100 Books Like The Silent Woman

First, because it’s incredibly funny. Geoff Dyer set out—he says—to write a sober, serious study of D. H. Lawrence, but life, travel arrangements, random people and his own inertia kept getting in the way. The story of his odyssey doesn’t just evoke all the things about writing that we’ve always suspected (that it’s hard; that it’s easy; that we often wonder why on earth we do it; that we never question that we want to do it). It also, by stealth, evokes and explains an amazing amount about Lawrence, and why he’s a writer that so many people love—or hate—so passionately. 

This book is a literary biography that reads like a detective novel. I found it to be gripping, shocking, hilarious, and tragic. I also consider it a great work of literature in its own right, effectively reinventing the genre of biography and turning it into an artwork forged in the era of Raymond Chandler. It was first published in 1934, but has been through many reissues, including with the alternative subtitle, Genius or Charlatan? 

That question captures perfectly the state of mind in which I was left after finishing Symons’s account of the life of Frederick Rolfe, who called himself Baron Corvo, as he swanned around southern Europe in the 1900s. While Corvo was a writer—he wrote a series of over-ripe novels, most famously Hadrian the Seventh—his life is more the stuff of the unbelievable potboiler than the usual tedious life of authors tied to their typewriters.

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Through sheer magic, Lisa Cohen manages to combine three lives that defy biography into a beautifully written group portrait of mid-century lesbian modernism. Although Cohen writes that “every biography is a disappointment of some kind,” her book about Esther Murphy, Mercedes de Acosta, and Madge Garland thrilled me from start to finish.

I haven’t recovered yet from the way Hartman recovers the lives of young Black women through historical photographs. The images were made to rob these women of their individuality, make them fit “types,” letting them say Nothing about themselves.

But Hartman writes like she’s talking to them, and they’re wonderful. She messes with categories used by authorities who thought they “knew” these women by their transgressions. I was utterly transfixed by how she imagined these women’s lives and loves in the ordinary stairways and back alleys they called home.

The photos are gorgeous. You could talk about them for days and still have more to think about—like how when it comes to women being framed for doing something wrong, maybe Nothing has changed.

The writer and poet Blake Morrison had a lifelong struggle to come to terms with his overbearing father.

Arthur Morrison, a Yorkshire doctor, was a smooth talker, a small-time cheat, who took pleasure in outwitting the authorities, living out his motto "I may not be right but I’m never wrong."

He was forever invading his children’s space, a habit which his son found painfully hard to resist, leading him to take up writing to escape this domineering influence. But when his father contracted cancer and lay dying, he was overwhelmed with grief and guilt.

It’s a moving, angry, and sometimes harrowing account of a dysfunctional relationship, which yet manages to be funny, and is written with poetic and humane grace. 

Mixing official documents with real, remembered events, Lemn Sissay’s memoir is a search for identity, for his true name. Left in a home in Liverpool for unmarried mothers, he is moved between a series of foster and care homes, until he is given access to all his records in 2015, after a thirty-year campaign to find them. He finds who he really is. It’s an honest, poignant, unsettling, and heartfelt journey, revealing how a small boy’s life is shaped by ‘the authority’ and the faceless state. Complimented with inspiring poems and useful resources, this is a hopeful and helpful book. 

Kate Morton is the penultimate professional at combining sweeping historical fiction and a mystery element. Any of her books are a delight, but I chose to showcase The House at Riverton because of its English aristocratic setting and the heavy mystery element. I adore Morton’s almost magical ability to successfully weave two or even three plotlines, all in different eras, into one tight story.  

I loved Hewitt’s writing style; it’s lush and intimate and deeply personal, and overall a heartwrenching queer memoir about loving someone who doesn’t want to love themselves anymore.

Trained as a poet, Hewitt has a knack for turning very mundane personal experiences into luminous scenes infused with spirituality. 

Biographers customarily make some psychological observations, but Dr. Kaplan, both author and practicing psychiatrist, had the training and the daring to go further. A suicide at seventeen, Chatterton’s presentation of his own poetry as the creation of an invented 15th-century monk proved his undoing.

Freud’s theory of adolescent development and “Family Romances” guides Dr. Kaplan as she ties the universal patterns of adolescence to Chatterton’s individual needs and drives, analyzing what led him to recklessly defraud the literary public. 

I love this book because it is a war novel without a single battlefield or battle, except the one for Siegfried Sassoon’s sanity. I became fascinated by WWI as a teenager. I can’t say why this war caught my imagination, but it did, and that fascination has continued for my whole life.

I gobbled up books, movies, and history about the war, and I especially loved the poetry of Siegfried Sassoon, a noted poet and war hero who publicly refused to continue fighting in 1917. When I re-read his poetry fifty years later, I found a kinship with that refusal and the boys around me who were conscientious objectors to the Vietnam War.

I was a dreamy, romantic teenager, which is why Sassoon’s words pierced my heart: “Soldiers are dreamers; when the guns begin they think of firelit homes, clean beds, and wives.” Oh! How I cried over his poems… show more.