of the male gaze, getting pleasure from looking at the desired object and the narcissistic satisfaction of inserting oneself into the fantasy, play out elaborately in this tight narrative. The narrators are consumed by the girls’ every move, going so far as to dig through the trash to retrieve a freshly un-bodied tampon. But they are only interested in the girls because of what it reveals about themselves.

The girls are treated like objects, and they are deemed worthy of this objectification for a variety of reasons: their beauty, their misery, and their innocence. All of these are definitions the boys apply to the Lisbon sisters. In doing this, they create worlds of meaning within themselves and spend the entirety of the novel trying to prove themselves right.

A huge benefit of the male gaze is confirming that the object of that gaze is worthy of adoration and obsession. If the object is deemed undeserving, the fascination loses its appeal, and the subject must re-evaluate his own taste.

When this happens to the boys, they do turn inward. They develop a sense of self-awareness and begin to wonder what role they may have played in the girls’ isolation. They loved the girls, sure, but they never tried to help the girls. As soon as they got close to them, the girls’ mysterious power over them dissolved.

The Female Fascination with True Crime

While the novel’s central theme relies on the male gaze, women are not exempt from perverse objectification. It’s become almost trendy for women to do this with true crime media. According to a 2023 Pew Research Center study, women are twice as likely to listen to true crime podcasts as men.

Our contemporary obsession with murderers, spurned lovers, and abused children has reached a lucrative fever pitch. While crimes have always found a captive audience, there are entire television networks now devoted exclusively to true crime docs, interrogation videos, and multi-episode deep dives into infamous serial killers. True crime is also one of the most popular genres for podcasts, with over 20,000 of them available.

Now you might be saying, “Hey, they’re not the same!” While the mystery element is intoxicating, especially when experienced from the safety of the sofa, there may be a an evolutionary reason for women’s fascination with true crime. It can help us recognize potential threats.

Much like the boys, women who enjoy (if that’s the right word to use) true crime stories are engaging with unknowable subjects to gain insight into themselves. In some ways, it might seem like this thirst for knowledge about a case brings us closer to it, but it only seeks to create a safe distance.

It’s like the clickbait articles where a young, 20-something is suffering from Stage 4 colon cancer, and many of the comments ask the same thing: What were your symptoms? These comments might be coming from a place of genuine concern, but more likely, they are coming from a place of prevention. I want to know what you experienced so I can avoid what happened to you.

Whitney Phillips, assistant professor of digital platforms and ethics at University of Oregon, teaches a course that discusses the cultural impact of true crime, highlighting the immense popularity (and potential exploitation) of the genre.

I believe this fascination with true crime, in the form of neatly named podcasts and popular network shows, can veer into the unethical. Much like the disgust we (and I’m speaking as a woman now) feel when we’re confronted with the male gaze, the obsession with true crime results in a similar objectification of victims and the glorification of perpetrators.

As a woman, when I think about The Virgin Suicides, I consider the perspective of the mother. Her overprotective and authoritarian parenting was most definitely a major factor in the girls’ decisions to take their lives. Maybe my fascination with it is in choosing not to replicate her mistakes.

What The Virgin Suicides Tells Us about Ourselves

There is something captivating about being told a story by someone you can’t trust. It’s like a puzzle. What is the author trying to hide? What is really being said? And it’s quite rewarding when all the pieces we see merge with the ones we’ve imagined to create a complete picture. But at the end of the day, we care most about how this shapes our own perspective.

Much like the boys who felt that they’d “been too infatuated to listen” to the girls’ cries for help, we can become too wrapped up in our projections of fear and anxiety to honestly connect with our own morbid curiosity. No one wants to suffer. No one wants to see a life cut off prematurely. But we can’t help but make it about us somehow.

We’re always searching for meaning, trying to validate what we think we know. But in most cases, this is impossible.

For me, that’s the power of The Virgin Suicides. No matter how much you try, you can never really know someone. You’ll never get into someone’s mind. What you end up with is a projection, a story that you’ve created for yourself that serves you in some way. The boys attempted to develop a deeper connection to the girls and failed. But they did succeed in creating self-awareness for themselves. They accept their own loss of innocence as they grapple with the futile exploration of mysteries that will never be solved.

It’s the unsatisfying realization that you’ve grown up. And Eugenides is a master because he pressures us to accept this as well.

November 20, 2025
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 duality.

It explodes and erodes. It is lament and lacuna, relief and resentment. It is visceral and fugitive. It is shadow and spotlight. Grief can be both burden and revelation, as many of the authors below illustrate. We hope these books help you carry your own grief in a way that respects the uniqueness of that experience, neither forcing pain to the surface nor burying it further inside.

The Mounting Grief of Loss in Womanhood

A poster for the Loss and Grief symposium led by the OMS and National Institutes of Health, 20th century

Grief is a universal experience, but the grieving process does not unfold the same way for everyone. A 2020 study in the Journal of Psychiatric Research reveals (un)surprising differences in how men and women navigate significant loss. It suggests that men tend to experience an acute reaction; they feel immediate devastation after the sudden death of a loved one, but these feelings gradually decrease in the weeks and months that follow.

Many women, however, bear their own grief much differently: their grief may feel less dramatic initially, but it intensifies and lingers over time. Instead of receding as months pass, it only grows. This “mounting grief” is reflected in many of the best books about grief written by women, in which authors process heartbreak that becomes an enduring part of their female characters rather than an isolated experience.

The Burden of Responsibility

Death and the Child, Edvard Munch, 1889, Oil on canvas, Kunsthalle Bremen, Bremen

Part of this difference comes from the unique challenges women face when mourning. Many women must deal with their grief while caring for children, siblings, or aging parents. Even as they are overcome by sorrow and feel overwhelmed, they may continue to be the emotional center of their families; in this role, they are expected to provide practical advice, offer support, and provide comfort for others while falling apart themselves.

This dual role complicates the healing journey for many women; the mourner must balance her personal anguish with her “duty” of sustaining life for others. Novels written out of women’s own

experiences capture this reality; they echo the fact that dealing with grief is never linear, especially when it is tangled up with caregiving.

How Art Captures Women’s Grief

Lucretia (one of three), oil on canvas, Artemisia Gentileschi, 1627

Despite these lived realities and a growing body of research, cultural portrayals of grief repeatedly flatten or distort women’s experiences. In film and television, women’s mourning is often reduced to wailing at funerals. Their bodies collapse in despair, their hands knot and writhe, mascara-tipped tears fall from their eyes in torrents. Alternatively, men are shown as stoic, resolute, and solemn.

This trope obscures the truth and actually reverses what science has found to be true: women’s grief is rarely a theatrical outpouring of sorrow and men’s grief is not always silent or quickly resolved as such portrayals suggest. Women’s grief is not tidy, either. It can be angry,

messy, violent, and self-destructive; less romantic mascara lines across the cheeks and more empty liquor bottles and stained bedsheets littered on the floor.

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To illustrate that reality, we turn to art and literature by women. Art created by women (like Tracey Emin’s My Bed or Frida Kahlo’s Henry Ford Hospital) depicts grief and loss as raw and bodied. Literature written by women also resists the clichés outlined above; writers like Carol Shields and Maggie O’Farrell meditate on the complexity, duration, and layered responsibilities of their characters’ grief.

The following books accurately portray how women confront devastating loss, not only of partners, but of children as in Hamnet, of parents as in Everything I Never Told You, and of their own sense of self as in The Stone Diaries. Toni Morrison’s Beloved turns mourning into mythology as she shows how a mother’s grief can be both private and intergenerational. While best known for her deeply personal memoir The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion explores similar territory in fiction like Play It As It Lays, where she writes about dislocation and psychic pain.

Grief as Erosion, Not Explosion

Patience on a monument smiling at Grief, John Roddam Spencer Stanhope (English, 1829 – 1908)

The difference, then, is not about who hurts more, but about the texture and timeline of one’s grief. Men’s mourning may be compared to a storm: violent, visible, then passing. Women’s grief is often better compared to erosion: subtle, relentless, reshaping the landscape of their lives long after others expect them to be “done.”

From Morrison to Enright and from Shields to O’Farrell, literature insists that grief is less something to overcome and more something to integrate. It remakes the self. And it rewrites relationships. The following books are resources for both adults and children, for siblings, parents, and friends, because they show that grief is not only personal but also relational.

In this way, the mounting grief of womanhood is a lesson and a reflection; mourning is not weakness and the refusal to “move on” is not failure. But it shouldn’t be seen solely as a vehicle for personal growth, either. These books might demonstrate the universality of grief, but they also show how deeply individual it is, how fractured it can be, and how nonlinear healing feels.

We encourage you to explore books like Beloved, Runaway, and The Gathering after reading this article. They might not include practical strategies for healing or daily meditations on the complexities of grief, but they do provide context and comfort.

10 Fictional Books About Grief by Women Who Lived Through It

Beloved by Toni Morrison

In this Pulitzer-winning novel by Toni Morrison, Sethe kills her baby daughter rather than see her enslaved, but the child comes back in the form of Beloved after her spirit is forced from their haunted home. Inspired by an account from 1856, the grief in this story is fierce and layered; Sethe (who herself was horrifically abused) mourns her child, but she also mourns her own stolen life and the lives of generations before her.

Over time, Beloved grows larger and larger, fed by Sethe’s guilt-fueled dedication to the young woman. Even as memory of Beloved fades from collective memory in their town, Morrison chronicles how a mother’s sorrow, trauma, and heartbreak lives on in the body and in her own memory. This kind of somatic grief often intensifies (or at the very least, changes shape) with time. It is all-consuming and unending.

The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields

In this novel by Carol Shields, Daisy Goodwill grows up without her mother, who dies in childbirth. Daisy then lives much of her life in obscurity. Long after her mother dies, she endures the death of her husband and her fading sense of self, which debilitates her over time.

Shields traces how loss threads itself through Daisy’s life; her grief is never depicted as a sudden, soul-shattering moment but rather as an undercurrent that slowly shapes who she becomes. This novel makes space for small ways in which grief appears across domestic life.

Here, mourning is not centered on a single devastating event; for her, it is a lifetime of absences.

Runaway by Alice Munro

In this collection by Alice Munro, women live with the grief wrought by abandonment, estrangement, and regret. Children leave home, marriages dissolve, and unrealized possibility dissipates before it can be realized. These stories capture loss not as spectacle but as something that settles slowly into daily life.

Munro shows how women continue moving through ordinary routines while carrying unbearable sorrow with no clear outlet (or outline). Some characters turn away from their feelings, while

others allow themselves to remember and even revel. In either case, grief lingers and shapes the choices Munro’s characters make.

The Gathering by Anne Enright

In Anne Enright’s novel, Veronica Hegarty travels to Dublin after her brother Liam commits suicide. His death forces her to confront the unaddressed fractures and growing silence that have long haunted their family. Here, grief is equally yoked with anger and unease.

Veronica shoulders the weight of holding her family together while privately unraveling. Enright makes visible the hidden burden women often bear in mourning: to soothe others, to tell the story, to carry both memory and responsibility without letting it slip beyond themselves.

Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng

Celeste Ng’s novel opens with the sudden death of Lydia Lee, favored daughter of a Chinese American family in 1970s Ohio. The nature of her death is not revealed until much later in the novel. Her mother Marilyn is irreparably undone by the loss, yet her grief is complicated by the expectations she placed on her daughter.

This novel reveals how silence magnifies sorrow and compounds loss. Marilyn aches for the life she wanted for Lydia, while the rest of the family falters under the weight of what has never been said. Ng illustrates how grief can expose every fracture within a household and how mothers, in particular, lie on the sharpest edges of those fractures while trying to desperately to glue them back together.

Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell

In Hamnet, Maggie O’Farrell reimagines the death of Shakespeare’s young son through the eyes of his mother, Agnes Hathaway who is surprisingly wild and bold. After the shocking death of her son, Agnes feels the boy’s absence in her bones; her mourning is the spine, muscle, and marrow of this book.

O’Farrell writes much from her own brush with death and that closeness to the subject shapes the intensity of her portrayal. She renders the grief of a mother losing a child as both physical and spiritual, something that stretches across time and transforms every relationship it touches.

Critics have described Hamnet as “a luminous portrait of a marriage, a family ravaged by grief.”

The Dark Flood Rises by Margaret Drabble

Margaret Drabble’s novel follows Fran, who is an older woman moving through the cumulative losses that come with age. She attends funerals, witnesses the decline of others she holds dear, and lives with the knowledge that her own mortality is inevitable (and likely near). In Drabble’s novel, grief is an ordinary part of life.

The book does not dwell on widowhood alone but on how women face loss in solitude. Fran resists dependence on others, even as she feels the world narrowing around her. Again, grief is portrayed not as a single shocking event but as a continuum. It grows as we do.

Still, Fran finds the beauty and humor in life, even amid meditations on her own mortality. In The Dark Flood Rises, she opines, “Old age, it’s a fucking disaster!”

The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen’s novel tells the story of sixteen-year-old Portia, who discovers betrayal in her household years after severe loss in her childhood. Instead of a dear relative or romantic partner, she loses her innocence and trust. The grief that follows is quiet but all-consuming.

Bowen wrote out of her own experiences of loss and her prose carries that. Portia’s sorrow is less about sudden death than it is about the collapse of safety she though inherent to being part of a family. Here, grief is tied to betrayal and the unfairness of misplaced trust.

Bowen shows how disillusionment can feel as devastating as bereavement, particularly for a young woman who believed family could be a refuge after losing those closest to her (her father and mother) at an early age.

The Almost Moon by Alice Sebold

In Alice Sebold’s novel, Helen kills her elderly mother after years of tension and care. The act forces her to reckon with a lifetime of estrangement. What follows is grief tangled messily with guilt, anger, and unwanted devotion, emotions many of us feel after complex, conflicting loss.

Being a caregiver is never solely about love; it starts that way, but often devolves into resentment, frustration, and longing for a simpler life with softer boundaries.

Herself a survivor of violence, Sebold writes bluntly without sentimentality. Helen’s mourning is not tender or redemptive; it is complicated and harsh. It exposes the realities of caring for someone out of obligation rather than adoration. The novel explores what it means to grieve a parent one could never fully love.

Many of us are familiar with the anger that comes when a parent, partner, sibling, or friend is “deified” after death. Helen feels anger not just at her mother, but at the way death immediately rewrites her mother’s story. It sands away the uglier, grittier parts that defined their relationship and eroded Helen’s sense of self. Sebold doesn’t soften this but instead shows how grief is tangled with fury when the dead are sanctified.

The Lover by Marguerite Duras

Marguerite Duras’s The Lover is based on her own adolescence in French colonial Vietnam and is not strictly a novel about bereavement, but it explores these themes nonetheless. It illustrates how grief bleeds into many other emotions.

In this book, a young girl enters an affair with an older Chinese man who is quite wealthy. While this affair is central to Duras’ novel, the main character’s deepest pain lies in estrangement from her unstable mother, her brother’s cruelty, and her family’s decline during her absence.

Harshly dislocated from her family, the young narrator feels both estranged from her home and bound to it. Like others on this list, Duras depicts grief that arrives not in a single, deafening blow but in the accumulation of disappointments and separations that percolate over years or even decades. Her novel shows how a young woman grieves for family, for country, and for a

life that could not be lived. The New York Times Book Review described her prose as “powerful, authentic…perfect.”

If You Are Struggling with Grief, Please Consult These Resources

The Widow I (1922–23), woodcut from the Mario de Andrade Collection, Käthe Kollwitz, at the Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros

If you are coping with grief right now, please know that support is available. Grief can feel overwhelming and unending, but you do not have to carry it alone. The following organizations and hotlines can offer you immediate help and ongoing guidance as you navigate the pain of losing a loved one.

● National Alliance for Grieving Children (NAGC)

● The Dougy Center

● National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) Helpline (call 1-800-950-NAMI (6264)) ● 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline (U.S.) (dial 988)

● Hospice Foundation of America

● The Compassionate Friends

● GriefShare

Grief may feel isolating, but you are not alone. Finding support, whether through community groups, therapists, or a crisis line, is never a sign of weakness.

A Note from The Somatic Diary

At The Somatic Diary, we have found reading books to be a surprisingly effective way to process trauma and grief; they have become part of our healing process. This may be because literature allows people to witness their own experiences reflected back to them.

The books outlined above navigate and excavate emotions that may otherwise feel overwhelming or unspeakable: shame, anger, hatred, hopelessness, relief, regret… We hope you find some comfort in the many manifestations of grief described by these incredible writers.

September 14, 2025
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 healthcare is no well-intentioned climb toward omnipotence. It is an incomplete archive of dismissal, distortion, and outright violence. From ancient Greeks who believed the uterus wandered like a wild animal to 19th-century asylum doors that opened a little too easily for wives with opinions to modern exam rooms where women are still told their pain is “normal”—the throughline is mistrust, not benign misunderstanding.

As we trace the history of medical gaslighting (by the healthcare system, by our loved ones, and by our cultures), we encourage you to remember that this is not about bad science. It is about power. It is about who is believed and who isn’t. It is about how medicine—so often billed as “neutral”—has followed a cultural script, reinforcing who is seen as credible, coherent, and deserving of care.

Medical gaslighting is not new, but we’re naming it. And that is new.

What is Medical Gaslighting?

Jean-Martin Charcot Series of photographs from 1878, inspired by his studies in Neurosis.

Medical gaslighting (also called “medical invalidation”) happens when medical professionals dismiss or minimize a patient’s symptoms and attribute them to anxiety, stress, or a mental health condition instead. This is often done without adequate testing, follow-up, or consideration of the patient’s own experience. It leaves patients—especially women, Black patients, and those from other marginalized groups—feeling unheard, invalidated, misdiagnosed, and without important medical care.

This isn’t limited to one bad doctor or one rushed medical appointment. It’s rooted in a larger healthcare system shaped by medical bias, limited time, and long-standing gaps in medical research. As you might imagine, we see medical gaslighting happen more frequently in relation to women’s health, chronic illness, and mental health. As Harvard Medical School researchers have noted, even when men and women present with the same symptoms, women are more likely to receive a diagnosis of a mental health condition, be prescribed less pain medication, or have their health concerns labeled as “stress-related.”

Classic examples of gaslighting in the medical system include women with IBD (inflammatory bowel disease) or IBS (irritable bowel syndrome) being told their pain is “in their head” or patients with long COVID, chronic pain, or mental illness being passed between specialists with no clear treatment. Those who rush to the emergency department with horrifying symptoms and unimaginable pain might be dismissed as “drug seeking” by health care professionals. Gaslighting is often associated with worse medical outcomes—especially in women.

You may be experiencing medical gaslighting if…
- Your symptoms are consistently dismissed without explanation.
- A physician tells you your test results are “normal” but you still feel unwell.
- You are not offered modern medical testing or appropriate referrals.
- You’re told to “reduce stress” or “get more sleep” as a catch-all treatment.
- You leave appointments feeling like you weren’t taken seriously.
The power differential between patient and provider can make it hard to spot medical gaslighting, but there are ways to protect yourself.

How to Protect Yourself from Medical Gaslighting
- Bring a trusted friend or family member to appointments.
- Write down your own experiences, symptoms, and questions in advance.
- Don’t hesitate to seek a second opinion—many patients need to advocate for themselves to receive quality care.
- Trust your own body. You deserve to feel heard.
Medical gaslighting is incredibly frustrating in the short-term but it can also have serious, lifelong consequences. Gaslighting can lead to worse health outcomes, delayed diagnoses, and improper or missed treatment. Recognizing that you have not received adequate care when you should have is your first step toward reclaiming self care, advocating for proper treatment, and demanding a more equitable health care system for all of us.

But this isn’t all on you.

Monsters, Myths, and Medical Men: Tracing the Timeline of Gaslighting in Women’s Healthcare

The Original Misdiagnosis of the Wandering Womb

Anatomical illustration of the inside of the uterus, fallopian tube and ovaries from 1672, by Hendrik Bary

Between the 5th Century BCE and the 4th Century CE, Western medicine did women few favors. The ancient Greeks believed the uterus was not an organ, but a creature. This create was unmoored, mobile, and hungry. According to Hippocratic theory, it could travel through a woman’s body, suffocating her organs, clouding her mind, and producing symptoms of madness. The solution? Scent therapy, sex, or marriage—tools meant to pacify the womb, not the woman.

This was not diagnosis. It was containment disguised as care.

The myth of the “wandering womb” is perhaps the earliest recorded instance of what we now call medical gaslighting, which you now know is when healthcare professionals translate a woman’s symptoms not as evidence of disease, but as proof of her instability, sexuality, or sin.

As Mary Lefkowitz wrote for The New Yorker back in 1996, “A woman who was unwell was said to be ‘womby.” Has much changed? Lefkowitz argues not. “Even today, when wombs have stopped wandering, medicine tends to pathologize the vagaries of the female reproductive system, from menarche to menopause.”

Not our bodies, not ourselves?

By the time Roman physicians like Soranus began writing gynecological texts, women’s bodies were already categorized by deficiency. Soranus, often considered progressive for his time, advised against overmedicating, yet still treated women almost exclusively through the lens of fertility. A woman’s body was not her own; it was a vessel, a womb, a means to an end, and nothing more.

Pain without pregnancy was often invisible. Illness without male distress was rarely real.

The Age of Authority and Asylums

A portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft in 1797

Skipping ahead to the 18th century, we find ourselves face to face with Mary Wollstonecraft. Mary Wollstonecraft’s manifesto called for our access to education while ferociously rebuking the systems that kept women silenced, including medicine.

During this time period, male physicians routinely framed female intellect as a liability and female illness as emotional excess. Contrarily, Wollstonecraft issued a radical claim that angered her male counterparts: perhaps women were not weak but deliberately weakened.

Ignaz Semmelweis and the Unwashed Hands of Medicine

Decades later in 1847, Semmelweis observed a deadly pattern: women giving birth in physician-run hospitals were dying at alarming rates from childbed fever. The cause of these mass deaths was doctors moving directly from autopsies to deliveries without washing their hands. Semmelweis’ solution (basic hand hygiene), was dismissed as offensive, unscientific, even hysterical. While he did eventually implement chlorine hand-washing in one hospital, his 1861 book was ripped apart.

He died in an asylum. The women he tried to save died in droves.

Medical gaslighting doesn’t always look like disbelief in women’s symptoms. Sometimes, it is the refusal to take action when those symptoms are common, inconvenient, or coming from the “wrong” source.

The Father of Gynecology and the Mothers He Ignored

Agnew Clinic by Thomas Eakins (depicts Dr. Agnew in an operating theater performing a mastectomy, not Dr. Sims), Oil on Canvas, 1889

We often praise 19th century doctor J. Marion Sims as a pioneer of gynecology. Less often mentioned is how he built that legacy: through painful surgical experiments performed on enslaved Black women without anesthesia or consent. Their names—Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsey—are remembered by few, but they are the true founders of the field.

Medicine’s advancements have often been paved with the suffering of those deemed expendable (women, Black patients, poor patients), whose pain was either normalized or invisible.

Hysteria, the “Rest Cure,” and the Architecture of Silence

Series of three photos showing a hysterical yawning woman, c.1890, by Albert Londe, Courtesy of the Wellcome Collection, Licensed under CC BY 4.0.

As women began speaking more boldly—demanding rights, education, autonomy—medical professionals responded with a new diagnosis: hysteria. It could explain everything and nothing. Melancholy, ambition, sexuality, exhaustion, imagination—all were signs of feminine dysfunction.

The prescription was “the rest cure:” total isolation, no stimulation, no writing, no conversation.

Many of us are familiar with Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper from 1892, which is much more of a case study than a fictional tale. Written after Gilman herself was prescribed the rest cure, it exposes the insidious way medical care fails us. The unnamed narrator’s descent into madness is not caused by illness but by the very health care system designed to “treat” her.

Progress, at What Cost?

“Stop Forced Sterilization” (1977), poster by Rachael Romero, San Francisco Poster Brigade, Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, digital ID ppmsca.43321, Public domain in the United States.

Under the banner of eugenics between the 1900s and 1930s, the U.S. forcibly sterilized over 60,000 people, primarily women of color, poor women, and disabled individuals, without consent. These procedures were framed as public good, even though we now see them for what they were: violation, maiming, and assault.

Women were experimented on, yet routinely left out of medical testing.

Just a couple decades later between the 1940s and ’60s, Thalidomide was marketed as a mild sedative and anti-nausea drug for pregnant women but caused thousands of birth defects worldwide. The scandal exposed what many already knew: modern medical testing rarely included women. Their own bodies were considered too “complicated” for clean data. The fallout was devastating and predictable.

Women were misinformed and minimized.

Around the same time, contraception became available to women. Often celebrated as a feminist breakthrough, the pill’s early trials paint a much bleaker picture. On the ground in Puerto Rico, poor women were recruited—often without full disclosure—and given experimental doses that caused severe side effects. Many healthcare professionals ignored or downplayed their reactions. There was no protocol for informed consent—only urgency to test.

And in the 1980s, Diethylstilbestrol (DES), prescribed to “prevent miscarriage,” harmed two generations. The drug caused cancer, infertility, and birth defects. Again, it was marketed as safe. Women’s concerns were ignored until the damage was irreversible.

The Price of Disobedience in Mid-Century and Postmodern Media

Over the last thirty years, we have reflected on medical gaslighting in film and on television. From Girl, Interrupted to The Crown, instances of medical maltreatment are endless. Cultural narratives mirrored real-life violations.

In Girl, Interrupted (set in 1967–68), young women are institutionalized and overmedicated for nonconformity. In Mad Men, Betty Draper’s depression is treated as an inconvenience. In The Crown, Princess Margaret’s struggles are sedated rather than understood.

These fictional portrayals echo a healthcare system that pathologized female emotion, autonomy, and illness while offering little in the way of proper treatment.

Present Day: The Pain Is Real—Are We Listening Yet?

Medical gaslighting persists, especially for Black patients, trans folks, women with “invisible” illnesses, and anyone outside the narrow model of the “ideal” patient. The maternal mortality crisis in the U.S. continues to produce worse health outcomes for women, especially women of color.

Long-dismissed conditions like PCOS, endometriosis, and long COVID are finally receiving attention, thanks to women-led advocacy and the democratizing power of social media. But medical understanding is still limited and treatments remain stuck in the past as funding is funneled elsewhere.

Educate Yourself. Advocate for Yourself.

If you need more information (and we’re sure you do), below are a few resources that might help. First, Maya Dusenbery’s Doing Harm investigates how bias in the medical system leads to worse health outcomes for women. Her words (and careful research) are incredibly validating. Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English’s For Her Own Good traces two centuries of medical and cultural control over women’s bodies.

Online communities like The Endometriosis Foundation of America, IWeigh’s health advocacy work, and hashtags like #MedicalGaslighting can connect you with other women experiencing similar health struggles and the dismissal that often accompanies them. Find support on Reddit and other forums if you can. For more clinical guidance, Harvard Health Publishing and Emergency Medicine News have finally started addressing these systemic issues in women’s health.

You are not imagining this. And you are not alone. But remember:

“Your silence will not protect you.”

—Audre Lorde

The featured image for this post is A Clinical Lesson at the Salpêtrière by Pierre Aristide André Brouillet.
June 21, 2025
10 Books That Reframe Menopause in Cultural Context

In Western culture, we see menopause as an ending. It arrives not with reverence but with euphemism, clinical dread, or silence—a slow erasure wrapped in hot flashes and unkind jokes about uncontrollable mood swings. But like all life thresholds, menopause is multifaceted—neither wholly psychological nor entirely physical. It is biography, biology, and belief. It is medicine. It is myth. It is a nexus of power, aging, identity, and rage.

The books below do not explain menopause in a clinical sense, but they do reframe it. They interrogate the structures that turned it into a punchline, reimagine it as metamorphosis, and invite us to reinterpret what it means—culturally, spiritually, politically—to inhabit a body that no longer conforms to the (not-so-reliable) rhythms it once did. Yes, they address menopause symptoms like weight gain and waning estrogen, but they also re-contextualize women’s health at—and beyond—this crucial juncture.

Whether through memoir, manifesto, fiction, or anthropology, these ten works resist our cultural inclination to flatten menopause. They insist that menopause is not the death of youth, but a fresh chapter of womanhood.

10 Books That Reframe Menopause in Cultural Context

The Slow Moon Climbs: The Science, History, and Meaning of Menopause by Susan Mattern

The first menopause book on this list is The Slow Moon Climbs. Countering the pathology and pity that frequently defines coverage of this subject, Mattern’s voice is clear and corrective. A medical historian by training, she dismantles the “decline narrative” with precision and scope.

Mattern argues that menopause is not an evolutionary fluke but a biological and social asset. Her writing is lucid, quietly persuasive, and steeped in global anthropology. By tracing menopause through centuries of human development and across cultures—from ancient China to contemporary Western medicine—Mattern reframes it as a meaningful adaptation rather than a malfunction.

Readers will find no recipes, hormone therapy recommendations, or symptom trackers here, but they may step away with something rarer: relief. Nothing about this transition is unnatural. We were never meant to navigate menopause in shame or isolation.

How Mattern Reframes Menopause

Rather than offering practical advice on managing symptoms or presenting studies on women’s hormonal health, Mattern gives readers historical context, intellectual clarity, and cultural validation. Her work grants women permission to locate themselves within a longer lineage, one in which the aging female body is not in decline, but in continuity with generations of women whose bodies were never the problem.

What Fresh Hell Is This? by Heather Corinna

There is nothing dainty or demure about Heather Corinna’s treatment of menopause. This empowering resource is for those who feel their bodies are shape-shifting without warning and who want answers without condescension.

Part field guide, part memoir-manifesto, What Fresh Hell Is This? is appropriately inclusive, particularly of queer, nonbinary, and gender-expansive readers. It is also unflinchingly honest about what it’s like to wake up in a body suddenly thick with uncertainty, rage, and night sweats.

Corinna doesn’t tidy the realities of hormonal shifts, libido changes, insomnia, “menopause brain,” or weight gain. Instead, they give them names, contexts, and dignity. Through sex-positive, body-literate writing, they expose how medical systems often ignore perimenopausal symptoms or dismiss them as emotional instability.

This book pushes back—hard—against gaslighting in the exam room and the cultural script that menopause is simply an absence of estrogen and desire.

How Corinna Reframes Menopause

Corinna reframes menopause as a space for autonomy and truth-telling, not for shame or disappearance. They offer practical tools but also political clarity to help readers see how misogyny, heteronormativity, and capitalism shape what we label “disfunction” or “deterioration.” Their work is a lifeline for anyone whose experience doesn’t fit neatly into the mainstream narrative.

Menopause and Culture by Gabriella Berger

Long before menopause was a podcast topic or a wellness marketing hook, Gabriella Berger was examining it through a sociological lens. Years later, Menopause and Culture is still a foundational text in understanding how gender, class, and race shape a person’s menopausal experience and how these intersecting forces determine whether one’s symptoms are medicalized, moralized, or ignored entirely.

Berger’s work insists that menopause cannot be understood in isolation from its cultural frame. Why are hot flashes pathologized in some societies and spiritualized in others? What does it mean when hormonal changes are treated as personal failure rather than natural progression?

Berger explores these questions not through self-help, but through careful ethnographic study and social critique. This text helps women and others who experience menopause understand how deeply their experiences are shaped by systems they didn’t choose.

How Berger Reframes Menopause

Berger reframes menopause not as an issue of illness, but of interpretation. Her work restores complexity to a stage of life often reduced to mood swings and medical charts.

Crone: Women Coming of Age by Barbara G. Walker

Unlike other books on the subject, Barbara G. Walker’s Crone reads less like a roadmap and more like a reclamation—of time, body, and mind. In our Western culture where women past midlife are often erased, diminished, or flattened, Walker grants aging power. Her essays challenge the idea that worth ends with waning fertility, that post-menopausal bodies are anything less than potent, or that women’s mental health deserves no attention after 50.

Drawing on mythology, feminist critique, and historical analysis, Walker reclaims the archetype of the “crone” as a figure of wisdom, clarity, and independence. She doesn’t downplay the discomfort of aging—the hot flashes, hormonal fluctuations, or emotional volatility—but she situates these changes within a broader philosophical shift. Walker offers us a “new menopause.”

How Walker Reframes Menopause

Walker’s work offers emotional resonance and cultural validation, particularly for readers seeking to reframe the menopausal transition as shifting instead of shrinking.

The Change by Kirsten Miller

A supernatural feminist thriller about post-menopausal women reclaiming power, The Change is culturally subversive and fun. Kirsten Miller’s genre-defying novel leans into the wild potential of post-menopausal life, both literal and mythic. She gives those hormonal shifts witchy power instead of viewing them as society does—a descent toward death.

Her story follows three women in midlife who, freed from the constraints of their younger selves, discover new, otherworldly abilities that connect them to rage, justice, and one another. The novel never flinches from the realities of menopause—weight gain, insomnia, mood swings, the bodily betrayals that come without warning—but it refuses to treat those realities as shameful or passive. Instead, it treats them as fuel.

How Miller Reframes Menopause

Miller reframes menopause as catalytic. Her novel speaks not to symptom relief, but to the cultural hunger for stories where aging women are agents of change, not its casualties. This type of menopause care might not come from a women’s health clinic, but it certainly is a salve!

The Meanings of Menopause: Historical, Medical, and Cultural Perspectives, edited by Ruth R. Formanek

This interdisciplinary anthology doesn’t prize ease or brevity; it aims for depth. The Meanings of Menopause gathers essays from across disciplines—anthropology, psychology, history, and feminist theory—to show that what we call “menopause” is neither biologically fixed nor culturally consistent.

Through its many voices, the collection makes clear that the way we interpret hot flashes, hormonal shifts, and aging bodies has far more to do with social context than science alone. While science empowers women, she also argues that the limited definition tendered by our Western medical community is not at all sufficient. Some essays trace the medicalization of menopause (from changes in women’s brain health to the panoply of hormone replacement therapy prescriptions) in Western medicine, while others compare global traditions that treat the menopausal transition as a new phase of life rather than a mourn-able loss.

How Formanek’s Anthology Reframes Menopause

Rather than presenting a unified thesis, Formanek and her contributors offer a kaleidoscope of cultural narratives. This book gives readers intellectual scaffolding, that, upon scaling, reveals how deeply our understanding of menopause is shaped by politics, language, and history.

Reinterpreting Menopause: Cultural and Philosophical Issues, edited by Komesaroff, Rothfield, and Daly

Though not a replacement for scientific menopause education, this book explores the ethics, identity, cultural construction of the aging female body. Reinterpreting Menopause is a dense and layered text that asks how the medical community, the media, and even women’s health clinics have shaped our most intimate understandings of menopause and the body.

These essays resist the “deficiency” and “decline” language that so often saturates conversations about hormone therapy. Hell, you might even hear that verbage from an actual menopause specialist. Instead, they invite readers—especially menopause experts, social psychologists, and clinicians—to reconsider what counts as “normal” for people experiencing menopause.

How the Editors Reframe Menopause

This collection reframes the menopause transition. It offers mental health professionals and philosophers alike a structure to critique dominant narratives and to imagine menopause care that is responsive, curious, and respectful of difference.

Flash Count Diary: Menopause and the Vindication of Natural Life by Darcey Steinke

Darcey Steinke’s Flash Count Diary is raw, impressionistic, and unapologetically personal. Steinke does not flinch from the hardest parts: the brain fog, the night sweats, the hormonal changes, the sexual wellness issues. But neither does she flatten menopausal and perimenopause symptoms into clinical bullet points.

Instead, she writes through them. For Steinke, memoir is inquiry. She weaves in interviews with orcas and elephants—species whose females also hit menopause—and muses on desire, death, and transformation. She speaks to the mental health toll of early menopause (society often ignores it), the increased risk of cardiovascular disease, the grief that can arrive in the wake of a shifting sex life, and the silence surrounding it all.

How Steinke Reframes Menopause

Steinke reframes menopause as a state of reckoning. This book is perfect for readers feeling gaslit in their doctor’s office or skeptical of one-size-fits-all lifestyle changes like the Galveston Diet. It’s not a definitive guide, but it is a luminous one.

Second Spring: Dr. Mao’s Guide to Reviving Female Sexuality and Vibrancy Naturally by Dr. Maoshing Ni

For women navigating the often-overmedicalized terrain of menopause, Second Spring offers a gentler, deeper path that is rooted not in pharmaceuticals but in traditional Chinese medicine and holistic care. A 38th-generation practitioner, Dr. Maoshing Ni implores readers to consider that what we call decline might actually be rebirth: a second spring in the seasons of our lives.

This book addresses the realities of common symptoms—hot flashes, brain fog, mood swings, vaginal dryness, low libido, joint pain, and weight gain—but does so through a lens of harmony instead of crisis. Dr. Ni provides practical advice grounded in centuries-old traditions: herbal remedies, acupressure, movement practices like qi gong, and dietary shifts designed to support women’s hormonal health, sexual wellness, and mental health through the menopausal transition.

Unlike most books that treat menopause as a problem to be solved by a menopause specialist, a pill, or a women’s health clinic, Second Spring prioritizes balance. Dr. Ni’s approach honors women’s brain health, cardiovascular wellness, and cognitive function, but also the spiritual and emotional realignment that often arises at midlife.

How Dr. Ni Reframes Menopause

Dr. Ni reframes menopause as an invitation to slow down, to reflect, and to listen to what the body is asking for rather than trying to suppress or fix it. Instead of conventional Western medicine approaches to menopause management, Dr. Ni poses a rhythmic, reverent, and culturally rich alternative.

The Menopause Manifesto by Dr. Jen Gunter

If Walker frames menopause spiritually, Dr. Jen Gunter delivers a sharp scientific perspective. Known for her no-nonsense writing and advocacy for evidence-based women’s health, Gunter’s The Menopause Manifestois exactly what its title suggests. Grounded in the latest research and the realities of clinical practice, the book dismantles medical myths and gives readers the menopause education many of us never got.

From perimenopause symptoms to hormone replacement therapy, from sexual wellness to breast cancer risk, Gunter lays out what we know, what we assume, and what still needs to be studied. She makes space for conversations around our evolving health, all while naming the shame and neglect that often shape menopause care in today’s healthcare system.

Reframing Menopause in Your Own Words—in Your Own Time

The Nymph of Spring, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Oil on Panel, After 1537

In recent years, menopause has started shedding the skin that Western medicine has made it wear, in part due to impactful women like Michelle Obama, Oprah Winfrey, and Naomi Watts, who have shared personal experiences and advocated for better awareness, research, and care.

Podcasts, documentaries, books like The New Menopause by Mary Claire Haver, and platforms like Alloy Women’s Health are giving midlife women the tools they need. Our shared hope is that perimenopause and menopause are no longer just endured, but understood. We hope that you will reframe menopause in your own words, on your own time, knowing that this transition is worthy of attention, resources, and language that reflects the full spectrum of that experience.

Reframing Menopause at The Somatic Diary

The memento mori painting above feels like an allegory for menopause: a dichotomy between death and a “new spring.”

The Somatic Diary is devoted to the mind-body connection. It was born out of one woman’s realization that her body had been narrating her life all along: through pain, shame, resilience, and change.

In all its unpredictability and “mystery,” we see menopause for what it is: an important, vital chapter in women’s lives. For many of us, it is a reckoning with identity, desire, and aging.

Our stories matter, our bodies matter, and healing starts when we listen to both.

June 15, 2025