Here are 100 books that Women Holding Things fans have personally recommended if you like
Women Holding Things.
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I’m Gen X, through and through. And because I grew up in that (glorious?) time before social media, I didn’t have the worry that my messy-woman missteps would be exposed online. But the trade-off to keeping my mistakes as private as possible was that I often felt like I couldn’t live boldly. So now I’m fascinated by the ways other women handle the messier aspects of their lives: the obsessions and frustrations, the secrets we all keep, the duality we choke down. I want to know what we’re each quietly starving for, what’s driving us when we strip away social expectation and are left to sit with our gnawing hungers.
I’ve got two kiddos, and between the bodily, emotional, and lifestyle changes alone, I’ve found motherhood to be a WILD ride. And I’ve never felt more seen as a mom than in this book.
From the heartbreaking joy to the numbing boredom to the rage and the shocking invisibility that can come with motherhood, particularly during those early days, it made perfect sense to me that the main character turns into a dog. Because motherhood does shape you into something else.
This book captures that loss, that feral transformation, perfectly. Also, I wish I’d come up with the title.
In this blazingly smart and voracious debut novel, an artist turned stay-at-home mom becomes convinced she's turning into a dog. • "A must-read for anyone who can’t get enough of the ever-blurring line between the psychological and supernatural that Yellowjackets exemplifies." —Vulture
One day, the mother was a mother, but then one night, she was quite suddenly something else...
An ambitious mother puts her art career on hold to stay at home with her newborn son, but the experience does not match her imagination. Two years later, she steps into the bathroom for a break from her toddler's demands, only…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
Parenting books bore me. I don’t like reading instruction manuals, and don’t have time to weigh others’ opinions about how to raise my kids. But when I read books about motherhood forged in self-reflection and told with literary elegance, I become a more self-reflective parent and have the eyes to see beauty in my ordinary maternal experiences. Books like this are few and far between. It’s hard for mothers to make art; when our resources are spread thin in parenthood, why do work that may not pay? How to find time for creative rumination? But here’s a list of books written by mothers who persisted in their creative work to show us motherhood in all of its mundanity, mania, and magic.
I often wonder "How is a mother to focus on a project in the face of constant interruption?" For the Mexican writer Jazmina Barrera, it happened in fragments. Using artworks as points of departure, Barrera wonders her way through pregnancy and early motherhood, asking poignant questions about how to persevere in creativity while mothering. She gathers bits of writing penned while mothering into a coherent narrative of one mother’s beginnings.
It’s written in Spanish and gorgeously translated into English by Christina MacSweeney. I loved its meditative tone, poetic language, and all that it taught me about women writers and artists.
“Eminently worthy of acclaim.” ―Vogue (The Best Books of 2022 So Far)
An intimate exploration of motherhood, Linea Nigra approaches the worries and joys of childbearing from a diverse range of inspirations and traditions, from Louise Bourgeois to Ursula K. Le Guin to the indigenous Nahua model Luz Jiménez. Part memoir and part manifesto, Barrera’s singular insights, delivered in candid prose, clarify motherhood while also cherishing the mysteries of the body.
Writing through her first pregnancy, birthing, breastfeeding, and young motherhood, Barrera embraces the subject fully, making lucid connections between maternity, earthquakes, lunar eclipses, and creative labor. Inspired by the…
Parenting books bore me. I don’t like reading instruction manuals, and don’t have time to weigh others’ opinions about how to raise my kids. But when I read books about motherhood forged in self-reflection and told with literary elegance, I become a more self-reflective parent and have the eyes to see beauty in my ordinary maternal experiences. Books like this are few and far between. It’s hard for mothers to make art; when our resources are spread thin in parenthood, why do work that may not pay? How to find time for creative rumination? But here’s a list of books written by mothers who persisted in their creative work to show us motherhood in all of its mundanity, mania, and magic.
In my reading, I seek to surround myself with experiences of motherhood that are different from my own. In this memoir, Sarah Sentilles tells the story of fostering a child with the hopes of adopting her while shedding light on the injustices and inefficiencies of the American foster system.
I loved the tender descriptions of maternal love and the way that Sentilles writes about maternal grief. While chronicling her experience of loving a child that isn’t her own, she urges all of us to extend mother-like love beyond our own families, even to the children of strangers.
NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE • “A powerful, heartbreaking, necessary masterpiece.”—Cheryl Strayed, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Wild
The moving story of what one woman learned from fostering a newborn—about injustice, about making mistakes, about how to better love and protect people beyond our immediate kin
May you always feel at home.
After their decision not to have a biological child, Sarah Sentilles and her husband, Eric, decide to adopt via the foster care system. Despite knowing that the system’s goal is the child’s reunification with the birth family, Sarah opens their home to a…
A poisonous maiden, a Daoist sex cult, and a violent insurgency.
The polyandrous Yan family in China's rural Shaanxi Province takes in two carpenter brothers. When one brother is convicted of murder after killing their neighbor in a dispute, a constable threatens to expose the family's rumored polyandry and extorts…
Parenting books bore me. I don’t like reading instruction manuals, and don’t have time to weigh others’ opinions about how to raise my kids. But when I read books about motherhood forged in self-reflection and told with literary elegance, I become a more self-reflective parent and have the eyes to see beauty in my ordinary maternal experiences. Books like this are few and far between. It’s hard for mothers to make art; when our resources are spread thin in parenthood, why do work that may not pay? How to find time for creative rumination? But here’s a list of books written by mothers who persisted in their creative work to show us motherhood in all of its mundanity, mania, and magic.
I found it almost impossible to find time for self-reflection in early parenthood. I was consumed at all times by the urgent needs of the infant and toddler in my care. But when I read Motherhood: A Confession, I became self-reflective by proxy.
Using Saint Augustine’s Confessions as a literary companion, Natalie Carnes asks, What if one of the greatest texts about human nature were written not by a man but by a woman and a mother? Using the self-awareness that is a hallmark of Augustine’s memoir, Carnes shows us maternal love and its shadow side, inviting us to see, from the eyes of women, both the dark and luminous shades of the human condition.
A meditation on the conversions, betrayals, and divine revelations of motherhood.
What if Augustine's Confessions had been written not by a man, but by a mother? How might her tales of desire, temptation, and transformation differ from his? In this memoir, Natalie Carnes describes giving birth to a daughter and beginning a story of conversion strikingly unlike Augustine's-even as his journey becomes a surprising companion to her own.
The challenges Carnes recounts will be familiar to many parents. She wonders what and how much she should ask her daughter to suffer in resisting racism, patriarchy, and injustice. She…
I’m the author of the short story collection I Meant It Once. I often say it’s a book about being a mess in your twenties, but to speak more personally, writing it was a necessity, a way to make sense of both the intensity and mundanity of my own experiences. I love a book where you can palpably feel the author working to make sense of their own life, through language—and, in turn, sorting out what it is for any of us to be a person. Books like these are essential reading when life feels thorny, beautiful, and impossible to make sense of, and all you can do is try to write it down.
I don’t set much store by orderly chronology, in life or writing—as might be clear from my book, where old memories live vividly alongside the present moment!
More interesting to me is how memory accumulates and morphs over time, and how stories live in our minds. Needless to say I adore Julavits’s non-chronological diary The Folded Clock (and what a title)! In gorgeously detailed individual sections, she immerses us in her life without regard for the precise sequence of events. We’re left with a beautiful jumble, which is surely truer than how life is anyway.
Rereading her childhood diaries, Heidi Julavits hoped to find incontrovertible proof that she was always destined to be a writer. Instead, they “revealed me to possess the mind of a phobic tax auditor.” Thus was born a desire to try again, to chronicle her daily life—now as a forty-something woman, wife, mother, and writer. A meditation on time and self, youth and aging, friendship and romance, faith and fate, and art and ambition, in The Folded Clock one of the most gifted prose stylists in American letters explodes the typically confessional diary form with…
I’ve dedicated my life to the study of Chinese history. I received a Ph.D. in History and East Asian Languages from Harvard and have spent my career teaching Chinese history at universities in Taiwan. I am the author of eleven books and many academic articles and book reviews about Chinese history. As an American who has spent decades lecturing about Chinese history in Mandarin to Taiwanese students, I have an uncommon perspective on the subject.
Even though this is a work of anthropology, it also provides unique insights into rural history. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Margery Wolf did fieldwork in a poor village in rural Taiwan. At that time, modernization was just beginning to affect the countryside, so most aspects of village life were still traditional. Although Taiwanese society differed from the mainland in certain ways, in most aspects of life there carried on the traditions of Chinese village life. This book looks at rural society from a female perspective. Due to poverty, both women and men had few options. They did whatever it took to survive. Many of the people the author interviewed seem very discontent with their lives, but they usually had no other choice.
Studies of Chinese society commonly emphasizze men's roles and functions, a not unreasonable approach to a society with patrilineal kinship structure. But this emphasis has left many important gaps in our knowledge of Chinese life.
This study seeks to fill some of these gaps by examining the ways rural Taiwanese women manipulate men and each other in the pursuit of their personal goals. The source of a woman's power, her home in a social structure dominated by men, is what the author calls the uterine family, a de facto social unity consisting of a mother and her children.
Big Ideas... For Small Businesses
by
John Lamerton,
Big Ideas… for Small Businesses is a straight-talking, no-nonsense guide to growing a small business without sacrificing your lifestyle. Written by a former civil servant turned entrepreneur, the book challenges hustle culture and instead champions the idea of an "ambitious lifestyle business" - one that provides freedom and financial stability,…
A thing I love about detective stories is that, from the moment they were probably invented by Edgar Allen Poe in 1841, authors have been playing with the form. Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue begins with a display of Dupin’s ratiocinative powers, and detective stories do often involve a protagonist reasoning through clues and red herrings on the way toward the resolution of a central mystery. But the kinds of “clues” we use to make sense of (or make peace with) the world are varied, and the mysteries that obsess us are vast—as illustrated over and over again in this mutable genre.
In classical detective fiction, the story of the crime is like a puzzle, and piece by piece, clue by clue, we arrive at the big picture. Subdivision is, in some ways, a classic puzzle mystery (it even involves a puzzle!)—except it doesn’t start at a crime scene. It starts with a woman arriving at a guesthouse in the surreal and Kafkaesque Subdivision where she now lives. She can’t remember why she is there or really anything from her past. Unlike more classical detective fiction, she is not a guide; I followed her—tracking, assembling, interpreting—but when certain elements of the real (maybe) slid into focus, they did so mostly despite her. I couldn’t put it down, and notwithstanding its fairly cerebral tone, I cried at the end.
An unnamed woman checks into a guesthouse in a mysterious district known only as the Subdivision. The guesthouse's owners, Clara and the Judge, are welcoming and helpful, if oddly preoccupied by the perpetually baffling jigsaw puzzle in the living room. With little more than a hand-drawn map and vague memories of her troubled past, the narrator ventures out in search of a job, an apartment, and a fresh start in life.
Accompanied by an unusually assertive digital assistant named Cylvia, the narrator is drawn deeper into an increasingly strange, surreal, and threatening world, which reveals itself to her through a…
I am a writer of historical fiction. When I was in my teens, my family embarked on a project to trace our ancestry and identify our living relatives. Through church records in Sweden and Norway, we found that Harald Fairhair (Harfagr), the first king of Norway is one of our ancestors. Those explorations gave me the seeds of my first novel of Viking-Age Norway, The Half-Drowned King, and the subsequent books in the trilogy.
Myths about viking women abound, but Judith Jesch’s book is grounded in what we can know from the archeological, historical, and literary record. That still paints a vivid picture of the Viking women who remained in the traditional feminine sphere, and those who ventured into men’s. As Women in the Viking Age reveals, Viking women were farmers, housewives, managers of hundreds of servants, explorers, priestesses, rich benefactors, and war-leaders. In many ways, their lives were more varied than men’s.
Well-illustrated, closely argued and fascinating. GUARDIAN
This is the first book-length study in English to investigate what women did in the Viking age, both at home in Scandinavia and in the Viking coloniesfrom Greenland to Russia. Evidence for their lives is fragmentary, but Judith Jesch assembles the clues provided by archaeology, runic inscriptions, place names and personal names, foreign historical records and Old Norse literature and mythology. These sources illuminate different aspects of women's lives in the Viking age, on the farms and in the trading centres of Scandinavia, abroad on Viking expeditions, and as settlers in places such as…
Privately and professionally, I've always been addicted to literature and history and stirred by the experiences that these studies reveal. Yet as a novelist (retired from college lecturing) I instinctively assume the comic or satirical mode. Whereas in analysing the poetry of perhaps T.S. Eliot, I'm totally serious, when creating a story I start to giggle. Psychiatrists might label this a defence mechanism – but I suspect it's the result of formative years spent reading social satirists such as Huxley, Greene, Wodehouse, and Waugh. While certainly no imitator, I feel that this type of literature has become insidiously bred in the bone – hence my listed choices being socially directed and often comic or acerbic.
Part of Benson’s much-loved Lucia series. Gentler than Saki, this comedy of manners (also set in a bygone England) is deliciously entertaining, with its eccentric characters gleefully etched. Miss Mapp herself – prim and genteel but with lethal eyes – is a social snooper par excellence, and whose insidious wiles and steely shafts create havoc among the gossiping residents of sedate Tilling (firmly based on the ancient Sussex town of Rye, once home to Henry James.) As they negotiate the delicate snares of bridge, golf, and “charming” tea parties, cronies and quarries alike are pawns in her ruthless game of one-upmanship. It is a game she plays with relish and practised ease... that is until, elsewhere in the series, she is upstaged by the awesome Lucia. Hilarious.
The acclaimed author of Mapp and Lucia introduces the beloved Miss Elizabeth Mapp, a devious social climber, in this charming British comedy of manners.
In the English seaside village of Tilling, Miss Elizabeth Mapp keeps a thorough notebook about everyone’s business, including her servants. Whatever information she can’t collect through gossip, she discovers with the aid of opera glasses. Looking out from her window over High Street, she pays especially avid attention to her neighbor, Maj. Benjamin Flint, whom she has been planning for years to marry.
The second novel in E. F. Benson’s popular Mapp and Lucia series,…
The problem is not with the actions young women take but with the toxic, sexist conditions they are responding to.
Tanenbaum found, based on six years of interviews with young people ages 14-30, that young women are navigating a culture littered with gendered dress codes, revenge porn, and sexually explicit…
As an attorney, former TV broadcaster, and workplace consultant, I’ve devoted my career to empowering women and confronting systemic inequities. My passion stems from personal experience navigating the complexities of workplace harassment, which inspired me to write my book and guide others through similar challenges. I am continually drawn to books that illuminate the hidden power structures and offer practical tools for resilience, empowerment, and self-advocacy. The works on this list have profoundly shaped my perspective, providing inspiration and clarity in both my professional and personal journey. I hope they resonate with you as deeply as they have with me.
This book transformed the way I think about confidence. Kay and Shipman combine science and personal stories to tackle why women often underestimate their abilities and how to change that.
Reading this helped me see that confidence is a skill—not an inherent trait—and it inspired me to take bold steps both personally and professionally. I recommend it to anyone looking to own their power.
The New York Times bestseller, now in paperback and updated with a new introduction
Confidence. We want it. We need it. But it can be maddeningly enigmatic and out of reach. The authors of the New York Times bestseller Womenomics deconstruct this essential, elusive, and misunderstood quality and offer a blueprint for bringing more of it into our lives.
Is confidence hardwired into the DNA of a lucky few, or can anyone learn it? Is it best expressed by bravado, or is there another way to show confidence? Which is more important: confidence or competence? Why do so many women,…
