I am a writer and avid reader of “domestic horror”: stories about the uncomfortable, inhospitable spaces that women inhabit in everyday life. In the past, I worked as a crime victim’s advocate for a national nonprofit. I became a writer because I believe in the power of expression and truth as healing agents. I am passionate about the issues of trauma and taboo, mental illness and motherhood, and the institutional power structures that constrict us all. My short stories, poetry, and essays have been published in many journals and literary magazines, including Witness, Ninth Letter, Identity Theory, Epiphany, Literary Mama, NonBinary Review, and elsewhere.
Sylvia Plath is having a moment, and it’s about time. In recent years, I’ve seen an outpouring of Plath-inspired literature and scholarship, so much of which I’ve devoured and would love to include on this list. But let’s start at the source: the inimitable, the iconic, the patron saint of pissed-off women everywhere.
This is Plath at her most intense and raw. The restored version reinstates her original selection and arrangement before it was infamously edited by Ted Hughes. It’s a work of art and a piece of history.
Ariel, first published in 1965, contains many of Sylvia Plath's best-known poems, written in an extraordinary burst of creativity just before her death in 1963. Including poems such as 'Lady Lazarus', 'Edge', 'Daddy' and 'Paralytic', it was the first of four collections to be published by Faber & Faber. Ariel is the volume on which Sylvia Plath's reputation as one of the most original, daring and gifted poets of the twentieth century rests.
'Since she died my mother has been dissected, analysed, reinterpreted, reinvented, fictionalized, and in some cases completely fabricated. It comes down to this: her own words describe…
This unconventional novel (a mixture of poetry, essay, fiction, and letters) uses its unusual form to expound upon the messiness of childbirth and early motherhood.
This book chronicles a time and space that is difficult to pin down, giving it the feel of a wholly new art form. I was blown away by this unflinching depiction of the tensions between motherhood, marriage, and the creative life. It is one of the few books I've read that refuses to soften maternal ambivalence and anxiety for its readers, and I am grateful for it.
After giving birth, Anna is utterly lost. She and her family move to the unfamiliar, snowy city of Stockholm. Anxiety threatens to completely engulf Anna, who obsessively devours online news and compulsively orders clothes she can't afford. To avoid sinking deeper into her depression, she forces herself to read and write.
My Work is a novel about the unique and fundamental experience of giving birth, mixing different literary forms-fiction, essay, poetry, memoir, and letters-to explore the relationship between motherhood, work, individuality, and literature."Olga Ravn writes dazzlingly about the work of motherhood and the work of writing. Reading Ravn's book, you…
LeeAnn Pickrell’s love affair with punctuation began in a tenth-grade English class.
Punctuated is a playful book of punctuation poems inspired by her years as an editor. Frustrated by the misuse of the semicolon, she wrote a poem to illustrate its correct use. From there she realized the other marks…
A figurehead of radical feminism and courter of much controversy, Dworkin is another writer whose work is having a resurgence lately—and for good reason. A healthy blend of scholarly and disturbing (my personal sweet spot), I’d recommend most of her books, but this one is a great place to start.
It is an in-depth examination of the power dynamics that underpin heterosexual relationships. It’s a wonderfully uncomfortable read. Dworkin is nothing if not thought-provoking; she is unafraid to pose difficult questions, and for that, I adore her.
Andrea Dworkin, once called Feminism's Malcolm X," has been worshipped, reviled, criticized, and analyzed-but never ignored. The power of her writing, the passion of her ideals, and the ferocity of her intellect have spurred the arguments and activism of two generations of feminists. Now the book that she's best known for-in which she provoked the argument that ultimately split apart the feminist movement-is being reissued for the young women and men of the twenty-first century. Intercourse enraged as many readers as it inspired when it was first published in 1987. In it, Dworkin argues that in a male supremacist society,…
The title says it all. In this short story collection, simply being a woman is a kind of emergency. These stories are slow burns, full of interiority and character development. The devastation is in the details: tiny moments that reveal deep-seated fears and barely acknowledged longings.
Each story is full of quiet revelations: there’s subtlety in the dangers these women face; in fact, it’s woven into the very fabric of their lives.
A professor finds a photograph of her deceased mother in a compromising position on the wall of a museum. A twenty-something's lucrative remote work sparks paranoia and bigotry. A transplant to a new city must make a choice about who she trusts when her partner reveals a violent history. The summer after her divorce from an older man, an exiled painter's former friends grapple with rumors that she attempted to pass as a teenager.
In this long-awaited debut collection, Kathleen Alcott turns her skills as a stylist on the unfreedoms of American life-as well as the guilt that stalks those…
The Not Quite Enlightened Sleuth
by
Verlin Darrow,
A Buddhist nun returns to her hometown and solves multiple murders while enduring her dysfunctional family.
Ivy Lutz leaves her life as a Buddhist nun in Sri Lanka and returns home to northern California when her elderly mother suffers a stroke. Her sheltered life is blasted apart by a series…
The sordid history of women’s bodies and the institution of medicine is a focal point of dread for me. This is a terse study of the long history of misogyny in the medical field. It powerfully illustrates how women’s bodies have acted as sites for gender-based power struggles, along with the compounding overlay of class and race.
This book angered and inspired me, as the history it portrays is shockingly relevant to today’s discourse on reproductive rights. It’s scary as hell.
From prescribing the "rest cure" to diagnosing hysteria, the medical profession has consistently treated women as weak and pathological. Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English's concise history of the sexual politics of medical practices shows how this biomedical rationale was used to justify sex discrimination throughout the culture, and how its vestiges are evident in abortion policy and other reproductive rights struggles today.
It's No Fun Anymore is a haunting collection of eight stories, reaching into the darkest corners of modern womanhood to illuminate themes of trauma, identity, and the elusiveness of safety in our capitalist society.
A stay-at-home mother takes inspiration from a 1950s self-help book in a desperate attempt to reclaim her agency. A marriage implodes under the weight of a shampoo-sales pyramid scheme. The specter of generational trauma haunts a new mom in the delivery room. These stories juxtapose the everyday with the uncanny across diverse territories, from anime conventions to kindergarten classrooms. The result is an eerie familiarity, an intensity that lingers long after the final page.
Gifts from a Challenging Childhood
by
Jan Bergstrom,
Learn to understand and work with your childhood wounds. Do you feel like old wounds or trauma from your childhood keep showing up today? Do you sometimes feel overwhelmed with what to do about it and where to start? If so, this book will help you travel down a path…
Tina Edwards loved her childhood and creating fairy houses, a passion shared with her father, a world-renowned architect. But at nine years old, she found him dead at his desk and is haunted by this memory. Tina's mother abruptly moved away, leaving Tina with feelings of abandonment and suspicion.
