Books like My Dark Vanessa

For millennia, we’ve heard the stories in Greek mythology about gods who come down to earth to rape women (Zeus got around), women as seductive sirens who lure sailors to their doom, or goddesses and mortal women alike being exiled.

Because of that, I was intrigued to read this book, a retelling of the familiar narrative, but from the perspective of a woman. I found this book to be very empowering.

I identified with the main character, a woman named Circe (in actuality a goddess) who is exiled because of her powers of witchcraft. However, in her exile, she finds that leaning into her power without the judgment of others makes her stronger.

I loved reading classic Greek mythology, complete with all the familiar characters, told from a woman’s perspective.

I first loved Rebecca for its atmosphere, but what stayed with me was something more unsettling: how completely another person’s version of the past can shape the present.

I remember finishing it and thinking about how easily we accept a story when everyone around us seems to believe it. As a writer, I keep returning to that idea.

Du Maurier showed me that an absence can dominate a novel as powerfully as a living character, and that what people refuse to say can matter as much as what they reveal. That has stayed with me in my own writing about memory, silence, and family secrets.

I first read Lolita when I was 14 and have read it every few decades since, learning something new each time.

I love the first-person immediacy of it and the way it is a crime novel in reverse: the narrator is already imprisoned but not for the crime he describes. It is a love story turned on its head: what the narrator says is love is in fact abuse.

It is a road trip across the vastness of the US, like one I took when I was a student.

What stayed with me about The Kite Runner is its understanding of redemption.

You cannot change the past, and redemption does not undo the original harm. Forgiveness is not erasure. What happened still happened, and some of that weight remains. But knowing the truth and owning the harm can change the choices you make afterward. That distinction mattered to me.

Redemption is not pretending the past is gone or somehow balancing the scales perfectly. It is allowing what you now understand to change who you become and how you move forward. Few books I have read have explored guilt, forgiveness, and redemption with that kind of emotional honesty.

This selection is a bit of a cheat, given that the novel is about a mother and son (as told by Jack, the 5-year-old boy), but it’s also a moving evocation of maternal resilience under the most appalling circumstances.

I include it because this exceptional story strips bare the fundamental ties between a helpless child and a fiercely resourceful parent. And it’s a great read.

I’m sure I’ve never laughed out loud so many times while reading a book that explores the effects of deep trauma.

What I love here is that we barely know the extent of Eleanor’s childhood trauma until the very end. What we experience instead is the increasingly interesting life of someone who doesn’t at all fit into the social world as we know it but is about as endearing in her innocence and brute honesty as they come.

The way Eleanor Oliphant sees the world made me appreciate how ridiculous so many of our social rituals can be. I rooted for her every step of the way and came away almost wishing I could wear her particular goggles when walking through my own life.

I still have dreams set in the school-world of this book… that alone speaks to how compelling and utterly captivating Naomi’s setting is.

I loved the self-imposed isolation of the main character, how compelling her motivation and determination are. The school itself plays a huge role in the plot, and I found the explanations of how magic worked in this world to be fascinating.

As soon as I finished this first book, I picked up the next one.

I fell into this story with the first line and barely came up for air until I was done.

I’m not sure I’ve ever read a book filled with so much beautiful and tragic truth, or an ending that filled me with so much optimism. Thousands have written gorgeous reviews about the story, the characters, the writing—so I won’t even attempt that here. 

These lines, from the book, are among the most beautiful and meaningful to me: “If you are surrounded by those who call what you are different instead of beautiful. If your mind or body has cried out for peace and acknowledgement and understanding, just know…You are part of an infinite family. The people who have been through terrible things and survived them. If you are reading these words, you WON today.”

This book still haunts me, even though I read it years ago.

It’s about the selling of dreams. I have found this to be a common topic when it comes to power dynamics and the exploitation of young girls. A gymnastics coach tells parents their daughter has extraordinary potential. The parents get stars in their eyes. But no one warns the parents that things can go terribly wrong in pursuit of the dreams they have for their child.

As a mother, I’ve been on the receiving end of one of these coaches’ speeches. But I had a secret weapon: my own experience pursuing a dream. I saw firsthand that things could go very wrong, something other parents didn’t necessarily have experience with.

This book is about what could go wrong.

A nonfiction book that tells the story of three unrelated women and their unique but universal struggles; I loved it because of the author’s incredible talent for articulating the everyday lived experience of being female, the subtle and overt judgments, and the fact that women are held to different standards, even by other women.

"‘Even when women fight back, they must do it correctly. They must cry the right amount and look pretty but not hot." Many times while reading, I recognised myself, my sister, my mother, and my friends.

All three stories are highly engaging, but the truly compelling story is Maggie’s, a troubled girl from a difficult family who is preyed upon by her teacher, a married man with a family. The subsequent effect on her life is just devastating (remember, folks: this is nonfiction.)