“They are embossed on every song that was a hit that summer, in every novel I read during and after his stay, on anything from the smell of rosemary on hot days to the frantic rattle of the cicadas in the afternoon—smells and sounds I’d grown up with and known every year of my life until then but that had suddenly turned on me and acquired an inflection forever colored by the events of that summer.”

-André Aciman

It’s officially the time of year for my favorite genre of books: literary fiction (plus a memoir) that takes place in the summer and deals with themes of identity and memory. I have been obsessed with Call Me By Your Name for the last few years during the summer months (fun fact: the ancient Roman ruins where Elio, his dad, and Oliver examine a bronze statue in the movie is actually where I got engaged, and now I am even more obsessed).

After rereading the book and rewatching the movie several times, I went on a mission last summer to find my new Call Me By Your Name. While that may have been an impossible task, I ended up with a variety of new favorite books that fulfilled my cravings for a summer read. Below are my favorites that I found—hopefully they can help you if you find yourself with a similar craving this summer:

1. Hot Milk by Deborah Levy: A daughter and her chronically ill mother travel to a town in coastal Spain in search of a cure for her mother’s illness. While her mother is in treatment, the daughter is confronted by questions about freedom, maternal resentment, and becoming. This is one of my favorite books of all time, with the combination of the beach atmosphere, Levy’s amazing writing, and the main character’s studies as a cultural anthropologist which inform her perspective throughout the book. (This book also has a very good film adaptation!)

“My boundaries were made from sand so she reckoned she could push them over, and I let her. I gave my unspoken consent because I want to know what’s going to happen next, even if it’s not to my advantage. Am I self-destructive, or pathetically passive, or reckless, or just experimental, or am I a rigorous cultural anthropologist, or am I in love?”

2. Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin: In Paris during the 1950s, an American man escapes to Paris to avoid his responsibilities in life and begins a love affair with an Italian bartender, Giovanni. Baldwin’s writing evokes a hot Paris summer, stuck in a tiny apartment that is at once suffocating and claustrophobic, and at the same time, an escape from the rest of the city and his life.

“Giovanni had awakened an itch, had released a gnaw in me. I realized it one afternoon, when I was taking him to work via the Boulevard Montparnasse. We had bought a kilo of cherries and we were eating them as we walked along. We were both insufferably childish and high-spirited that afternoon and the spectacle we presented, two grown men jostling each other on the wide sidewalk and aiming the cherry pits, as though they were spitballs, into each other’s faces, must have been outrageous. And I realized that such childishness was fantastic at my age and the happiness out of which it sprang yet more so; for that moment I really loved Giovanni, who had never seemed more beautiful than he was that afternoon.”

3. Bonjour Tristesse by Francoise Sagan: A teenager spends the summer on the French Riviera with her charming father, until her jealousy and boredom of her father’s new relationship turns into cruelty. This one is short and perfectly capture the slow, hazy quality of summer days that can gradually turn destructive over time.

“I lay full length on the sand, took up a handful and let it run through my fingers in soft yellow streams. I told myself that it ran out like time. It was an idle thought, and it was pleasant to have idle thoughts, for it was summer.”

4. The Liar’s Club by Mary Karr: Karr’s memoir of growing up in an east Texas oil town, surrounded by the vivid and colorful characters of her town and family. While Karr’s writing is different than the previous books mentioned (in that it is not set in the Mediterranean and is less about longing), it encapsulates a combustible atmosphere of a hot Texas summer, cigarettes, and chaos.

“Before that summer, I had many times heard long-winded Baptist preachers take ten minutes to pray over card tables of potato salad and fried chicken at church picnics, but the way those sweating, red-faced men sat around on stacked pallets of lumber gulping oysters taught me most of what I knew about simple gladness.”

5. The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles: An American couple travel through North Africa, believing that travel will save them from emptiness. Instead, they find themselves alarmingly empty in the desert. While this book is more of an existential horror, I love the vivid descriptions of the landscapes, meditations on traveling, and dissolution of identity.

“Whereas the tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveler belonging no more to one place than to the next, moves slowly over periods of years, from one part of the earth to another. Indeed, he would have found it difficult to tell, among the many places he had lived, precisely where it was he had felt most at home.”

6. Thirst for Salt by Madelaine Lucas: A young woman begins a relationship with an older man at a beach town on the Australian coast, and recounts their memories together years later with more clarity and in an attempt to reflect. I cannot emphasize enough how pleasantly surprised I was by this book—the description does not do it justice. I read this book in a single flight and it felt like a fever dream.

“I would learn that things I perceived as abandonment were Jude’s acts of trust, like the way he always walked ahead without looking behind him, trusting me to keep pace, to follow. But I was the kind who always looked back, glancing over my shoulder whenever I turned a corner, as if I were a woman descended from the line of Lot’s wife in the old parable. When I licked my lips, I tasted salt.”

7. Atonement by Ian Mcewan: Beginning during a hot summer in the English countryside, Atonement follows a misunderstanding that irrevocably alters the course of several people’s lives. McEwan has a special way of setting up the story. Especially in the first chapters of the book, there’s a feeling of heat, tension, and a need to escape that slowly leads up to the life-altering event.

“…and now she was back in the world, not one she could make, but the one that had made her, and she felt herself shrinking under the early evening sky. She was weary of being outdoors, but she was not ready to go in. Was that really all there was in life, indoors or out? Wasn’t there somewhere else for people to go?”

8. The Lost Daughter by Elena Ferrante: While vacationing alone by the sea, a middle-aged woman becomes fixated on a young mother and daughter she observes on the beach, causing memories of her own motherhood and past relationships to resurface. Ferrante writes female interiority better than almost anyone, and her writing feels unmoored and slightly feverish in the way only her novels can.

“I had a sense of dissolving, as if I, an orderly pile of dust, had been blown about by the wind all day and now was suspended in the air without a shape.”

9. The Neapolitan Novels by Elena Ferrante: I couldn’t resist, I had to include more Ferrante. All four of the Neapolitan novels follow the lifelong friendship of Elena and Lila from childhood to adulthood, primarily taking place in their neighborhood in Naples. However, some of my favorite sections are in the second, The Story of a New Name, and the third, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, books which take place partially on the island of Ischia and precisely capture the feelings of girlhood and longing in the summertime.

“We had the same sensitivity to beautiful things, the same need to enjoy them, the same need to search for the right words to say how sweet the night was, how magical the moon, how the sea sparkled, how two souls were able to meet and recognize each other in the darkness, in the fragrant air.” (The Story of a New Name)

10. Outline by Rachel Cusk: A writer travels to Athens to teach during the summer and spends most of the novel listening to strangers recount stories about their marriages, desires, failures, and identities. There is very little traditional plot, but the novel has a detached, wandering quality that feels perfect to read during the summer, especially while traveling and observing new people and places around you.

“I felt that I could swim for miles, out into the ocean: a desire for freedom, an impulse to move, tugged at me as though it were a thread fastened to my chest. It was an impulse I knew well, and I had learned that it was not the summons from a larger world I used to believe it to be. It was simply a desire to escape from what I had.”

11. Second Place by Rachel Cusk: A woman invites a famous artist to stay at her remote home, hoping that his presence will somehow transform or clarify her life. However, his arrival does the opposite, bringing into sharp clarity all the existing tensions around her. This book captures the feeling of desperately seeking transformation from a particular season, change of landscape or person.

“It was as if some breeze kept wafting toward me, bearing a tormenting scent of freedom- and that same torment suddenly seemed to have bothered and pursued me for too much of my life.”

12. Lies and Sorcery by Elsa Morante: Set on an island in southern Italy, Lies and Sorcery follows several generations of a family whose lives are shaped by the fantasy of social mobility, love affairs, and emotional manipulation and delusion. The novel is sprawling, dramatic, and intensely immersive. Despite it being longer than the other books on this list, it feels perfect for a long summer read that you can disappear into and enjoy over the course of the season when you have time to spare.

“She quoted local proverbs such as this one: ‘Tears shed for a woman are like the water in the sea / not good to drink from, but good to drown in.’”

“We look at the world once, in childhood.
The rest is memory.”

-Louise Glück

I saw Paris for the first time at the young age of eleven, in the midst of a sweltering August. My dad’s French coworker let us stay in her family’s apartment in the 16th arrondissement while they were away on vacation. The first day we arrived jet lagged and sleep-deprived, and my mom, insistent that it would be bad if we slept during the day (of course she was right, but at the time, I only remember the exhaustion of dragging my feet), pulled us out of the apartment to sight-see. We walked across the 16th arrondissement to the Eiffel Tower and ate dinner at a classic French brasserie in the Left Bank, sitting at a table outside with the tower overlooking our meal. Bees swarmed our food as soon as the waiter placed it on our table. One bee nearly landed on my arm and I stood up abruptly. The waiter chuckled and I instantly sat back down, my cheeks blushing with shame for my reaction.

We stayed up late that night, not used to the six-hour time difference. We waited until the dusky blue summer sky grew dark and obsolete, only able to make out the shimmering lights of the Eiffel Tower in the midst of the city. I was not used to staying out in a city this late, and this night-world felt like a surreal dream. We queued to climb up to the top of the tower, peering out at the view of this new and unfamiliar city. It was my first time in Europe, and everything seemed full of history, full of beautiful and strange significance I was too young to understand.

We walked back down the tower, and planned to take a taxi home soon. A series of twelve chimes rang out across the city, signaling midnight had arrived, and seeming to silence the world. What happens next I believe must have been my imaginative memory as a childhood—I find it hard to believe that the clock struck midnight and suddenly the area surrounding the Eiffel Tower became empty, barren. But this is precisely how I remember it—there were no taxis calling out to offer a ride home, no more men selling tourist merchandise, no one offering to take your picture in front of the tower. Midnight had extinguished the city, and it immediately seemed a less friendly place.

The walk back to the apartment felt like the longest of my life. When I look at a map of the city now, the walk could not have been much longer than half an hour, but I remember it as if we had walked for hours through the dark city of Paris that night. Shadows lingered and appeared in front of us, enlarged and distorted in size. Rustling and whispers came from strange vans parked on the side of the street. We walked in a hushed silence, as if to hide our presence and avoid disturbing all that could be out there.

When we finally arrived back at the apartment, I barely remember gliding into bed, falling into the deepest sleep of my life to this day. That night, I dreamt of something like a Parisian funhouse, all saturated colors, whimsical and distorted faces, like a scene from Amelie but darker (I later watched Amelie at least twenty times, and perhaps this painted how I remember this scene). I woke up in the early afternoon the next day, surprised to see the light streaming in from the window by my bed, outside neighbors in the courtyard were hanging their laundry on a line. It felt like a whole new world compared to the one of the night before, and I was both surprised and relieved to found I had made it back safe and sound. When I think of Paris now, this is always what I remember—the strange, mesmerizing pull of a dream.

Now that I live three hours from Paris by train, I have been back twice in the last year, filling me with the memories of the first trip from my childhood. It all still feels so tangible. Walking up the long steps to Sacré-Cœur at night, clutching my tote bag tightly to prevent pick-pockets, lighting a candle in the cathedral. My younger brother ordering a croque-monsieur at the boulangerie for every meal. Eating a baguette in a garden for lunch. Leaves rustling from the end of summer breeze outside the Metro station. Ordering a lemon soda because it sounded fancy and realizing it was really just a Sprite. My first time at Shakespeare and Co, a picture of me standing out front, no line formed, unlike when I came back fifteen years later. At eleven, I had the sense that the city was filled with things that would become very important to me, but I did not yet have the language to articulate or understand why. Now in my late twenties, I guess this is my attempt.

Most recently, my boyfriend and I visited Paris last weekend. Of course, our first stop was Shakespeare and Co. We both have the patience of a squirrel, and made sure to arrive at the opening time on Sunday. In the bookstore, after the first ten minutes, I found myself with a pile of six books in my arm. I brought them to the reading room upstairs where my boyfriend was sitting, entertaining himself by drawing on a spare piece of paper while looking out the window at the Seine. I told him I had to restrain myself to one—maybe two, if I absolutely could not decide—books, forcing him to read the backs of each book and ranking them in order of what sounded the most interesting to the least.

He picked out My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein by Deborah Levy, to my excitement, since I absolutely love Levy’s writing. But I also found myself being drawn to A Girl’s Story by Annie Ernaux, and bought both. (To my surprise—I had The Years at home, and had not been able to immerse myself in it. But A Girl’s Story had a much more intimate quality, like a diary entry, that I couldn’t put down.)

The last time I was in Paris, I had been reading A Woman Destroyed and The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir. This time, I was determined to visit her and Marguerite Duras’s graves at the Montparnasse Cemetery. Beauvoir’s was covered in lipstick kisses, while Duras’s had several flower bouquets and a large basket of pens on it, offerings from those inspired by her, including myself. Directly outside the cemetery, the Giacometti Institute was located, home to the artist’s studio and a vast reading room. Of course, there were several books in the reading room on the close friendship between Giacometti, Sartre, and Beauvoir that I spent hours leafing through. This voyage through Paris felt a little bit like connecting pieces of a puzzle to understand each literary figure I crossed paths with and their lives better.

In bed that night, I read My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein. The narrator, an American living in Paris to write a book about the life of Gertrude Stein, also tries to understand a life through traces. She hikes through Pere Lachais cemetery to find Stein’s grave. She makes recipes exclusively from Stein’s wife Alice B. Toklas’s cookbook. She retraces Stein’s steps throughout the city, tries to imagine the city from her point of view. I found that as I was walking through Paris, I was not only trying to construct the lives of the writers that had lived there before, but also the life of my eleven year old self, during my first visit there.

Yesterday, I had talked to a friend who nearly ten years ago had spent a summer in Paris. Her grandma had frequented the city herself after fleeing her home country, making the summer my friend had spent there full of meaning. “I’m not ready to go back,” my friend said about Paris. “It would be such a weird reminder of the passing of time.”

The city seems to hold the lives and histories of so many selves at once. And maybe this is what this all amounts to: we walk through a place and not only look for remains of those before us, but also the remains of ourselves, knowing we can never fully recover either. As Levy writes in My Year with Gertrude Stein: “All writing is about walking ghosts. Or perhaps the ghosts walk the writer.”

It should have been the best of both worlds, and yet, I struggled. I lived in an apartment complex specifically for students studying abroad, which was filled with all American students. I quickly befriended the other girls in my apartment, and we became friends with other students around the complex. We would walk to class together, split Ubers to bars together, travel together on our semester break. And even though I was over 22 hours away from my home, on the whole, I lived the life of an American college student—not much had changed in my life except my physical location. Of course, this was my fault. I could have considered other living options or branched out and talked to people outside of my social circle, but alas, I chose the path of least resistance.

On a clear January day, the friends I usually walked to my Indigenous History class with had skipped for the beach. I went alone and sat next to an elderly man named Ross, who was going back to school to get a certificate in Indigenous Studies. He was from just outside of Sydney and deeply passionate about the nature throughout the country and its complicated Indigenous history. He gave me book recommendations on Indigenous art and showed me his favorite hikes in the Blue Mountains and Tasmania. (I never made it to Tasmania because shortly after this, the country went into lockdown due to the pandemic. It is still on my life bucket list to make it to Tasmania, all because Ross absolutely sold me on it.)

This was such a short interaction from over half a decade ago, but it has stayed with me. I regret not having talked to more people from different ages, different backgrounds—maybe not always the most obvious choice for a friend. When I think about Australia, I wish I made an effort to meet more people like Ross, people who could teach me something new about how they see the world.

This past week, I read philosopher Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble for an anthropology seminar. She begins “Chapter 7: A Curious Practice” with a quote by Hannah Arendt: “To think with an enlarged mentality means that one trains one’s imagination to go visiting.” I was instantly reminded of this experience in Australia. I had not yet trained my mind to go visiting at this time, but befriending Ross was a step in the right direction. To go visiting is not just changing locations physically, but stepping into the consciousness of others.

Haraway argues that most of us visit—whether it be a place or people—with preconceived notions. We see someone different from us, we assume something about them that flattens their character, thereby denunciating their essence. She tells us we can change from simply existing in a world to joining a world by the practice of going visiting.

She references the work of Belgian philosopher Vinciane Despret, who she describes as “allergic to denunciation and hungry for discovery.” Haraway introduces Despret’s concept of politeness, which, contrary to how it may sound, is not about manners in this case. Instead, politeness “does the energetic work of holding open the possibilities that surprise are in store.” To do this, not only must we engage with our interlocutor, but we must also ask questions that are important to them, that they truly find interesting, not one that serves some pre-planned narrative existing in our head.

To look at someone implies a sort of distance and judgement, to look with someone connotes a collaborative process. Haraway cautions us: to visit is not a safe act. If you do go visiting, new opportunities will arise inside your own consciousness and you will be irrevocably changed in some shape or form. This process is referred to as worlding—when we look with others, the world gets bigger.

Though Haraway emphasizes the importance of going visiting for everyone, she specifically urges this to women and those who have not been involved in the “patrilines of thinking, most certainly including the patrilines making decision for (yet another) war…Why should Virginia Woolf, or any other woman, or men for that matter, be faithful to such patrilines and their demands for sacrifice? Infidelity seems the least we should demand of ourselves!”

As a result of this historical exclusion, Haraway argues:

“Hannah Arendt and Virginia Woolf both understood the high stakes of training the mind and imagination to go visiting, to venture off the beaten path to meet unexpected, non-natal kin, and to strike up conversations, to pose and respond to interesting questions, to propose together something unanticipated, to take up the unasked-for obligations of having met. This is what I have called cultivating response-ability. Visiting is not a heroic practice; making a fuss is not the Revolution; thinking with each other is not Thought. Opening up versions so stories can be ongoing is so mundane, so earth-bound. That is precisely the point…the storytellers crack the established disorder.”

Reading this chapter from Haraway’s book interested me, because I think the practice of response-ability and worlding is precisely what writers do, or at least what I try to do, when I try to write. To write a truly convincing narrative, I have to imagine a field of possibilities and visit the consciousnesses of other characters, outside of my own perspective. To reduce or flatten a character is to take away their sense of life and believability. When it comes down to it, writing—while not quite an ethnography—is a melding together of patterns and an adding together of “both ontological and epistemological possibilities, propos(ing) and enact(ing) what was not there before.” This is also precisely why I love reading—every time I read a book, I take a dip into a different consciousness, and come out with my world view expanded, new possibilities exposed.

And that is the importance of reading and the stakes of writing. Haraway writes: “The risk of listening to a story is that it can obligate us in ramifying webs that cannot be known in advance of venturing among their myriad threads.” When we listen to a story, we become implicated in what we encounter, bound to the new worlds it opens up for us, which can be “risky, but definitely not boring.”

Beyond this, Haraway writes the practice of response-ability allows us to patch “together ways for living and dying well in the tissue of an earth whose very habitability is threatened… Many kinds of absence or threatened absence, must be brought into ongoing response-ability, not in the abstract but in homely storied practice.”

So I encourage you to go out into the world this week and stay curious. Don’t just seek information, but instead become entangled in stories that make you feel more implicated in the world-at-large, whether its about another human, animal, or the very land you walk on. Maybe this looks like striking up a conversation with someone in the neighborhood you’ve never stopped to talk to, learning why a local landmark exists and who it was intended for, or investigating the bird that regularly hangs out on your balcony. Wherever this task leads you, look with your subject, instead of at it.

If Haraway has taught me anything, it is that living well is a collaborative and messy affair of story-telling and -receiving.

Source:

Haraway, Donna J. “Chapter 7: A Curious Practice.” Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Duke University Press, 2016, pp. 30-57.

I enjoyed every other part of the book, whether it was Anna or Kitty’s internal struggles. And I knew Levin’s thoughts were important. The book is a classic for a reason. But in this state, I simply could not muster up the energy to care or power through the passages about farming. I found myself looking this up online, seeing if this was a common experience. Some Reddit users suggested to simply skim these chapters. But what was the point of trying to read the book if I was not in a place to appreciate it or enjoy it?

I’m sure I’ll return to Anna Karenina. I started reading it for fun in December and found myself picking it up again and again throughout January and February, simply because I loved the agency and inner worlds of the female characters that is so rare to find in books from male authors of the time. But I learned a valuable lesson this winter: reading books is NOT a checklist, not something to prove yourself to others, not something that should give you the ability to say “I’ve read X much, how about you?” I always deep down wished that whenever somebody brought up a classic, I would be able to to confidently say, “I’ve read it,” and have the ability to instantly engage in discourse about it.

In short: I was reading to impress Woolf’s “Professor Von X”, the fictional character in A Room of One’s Own who represents the elitist male academic, interested in asserting his own intellectual authority to make others feel small (did you really think I’d return without A Room of One’s Own reference?). Yes, I was reading to impress my very own internalized misogyny, personified!

This is NOT to say that you shouldn’t read the classics. I love the classics. But I do think you should read them for the right reasons. Because you are in the mood to read them. Because you genuinely appreciate the writing and the story. And I do think it’s important to push yourself with reading, but to a certain extent. The thing is, I forced myself to read too many classics this winter, to the point where reading became an act of motivating myself to get through a book so I could cross it off my checklist, rather than genuinely enjoying and savoring it. (In my essay on intellectualism, I also talk about the harms of reading to cultivate a specific aesthetic).

When reading falls apart for me, so does writing. I write because reading other people’s writing genuinely inspires me. When I don’t feel inspired by what I’m reading, when I can’t obsess over the way the sentences are constructed or the way a particular word choice made me feel, I have no fuel to keep writing. And so I found myself in a continuous cycle of a reading and writing rut.

So I resolved to get myself out, by reading what genuinely appealed to me at the time. I went back to the basics of what I know and love. For me, this includes Elena Ferrante and just any poetry (particularly when my attention span is feeling short). Sentences that I could dive into and live in for days. But my main advice would be: just read whatever YOU want to read, regardless of how intellectual it makes you seem. This spring, let yourself decide what’s worth reading, not some ambiguous figure in your mind that is the so-called arbiter of intellect.

Read more

Despite the chaos, my goal for this year was to be consistent on Substack. That being said, most of the books I read in January were for my studies rather than mostly books I read “for fun” outside of school (However, I would still call these books fun). I was still able to pick some of them out, as a large part of my Master’s program this semester is completely my own independent research. I will go more in depth on this research in a later post, but (if you can’t tell from the list) this research is largely focused on Charlotte Brontë. But something about reading Charlotte Brontë’s letters and imagining her life on the Moors has felt very fitting for January.

(P.S. The end of my semester is this week, and I am hoping to post more long-form essays once I am on break!)

1. The Information by Martin Amis: ★★★☆☆

The novel follows Richard Tull, a writer who has failed to be successful, and his rivalry with his friend and famous writer Gwyn Barry, as they both spiral into obsession and self-destruction.

I had such a love-hate relationship with this book—the kind of book that feels almost toxic. There were moments I was completely frustrated, but then I’d get drawn in, forget why I was mad in the first place, and find myself genuinely enjoying it. No doubt about it, Martin Amis is an excellent writer and satirist with great dark humor. However, I’m not sure I’ll be reading more of him—the writing and his sneering felt a bit obnoxious to me at a certain point.

“Whatever junk novels were, however they worked, they were close to therapy, and airports were close to therapy. They both belonged to the culture of the waiting room. Piped music, the language of calming suasion. Come this way--yes, the flight attendant will see you now. Airports, junk novels: they were taking your mind off mortal fear.”

2. The Life of Charlotte Brontë by Elizabeth Gaskell: ★★★★☆

I really enjoyed this one. Reading about Charlotte’s (and her sisters’) determination and love for writing, very evident in her letters, felt inspiring, especially in January when introspection is my main hobby. Learning more about her life also helped me to understand how and why she wrote the books that she did and when she did. However, as Elizabeth Gaskell was friends with Charlotte, I felt some of the more less favorable parts of Charlotte’s life and personality were not included in the biography, such as Charlotte’s time working as a teacher in Brussels (which Villette is based off of).

“I read for the same reason that I ate or drank; because it was a real craving of nature. I wrote on the same principle as I spoke—out of the impulse and feelings of the mind; nor could I help it, for what came, came out, and there was the end of it. For as to self–conceit, that could not receive food from flattery, since to this hour, not half a dozen people in the world know that I have ever penned a line.”

3. The Secret of Charlotte Brontë by Frederika Macdonald: ★★★★☆

Macdonald focuses on Charlotte’s early adult life in Belgium and her romantic feelings for her teacher, M. Heger, exploring how these experiences influenced her writing of Villette. It’s a close look at her emotional world, rather than a full biography.

I found this fascinating because it dives into parts of Charlotte’s life that don’t get as much attention in Gaskell’s biography. It made me think about how deeply personal experiences can feed into art, and how delicate and complicated that process can be. While it’s more analytical than Gaskell, I liked seeing Charlotte through a lens that emphasized her emotions and creative mind rather than just her achievements and intellect.

“This point of view, however, is a mistaken one in the present case, because, to commence with, Charlotte Brontë's romantic love for M. Heger affords no game to the scandal-hunter; but, on the contrary, it is serviceable to the just appreciation of her character, as well as of her genius, that her true sentiment for her Professor—that explains her attitude of mind when writing 'Villette'—should be rightly understood.”

2. The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot: ★★★★★

The novel follows Maggie Tulliver and her brother Tom as they grow up in a small English town. Due to her curious nature and knack for reading, Maggie struggles with balancing societal and familial expectations and her own desires.

I loved Maggie as a character, who felt painfully relatable to this day. I found myself thinking about the ways the world shapes people and how much courage it takes to stay true to yourself, especially as a woman in George Eliot’s time. I need to look more into Eliot’s biography, but I believe a lot of the feelings of social isolation and being an outcast in the book are based off of her real life. It’s a heavy read emotionally, all the way through to the end, but so worth it.

“In books there were people who were always agreeable or tender, and delighted to do things that made one happy, and who did not show their kindness by finding fault. The world outside the books was not a happy one, Maggie felt: it seemed to be a world where people behaved the best to those they did not pretend to love and that did not belong to them. And if life had no love in it, what else was there for Maggie? Nothing but poverty and the companionship of her mother’s narrow griefs—perhaps of her father’s heart-cutting childish dependence. There is no hopelessness so sad as that of early youth, when the soul is made up of wants, and has no long memories, no super-added life in the life of others; though we who look on think lightly of such premature despair, as if our vision of the future lightened the blind sufferer’s present.”

As a disclaimer, I am no expert. I am still figuring this out myself. But as someone who has struggled with maintaining their creative spark in a corporate environment for over 5 years now, I have a few key pieces of advice that have helped me stay sane and keep that creative side of myself (even if it wavered a few times) through it all.

At several points I refer specifically to reading and writing, but this can be substituted with whatever art form or activity speaks to you.

1. Read in the in-between moments. At night before bed and while commuting instead of scrolling. If you get a real lunch break, read. If you are good at multitasking or you have tasks that don’t require too much critical thinking and more busy work, listen to audiobooks while you work.

I used to be terrible at this. I would come home from work and all I wanted to do was scroll. But I found that the more I pushed myself to read during these times when I wasn’t working, such as while commuting and before bed, the more used to it I became and the more calming it became for me—at least a couple minutes to fully immerse in another person’s story stress-free and screen-free.

I realized I don’t need to be pushing myself to read The Brothers Karazamov after a stressful and tiring day at work—instead, read something fun, something that will allow you to escape, without making your mind work too hard for it. (Not that reading The Brothers Karazamov can’t be fun, but hopefully you get my point—don’t make your expectations too high for yourself at first.)

2. Go to literary events. Place yourself among people that inspire you. Build community with these people.

Pushing myself to go to literary events alone, particularly while I was living in New York, was fundamental to my growth over the years. One Valentine’s Day, I went to a reading by some of my favorite poets at McNally Jackson who read poems about love. I found myself sitting next to a group of MFA students from NYU, discussing their own work. I felt a sense of both envy and motivation listening to them, and this motivated me to later go to grad school.

Another time I went to a signing for one of my favorite writers’ new book at The Strand, and struck up a conversation with the girl sitting next to me, who recommended to me what is now one of my favorite books. Pushing myself to attend these events after work, even if I was exhausted, made me feel and remember that I could be a member of a creative community, even if I worked in a corporate career.

I would recommend checking the events calendars of your local bookstores for any upcoming events. If you live in New York, I highly recommend checking:

• McNally Jackson

• The Strand

• 92nd Street Y

• The Center for Fiction

• New York Review Books

3. Give yourself a deadline or external pressure to create.

When I was working full-time in finance, I had pretty much completely stopped writing, with the exception of ranting in my journal every now and then. To combat this, because I was working full-time I was able to budget out some of my earnings for writing classes, which held me accountable. I took two courses at Gotham Writers Workshop:

• Creative Writing 101: I took this six-week long class in-person in New York, which was just lovely for building a community with people that love to write. Because the class ran weekly from 7-9pm, it was mostly people in 9-5 jobs that used to write when they were younger and were looking to reconnect with that part of themselves, which was extremely relatable for me.

• Fiction Writing Workshop I: I took this ten-week long class remotely. Gotham offers two remote options for their classes: over Zoom at a given time each week and purely online, on your own time, both with weekly deadlines. I did the latter, which worked well for my schedule at the time given I was in the process of moving to Germany. This class was instrumental for me to get used to receiving feedback (all of my peers were so talented and I learned so much from them) and becoming more confident in my writing. So even if you’re not located in New York or in a different timezone, I would strongly recommend still taking a class remotely with Gotham.

If a class is not within your budget (which is the case for me now that I am a full-time student), Gotham also offers free writing events, like in-person (if you live in New York) and Zoom write-ins, which you can use to get interesting writing prompts, listen to others’ work, share your own, and meet other writers.

4. Make your social activities paint and sips or art dates, rather than just going out for coffee or to a bar with friends.

On my 25th birthday, my best friend and I went to a figure drawing class at Happy Medium, an art cafe that now has several locations in New York. I am by no means a talented artist—in fact, far from it—but something about the experience, everyone sketching in silence, Lana Del Rey on in the background, on a Friday night in the city was extremely therapeutic.

Since then, I have tried to make my social activities with friends incorporate creative activities. It’s easy to feel like the only way you can catch up with friends or meet people is through going out or grabbing a coffee or dinner, but there’s really so many different ways to do it. I would recommend going on art dates at an art cafe, bringing crafts like knitting or collaging to a local cafe, doing a paint and sip night, or a ceramic-painting night. Not only do you leave with a healthy dose of social interaction, but you also leave with something you have created yourself. And this way, you’re hitting two birds with one stone—catching up with friends and exercising your creativity.

5. Read books about the experience of working in corporate to feel seen.

This was especially helpful when I was working in a finance job right out of college with insane hours and a toxic culture—reading books about others in similar situations reminded me I was not alone, while also validating me that my feelings about working this job were very real. Below are some of my favorite books about the experience of corporate:

• Severance by Ling Ma: A woman continues going to her office job even as a global plague collapses the world, turning her corporate routine into a metaphor for survival and numbness. (Craziest part: this book was published before the pandemic).

• Ripe by Sarah Rose Etter: A young woman spirals while working at a tech startup. Her ambition, anxiety, and capitalism feed off each other until her mental health begins to fracture.

• Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener: A memoir tracing a writer’s career in Silicon Valley, exposing the strange culture, power dynamics, and emptiness beneath the tech industry’s promises of meaning.

6. Read about writers that worked in corporate to earn their living, while creating on the side.

Think of writers like Franz Kafka, who worked in insurance; T.S. Eliot, who worked at a bank; Toni Morrison, who worked as an editor while writing her early novels; or Clarice Lispector, who supported herself through journalism and diplomatic work. Reading about their lives often reminds me that creating under constraint is not a failure. It’s often the condition of making art at all.

If you have any tips for keeping your creative spark while working in corporate, let me know—I’m still learning.

1. Villette by Charlotte Bronte: ★★★★★

Lucy Snowe arrives in Villette and becomes a teacher to financially support herself, based off of Emily Bronte’s real life experience of teaching in Brussels. Though Bronte gives little away about the protagonist and narrator, Villette is a story about her journey through loneliness, isolation, and fear of depending on others, to growing into herself, restoring hope, and learning to trust both others and herself.

I love this book more than I can explain in words. I loved Lucy Snowe’s quiet, inwards journey towards resilience, hope, and trust in others and herself, and the dark, introspective nature of the book. I read it at a perfect time in my life, after moving to Germany with little knowledge of the language and attempting to learn the language and find community there myself. The book surely is slow and does not give itself away easily, but is extremely worth it.

“The negation of severe suffering was the nearest approach to happiness I expected to know. Besides, I seemed to hold two lives - the life of thought, and that of reality.”

2. Dept of Speculation by Jenny Offill : ★★★★☆

Jenny Offill paints the dissolution and repairing of a marriage and herself in this fragmentary, auto fictional novel. I completely related to her descriptions of drift and estrangement that can occur in growing up, marriage, and raising children as a woman—especially when this reality feels wildly different than the future you envisioned for yourself. Offill’s writing reminded me a lot of Rebecca Solnit’s writing, who has also written profoundly about these topics. My only qualm is that Offill’s writing, like Solnit’s, can go heavily into abstraction, which sometimes loses me. However, most of the time it works, and I love it.

“My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead. Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things. Nabokov didn’t even fold his own umbrella. Vera licked his stamps for him.”

3. The Passion by Jeanette Winterson: ★★★☆☆

The Passion follows the stories of Henri, a soldier in Napolean’s army, and Villanelle, a Venetian boatwoman, who stories eventually become intertwined during the war. There’s no doubt that the Winterson’s writing is absolutely beautiful and poetic. I found myself underlining line after line. The story reads like a fairytale. However, I couldn’t quite get into the story and found that I loved the writing and the idea of the story more than the story itself.

“Travellers at least have a choice. Those who set sail know that things will not be the same as at home. Explorers are prepared. But for us, who travel along the blood vessels, who come to the cities of the interior by chance, there is no preparation. We who were fluent find life is a foreign language. Somewhere between the swamp and the mountains. Somewhere between fear and sex. Somewhere between God and the Devil passion is and the way there is sudden and the way back is worse.”

4. Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell: ★★★☆☆

I am a real stickler for reading books before I watch the movie adaptation. So naturally, after meaning to read Hamnet for years, I finally had to do it while I was back in the US before I planned to see the movie with my best friend. The story follows William and Agnes Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, falling ill and dying from pestilence, and the parents’ journey to moving past their grief while also honoring and remembering his life.

O’Farrell beautifully curates the atmosphere of this novel and I enjoyed the portrayal of Agnes. However, the novel didn’t fully grab me. As much as I hate to admit this, I found the movie more moving, perhaps because visually seeing Hamnet leading up to his death and knowing the ending and the grief it causes made these scenes all the more devastating.

“She hates the way the people part to let them past and then, behind them, regroup, erasing their passage, as if it were nothing, as if it never were. She wishes to scratch the ground, perhaps with a hoe, to score the streets beneath her, so that there will forever be a mark, for it always to be known that this way Hamnet came. He was here.”

As an eldest daughter myself, visiting my family for the holidays brings all of these dynamics rushing back to me, as grateful as I am to spend time with them. The old feelings, resentments, and habits arise. Prioritizing responsibility before pleasure. Having to read a room, manage moods, anticipate disappointments. The feeling of being an experiment for your parents while simultaneously living up to their high expectations, all while trying to set an example for the rest of your family and keep yourself happy.

After turning to books as my antidote for these feelings, I realized I was finding the same girl in books: capable and independent, but exhausted. Before eldest daughter syndrome was recognized, it was depicted in literature, whether it’s Villette’s Lucy Snowe surviving off of negation and endurance, Persuasion’s Anne Elliot being conditioned into silence and people-pleasing tendencies, the women of the Neapolitan novels inheriting the rage of the generations preceding them. These books recommendations below have made me feel seen when facing the struggles that plague the eldest daughter.

(Note: these book recommendations aren’t just for eldest daughters. They’re for anyone who has felt a similar, crushing weight within their own family dynamics.)

1. Villette by Charlotte Brontë: Lucy Snowe leaves England to teach abroad, carrying very little with her besides her inner life. The novel unfolds almost entirely inward. Lucy survives off of the negation of her desire, comforts, hopes, and the refusal to rely on anyone but herself. Although we know little about her family, reading her is to recognize the eldest daughter who learns early that wanting less is safer than wanting openly, especially from others.

“The negation of severe suffering was the nearest approach to happiness I expected to know. Besides, I seemed to hold two lives - the life of thought, and that of reality.”

“If life be a war, it seemed my destiny to conduct it single-handed.”

2. The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing: Anna Wulf is a writer trying to make sense of a life that feels fractured. She splits her self into notebooks, each one holding a version of the truth. Her belief that it’s her responsibility to make things cohere resonates with the eldest daughter’s struggles. She maintains that if she thinks hard enough, organizes carefully enough, she can hold the chaos together without breaking.

“Because I was permanently confused, dissatisfied, unhappy, tormented by inadequacy, driven by wanting towards every kind of impossible future, the attitude of mind described by ‘tolerantly amused eyes’ was years away from me… It’s only now, looking back, that I understood, but at the time I lived in a brilliantly lit haze, shifting and flickering according to my changing desires. Of course, that is only a description of being young.”

3. All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews: At heart of this novel are two sisters. One sister is brilliant and accomplished, but deeply burdened by life. She struggles under the weight of expectation and the unspoken responsibilities she has carried since childhood. The other sister witnesses this, trying to keep the family together and her sister alive, while still honoring her sister’s pain. The novel demonstrates the weight of being expected to hold everything together, even at the expense of oneself.

“Where does violence go, if not directly back into our blood and bones?”

4. Persuasion by Jane Austen: Anne Elliot was taught to be sensible before she was allowed to be young. As a result, she moves through the world quietly, observant, and largely ignored, trained into prudence and people-pleasing. Her story is about what happens when a woman has to unlearn restraint in order to choose herself.

“She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older: the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning.”

5. Girlhood by Melissa Febos: Girlhood traces how a girl learns her worth through being wanted, and how painful that education can be. This book is for the eldest daughters who confuse usefulness with value. Febos writes towards a girl that no longer has to earn love through harm or self-erasure.

“As a young woman I struck myself against everything - other bodies, cities, myself - but I could never make sense of the marks I made on them, or the marks they made on me. A thing of unknown value has no value, and I treated myself as such. I beat against my life as if it could tell me how to stop hurting, until I was black and blue on the inside. The small softnesses I found, however fleeting, were precious. They may have saved my life.”

“True love is not the reward for a successful campaign to domesticate oneself. It is the thing I was practicing all of those years ago, in my own constructive play. It is entering the woods a stranger, shaking loose the stories assigned you, and naming the world as you meet it, together.”

“Wanted was the only thing I was sure I ought to be.”

6. Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson: Two sisters grow up in the aftermath of loss, raised by a rotating array of caretakers before settling into a life of impermanence. This book relays a sense of a never-ending waiting for stability, explanation, arrival. It mirrors the eldest daughter’s sense of anticipation, but lack of control.

“I hated waiting. If I had one particular complaint, it was that my life seemed composed entirely of expectation. I expected — an arrival, an explanation, an apology.

7. The Neapolitan novels by Elena Ferrante: The novels trace the lifelong friendship of two girls growing up in Naples, beginning in the 1950s. The narrator, Lenu, embodies the eldest daughter in every sense: vigilant, responsible, and exhausted by the labor of keeping everyone, including herself, together. She carries the weight of expectations, shapes herself to fit others’ needs, and constantly measures her own worth against the world around her.

“They were more severely infected than the men, because while men were always getting furious, they calmed down in the end; women, who appeared to be silent, acquiescent, when they were angry flew into a rage that had no end.”

“I feel no nostalgia for our childhood: it was full of violence. Every sort of thing happened, at home and outside, every day, but I don’t recall having ever thought that the life we had there was particularly bad. Life was like that, that’s all, we grew up with the duty to make it difficult for others before they made it difficult for us.”

“There was something unbearable in the things, in the people, in the buildings, in the streets that, only if you reinvented it all, as in a game, became acceptable. The essential, however, was to know how to play, and she and I, only she and I, knew how to do it.”

8. Stoner by John Williams: This one follows the quiet life of William Stoner, a man who discovers a love for literature and teaching, which slowly shape his inner life. Stoner embodies the tendency to carry responsibility quietly, while measuring himself against what he ought to know and how fully he has lived. The book captures learning to sustain oneself even when recognition is rare.

“Sometimes, immersed in his books, there would come to him the awareness of all that he did not know, of all that he had not read; and the serenity for which he labored was shattered as he realized the little time he had in life to read so much, to learn what he had to know.”

“It was himself that he was attempting to define as he worked on his study. It was himself that he was slowing shaping, it was himself that he was putting into a kind of order, it was himself that he was making possible.”

9. The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera: The novel follows a number of characters as they navigate life in Czechoslovakia under Soviet occupation in the 1960s and 1970s. Tereza, one of the central characters, navigates love and her own identity. Tereza’s life reflects the eldest-daughter inheritance of guilt and responsibility from her mother. She absorbs others’ expectations and sacrifices, believing her worth is tied to service. She yearns for lightness, a desire to exist without carrying weight.

“Tereza’s mother never stopped reminding her that being a mother meant sacrificing everything. Her words had the ring of truth, backed as they were by the experience of a woman who had lost everything because of her child. Tereza would listen and believe that being a mother was the highest value in life and that being a mother was a great sacrifice. If a mother was Sacrifice personified, then a daughter was Guilt, with no possibility of redress.”

“In Tereza’s eyes, books were the emblems of a secret brotherhood. For she had but a single weapon against the world of crudity surrounding her: the novels. She had read any number of them, from Fielding to Thomas Mann. They not only offered the possibility of an imaginary escape from a life she found unsatisfying; they also had a meaning for her as physical objects: she loved to walk down the street with a book under her arm. It had the same significance for her as an elegant cane from the dandy a century ago. It differentiated her from others.”

“...she merely wished to find a way out of the maze. She knew that she had become a burden to him: she took things too seriously, turning everything into a tragedy, and failed to grasp the lightness and amusing insignificance of physical love. How she wished she could learn lightness! She yearned for someone to help her out of her anachronistic shell.”

10. The Dutch House by Ann Patchett: A brother and sister look back on their childhood shaped by abandonment. Maeve, the older sister of the narrator, steps into the role of protector after their mother leaves, becoming the emotional constant no one replaces. It’s a story about the eldest daughter who keeps others safe, even when no one keeps her safe in return.

“Mothers were the measure of safety, which meant that I was safer than Maeve. After our mother left, Maeve took up the job on my behalf but no one did the same for her.”

Read more

I’m “wife”—I’ve finished that—
That other state—
I’m Czar—I’m “Woman” now—
It’s safer so—

That seems to be the reading theme of the month, coincidentally. All of the books from this month (with the exception of one outlier) revolve around women finding a room for themselves both in the literary world and the world-at-large, outside their socetially imposed norms of being a wife and mother. They don’t just struggle to find their material rooms, but their temporal, mental, and social rooms as well. (If you want to hear me ramble more about my thoughts on finding a room of one’s own, I wrote an essay on this topic a couple weeks ago).

I love this topic because it blends my love of anthropology and literature and traces how social structures shape the horizon of possibilities for women’s lives and creative production. (More to come on this topic, because there are so many different avenues to explore).

The books I read throughout November outline this journey, all in different ways:

1. A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf: ★★★★★

It’s a classic for a reason. A fundamental text for all writers. Not only does it emphasize a women’s need to have money and a space of her own, but touches on topics of misogyny, systemic exclusion, and the cultural forces that silent women (She even touches on what we now call incels!). Woolf was truly ahead of her time in writing this.

“When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to. Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”

2. Beasts by Joyce Carol Oates: ★★★★☆

This is the only book I read that was not in theme for this month, so to speak. However, I wanted something with a dark-academia, New-England-winter mood to remind me of my days in undergrad. This one perfectly did the trick. Just read the passage below if you don’t believe me. My only complaint is it’s short, and I would’ve loved if it were longer and had more room to really get to know the characters.

“We met, we fell into stride together, on the snowy path behind the library. Evergreen boughs were heavy with snow, our breaths steamed in the freezing air. This was romance! (…) The chapel bell began to toll the half-hour. Five-thirty PM. In the Berkshires, in this season, dusk comes early. Rising like a dark tide out of the earth. (…) Now by chance we’d met, we were talking together on the snowy path behind the library. In the direction of the playing fields, and the woods. Catamount Creek was now frozen over. The scent of pine needles was now sharper than ever. (…) Lips made for kissing. Lips made to be kissed. The chapel bell. A beautiful sound but melancholy.”

3. Silences by Tillie Olsen: ★★★★★ (I found a link to an excerpt of her Harper’s essay)

Olsen reflects on the various silences of creative voices, including the ones that vanish after one bestseller and those that are never heard at all. She asks what the creative process requires to thrive and reflects on the ways it is stifled. For anyone interested in the intersections of gender, labor, and literary production or who has struggled themselves with being silenced, Olsen’s reflections are essential.

“Literary history and the present are dark with silences: the years-long silences of acknowledged greats; the ceasing to publish after one work appears; the hidden silences; the never coming to book form at all. What is it that happens with the creator, to the creative process in those times? What are creation’s needs for full functioning? Without intention of or pretension to literary scholarship, I have had special need to learn all I could of this over the years, myself so nearly remaining mute and having let writing die over and over again in me.”

4. Manifesto on Never Giving Up by Bernardine Evaristo: ★★★★☆

A truly inspirational memoir written after Evaristo won the Booker Prize in 2019. I always love to learn about the lives of writers and their journeys to finding their room of their own in the writing world. Especially in the case of Evaristo, a queer, black woman who encountered a number of institutional obstacles throughout her journey. While sometimes her advice felt a bit cheesy, there were other times where I almost teared up hearing about her love and respect for the craft of writing and storytelling.

“These were the writers who foregrounded black women’s lives and in doing so gave me permission to write. Indeed, they taught me how to write through their example, once I could overcome the burden of their greatness, which impaired my self confidence for a while. It took a while to overcome the persistent voice in my head that told me I’d never be as good as them. I had to learn that I would never write like people who were of a different generation, culture, and background. The only person I needed to write was like myself, although that’s much easier said than done.”

4. The Equivalents: A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s by Maggie Doherty: ★★★★★

This book traces the careers of The Equivalents, five women who are enrolled at an all-female institute to remove the barriers to art women often experience in their households and family lives. The Equivalents include Anne Sexton, the most widely well-known graduate of the institute, and Tillie Olsen, who wrote Silences above. In The Equivalents, we see the circumstances that led to and the process of Olsen writing Silences as her final project at the institute.

I would highly recommend this one for any fans of confessional poetry. While I’ve always loved confessional poetry, I knew very little about the emergence of it in the 1950s and 60s. It’s one big history lesson in confessional poetry, written with the excitement and pace of a novel. And, I loved learning about the lives of some of my favorite women writers who continue to inspire me and paved the way for those after them.

“For weeks, Olsen spent her days in Widener, researching literary production—what enabled it, and what got in the way. (…) She started to think of these gaps as silences—not the natural kind, the fallow period most writers need, but unnatural, brought on, metaphorically, by something like bad soil or a premature frost.”

Virginia Woolf famously writes in A Room of One’s Own: “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction” (1). I always pictured this in the most literal sense. I imagined myself living in a room filled with natural light, a desk in the corner with a view that allowed me to people watch, and of course, a bookshelf filled with inspiration.

After I received my bachelor’s degree, I was torn between two paths: pursuing a literary or writing career and continuing to be broke, or going into a more lucrative field and making the money that could support me moving out of my parents’ house. At the time, the only people I knew working in arts-related fields as their primary source of income had financial support from their families, which was not an option for me. After months of interviewing and graduating without any job prospects, I eventually received a job offer to be a qualitative researcher at a financial institution.

Actually, that’s an oversimplification. I was rejected at first. Desperate to find something that could pay rent, I emailed the hiring manager reaffirming my interest in the job. I guess they liked my perseverance—really, my desperation dressed up as persistence—and offered me the job. I considered the upsides: I had a job, supposedly this job could combine my love for writing with a more “practical” career, I could afford to live in New York, where my job was based. I would finally have the material room of my own—even if my job wasn’t my dream career, I theoretically had the money to support my literary pursuits in my free time.

I moved into my first real apartment in August of 2018, just a few days before my first day of work. I had prepared for months, envisioning exactly what my room would look like: a royal blue-and-white patterned carpet, white bed sheets, modern art adorning the walls, a Maison jar of flowers and a pile of books on my nightstand. My grandma’s wooden bookshelf hosting all of my favorite books, my most beloved possessions. My desk next to the window, allowing me a view of downtown Manhattan and the passersby in the tiny park below. I spent time and money on curating my room—time and money that I did not have. But as an introvert, I believed it was important to cultivate this space, the space where I would be spending the majority of my time the next few years.

The temporal room of one’s own

There was the problem of time. I had overlooked perhaps the most important aspect of Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, the very key which wills into existence all the other rooms necessary for the writer. This is where I now realize the heart of Woolf’s argument lies. The temporal room unlocks the other metaphysical rooms—the ability to have a mental and social room of one’s own.

When Woolf wrote A Room of Ones Own in 1929, the largest hurdle as a woman writer was finding the time to focus and write in spite of the interruptions that were obligations at the time. Women were first and foremost caretakers, whether it be for a father, husband, children, or the house itself. Woolf writes: “All the conditions of her life, all her own instincts, were hostile to the state of mind which is needed to set free whatever is in the brain” (41). Of course, I was lucky in many senses. I didn’t have any of the pressures of marriage, children, taking care of family, or societal limitations on the kind of job I could pursue. But still, time presented its own challenges.

Once I started my job, I had no time. 20 minutes to myself a day was considered a luxury. I worked late into the night and peeled myself out of bed at 6 am the following morning, my eyes bloodshot and eyesight blurry from exhaustion. I spent the majority of the weekend working to meet a weekly 11 am Sunday morning deadline. At one point, my manager made us record how we spent our time each day by 15 minute increments. By the time I was done, I wanted nothing more than to crawl into bed, pull the sheets over my head, and sleep for 20 hours. Or to meet friends for more than a few glasses of wine to forget the 6 and a half days behind me and prepare for the 6 and a half ahead.

The lack of time had a very material impact on my physical room. Clothes were strewn across the ground, used mugs, cups, and bowls laid vacant on every surface. Boxes and shoes on the ground become hurdles I would constantly trip over. Crumbs scattered the floor under my desk as I snacked to stay awake late into the night. The flowers in the Maison jar slowly died, crisp and withered, with a strange, spoiled scent emanating from them. The books that had once been my most used, most loved, possessions laid untouched for months on end. At the end of a long week I had tried to wash my sheets and ended up not having the time nor energy to put them back on, and instead, slept on a bare mattress for months.

The mental room of one’s own

It became clear the problem was not just that I didn’t have time, but also that all vitality had been sucked out of me. I recently read David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs, and his discussion of the spiritual violence bullshit jobs can induce completely resonated with me. Graeber writes: “Bullshit jobs regularly induce feelings of hopelessness, depression, and self-loathing. They are forms of spiritual violence directed at the essence of what it means to be a human being” (104). I was pulled back and forth between two thoughts at my job: I am so lucky to have a job that pays decently and lets me live in New York, and I need to quit because I am dying inside. Because this was my first full-time job in an office environment, I was not able to set boundaries—I assumed this was how corporate America worked. It didn’t matter, later I would go on to watch people with more job experience than me set boundaries at this company which would result in their termination. I grew to subconsciously envy their fate, and became part of my own cycle of self-loathing.

Woolf talks about the importance of keeping the room of the mind clean. The narrator explains how prior to her aunt’s deadly accident, she was not privy to this $500 a year she received from her and had to work for her living, unable to focus on her writing. She writes how these jobs bred a bitterness in her:

But what still remains with me as a worse infliction than either was the poison of fear and bitterness which those days bred in me. To begin with, always to be doing work that one did not wish to do, and to do it like a slave, flattering and fawning, not always necessarily perhaps, but it seemed necessary and the stakes were too great to run risks (…) all this became like a rust eating away the bloom of the spring, destroying the tree at its heart. (Woolf 30)

To write from this place of bitterness—the rust that is eating away and destroying the tree—is to write from a clouded headspace that conceals and distorts the work within it. Woolf believed that Shakespeare was the perfect encompassment of an incandescent mind: “All desire to protest, to preach, to proclaim an injury, to make the world the witness of some hardship or grievance that was fired out of him and consumed. Therefore his poetry flows from him free and unimpeded” (46). My mind was far from incandescent, blocked with obstacles at every turn.

The mess of my mental state fed into my social life. I avoided inviting people over. When people came over, I begged them not to look in my room. If they did, I would shove the mess into my closet. But they could still see the piles of clothes beginning to seep out, an explosion that could happen at any second. I couldn’t open up and write when it felt too messy inside to let anyone in at all.

Finding a room of my own

I refused to give up hope though. I began to prioritize attending literary events when I could. I always felt anxiety churning in the pit of my stomach as I went to these events alone, as if I were entering a world I no longer belonged to. I once sat next to a group of MFA students from NYU at a reading and felt a mix of excitement and jealousy as they discussed poetry. But every time, I walked out renewed and recharged, remembering why I loved literature. I started looking at graduate school programs online and lingered by the New School buildings longingly when I went on walks.

It wasn’t until two years after starting this job that I knew it couldn’t do it anymore, when I began to train new hires. I tried to in a way that protected their work-life balance. But every time, I was pushed by my higher-ups to stop doing that, that I should be making new hires work into the late hours of the night, showing up to work with puffy, grey under eye circles the next day. In Bullshit Jobs, Graeber speaks of the horror of watching yourself turn into the person sustaining and continuing the toxic system, keeping it alive and breathing:

It’s hard to imagine anything more soul destroying than (…) being forced to commit acts of arbitrary bureaucratic cruelty against one’s will. To become the face of the machine that one despises. To become a monster. It has not escaped my notice, for example, that the most frightening monsters in popular fiction do not simply threaten to rend or torture or kill you but to turn you into a monster yourself: think here of vampires, zombies, werewolves. They terrify because they menace not just your body but also your soul. This is presumably why adolescents in particular are drawn to them: adolescence is precisely when most of us are first confronted with the challenge of how not to become the monsters we despise. (104)

I saw my future there and I hated it. I realized the only way I could not be responsible for sustaining and passing on the generational trauma of my job, if you will, was to no longer be a part of it. I quit.

Of course, the company didn’t let me get away easy, slapping me with a noncompete that did not allow me to transition into my new job for months after the fact. But this provided time to travel for the first time in a long time. I met my fiancé traveling, who backed my best friend’s encouragements and motivated me to apply for master’s programs in English literature. Now in graduate school, I would have never posted my first Substack essay if my professor hadn’t provided me the encouragement. And I work a part-time job that pays the rent and isn’t necessarily my dream job or nearly as lucrative, but it gives me experience in copywriting and provides the balance to focus on school and literary pursuits in my free time.

In “Women Artists: The Creative Process”, bell hooks writes of her metaphorical room of her own:

I was determined to create a world for myself where my creativity could be respected and sustained. It is a world still in the making. Yet each year of my life. I find myself with more undisturbed, uninterrupted time. When I decided to accept a smaller salary and teach part-time, it was to give myself more time. Again, this choice required sacrifice, a commitment to living simply. Yet these are the choices women artists must make if we want more time to contemplate, more time to work. Women artists cannot wait for ideal circumstances to be in place before we find the time to do the work we are called to do; we have to create oppositionally, work against the grain. Each of us must invent alternative strategies that enable us to move against and beyond the barriers that stand in our way. (130)

bell hooks reminds me that a room of one’s own is not granted but carved, slowly and deliberately. It is a practice, a devotion to one’s voice and to oneself. The room is never perfect. It asks for sacrifices. But I open one door, then the next, and my room slowly expands.

I had been chasing the room as if it were a final, material destination. But now I see that rooms are something more metaphysical, interior spaces we have to tend to and nurture over time. The material and mental rooms collapse without the temporal room, and vice versa.

Still, I think of all the women who don’t have the luxury of the hours to create, who create anyway, and those who still cannot. All we can do is write within the rooms we’ve built, however small, and keep opening doors for others to build theirs.

Sources:

Graeber, David. Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. Simon & Schuster, 2018.​

hooks, bell. “Women Artists: The Creative Process.” In Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black, South End Press, 1989, pp. 125-131

Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own (1929). Penguin Books, 2004.

if you’re feeling the same November slump or are missing home in your own way, read on for some poems I’ve been turning to.

When you need to embrace the gray-ness of November…

Gingko leaves at my feet
a flood of questioning yellow

They say that everything that is growing
will stop growing soon, maybe

this weekend, the first deer freeze
The season of falling

will give way to the season
of brittle upturned sticks

Who cares, it’s all equally gorgeous

-Maggie Nelson, “The Mute Story of November”

When you’re happy to be alone…

They say I mope too much
but really I’m loudly dancing.
I eat paper. It’s good for my bones.
I play the piano pedal. I dance,
I am never quiet, I mean silent.
Some day I’ll love Frank O’Hara.
I think I’ll be alone for a little while.

-Frank O’Hara, “Katy”

When you need to make the most of the little moments…

Snow wafts off the little lake
along Route 66, momentarily encasing the car

in a trance of glitter

Live with your puny, vulnerable self
Live with her

-Maggie Nelson, “Morning En Route to the Hospital”

When you’re ready for complete self-acceptance…

I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.

-Adrienne Rich, “Diving into the Wreck”

When you are dealing with leaving or being left…

And before that, you are holding me because you are going away--
these are statements you are making,
not questions needing answers.

How can I know you love me
unless I see you grieve over me.

-Louise Glück, “Departure”

When you need to let go of what you can’t control…

You promise me nothing.

I distract myself from this fact
by wondering about the etymology

Of promise, promise myself
to look it up later

For now these is a home here

In this bent head
This hand in hair

-Maggie Nelson, “Promise”

When you’re moving through the unknown…

I stepped from plank to plank
So slow and cautiously;
The stars about my head I felt,
About my feet the sea.

I knew not but the next
Would be my final inch,—
This gave me that precarious gait
Some call experience.

-Emily Dickinson, “Experience”

i started to send my friends and family poetry whenever they were going through something, and eventually realized i have a library of poems for every occasion. so if you’re like me and need a poem to meet you in how you’re feeling, keep reading.

(i realize these poems are rather somber. promise i will be less of a downer next time—poems can be happy too!)

when you need to recover from a regretful night out…

“I’ll never get over the fact
that the buildings all light up at night,
and the night comes every night
and without regret we let it go.
We sleep a little and we live.
That’s what we do.”

-Alex Dimitrov, “Having a Diet Coke with You”

when you feel lost…

“Ocean. Ocean —
get up. The most beautiful part of your body
is where it’s headed. & remember,
loneliness is still time spent
with the world.”

-Ocean Vuong, “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong”

when you feel chronically lonely…

“I don’t want to sound unreasonable
but I need to be in love immediately.
I can’t watch this sunset
on 14th Street by myself.
Everyone is walking fast
right after therapy, texting back
their lovers orange hearts
and unicorns—it’s insane to me.
They’re missing this free sunset
willingly!”

-Alex Dimitrov, “Sunset on 14th St”

when you’re depressed…

“I spit on the street and was late on purpose and stepped
in glass and my dog died and I saw
minuses over and over. I’ll figure it out.
I let a man walk away and then
another one. It has taken me exactly this long
to realize I could have done something else.
I’m being repetitive now but do you ever
hate yourself?”

-Morgan Parker, “The High Priestess of Soul’s Sunday Morning Visit to the Wall of Respect

when you feel invisible…

“We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.”

-Mark Strand, “Keeping Things Whole”

when you need some courage…

“Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet — and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.”

-TS Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Pufrock“

when you want to come back to yourself…

“Call your spirit back. It may be caught in corners and creases of shame, judgment, and human abuse.

You must call in a way that your spirit will want to return.

Speak to it as you would to a beloved child.

Welcome your spirit back from its wandering. It may return in pieces, in tatters. Gather them together. They will be happy to be found after being lost for so long.”

-Joy Harjo, “For Calling the Spirit Back from Wandering the Earth in Its Human Feet”

1. rebecca by daphne du maurier: ★★★☆☆

you'll see a reoccurring theme throughout this post: my attempt to get into gothic literature in the spirit of halloween. i do not normally gravitate towards gothic literature, so take my ratings with a grain of salt. while i enjoyed reading rebecca, i wished the story focused more on the details of rebecca’s life and found myself bored and uninterested in the narrator’s character.

“We can never go back again, that much is certain. The past is still close to us. The things we have tried to forget and put behind us would stir again, and that sense of fear, of furtive unrest, struggling at length to blind unreasoning panic - now mercifully stilled, thank God - might in some manner unforeseen become a living companion as it had before.”

2. we have always lived in the castle by shirley jackson: ★★★★☆

one thing’s for sure: shirley jackson knows how to cultivate a vibe. i absolutely loved the spooky, whimsical vibes of this book. the end of the book left me reeling with questions, which is always a good sign. at the same time, i wanted more answers and found the plot a bit slow at points.

“All the Blackwood women had taken the food that came from the ground and preserved it, and the deeply colored rows of jellies and pickles and bottled vegetables and fruit, maroon and amber and dark rich green, stood side by side in our cellar and would stand there forever, a poem by the Blackwood women.”

3. ripe by sarah rose better: ★★★★★

if you have ever had a toxic job, manager, or relationship to corporate america, trust me and read this book. shockingly a page turner for a book that isn’t primarily plot-driven.

“The amount of pain we can endure is spectacular. We are conditioned to withstand torture, to haul gray boulders of hurt on our shoulders, to confront the pressure endlessly, the heavy rough stone wearing away at us until our skin breaks open, revealing the bloody red flesh below.”

4. lies and sorcery by elsa morante: ★★★★★

this book was one hell of a journey. its huge, time consuming, and a big commitment. every minute spent reading it was worth it though. a loner girl sits in her room and tells the history of her dysfunctional family, all of whom are known for telling myths and lies, making the reader question the reliability of the narrator herself. fun fact: elsa morante was a huge source of inspiration for elena ferrante, so would highly recommend for ferrante fans.

“The vast majority of my time in this apartment was spent entombed in this small room. Like a contemplative monk, I kept company with my books and myself. I was estranged from all that went on in the nearby rooms; I had no social life or entertainment of any sort; and I was immune to the frivolities indulged in by even the most modest girls. You mustn’t, however, conclude that this lonely room was the refuge of a saint. No; rather, it was the refuge of a witch.”

5. the cost of living by deborah levy: ★★★★☆

i will always love the weirdness of deborah levy’s writing. normally it works for me and is wildly relatable. sometimes i don’t know what she’s talking about but i enjoy it nonetheless. a memoir about levy creating a new life and room to write following a divorce.

“To strip the wallpaper off the fairy tale of The Family House in which the comfort and happiness of men and children have been the priority is to find behind it an unthanked, unloved, neglected, exhausted woman. It requires skill, time, dedication and empathy to create a home that everyone enjoys and that functions well. Above all else, it is an act of immense generosity to be the architect of everyone else’s well-being. This task is still mostly perceived as women’s work. Consequently, there are all kinds of words used to belittle this huge endeavour.”

6. practical magic by alice hoffman: ★★★☆☆

i’m a huge fan of the movie so i had to read the book. i hate to say that the book is not nearly as good as the movie, but it still captured the whimsical, witchy, small town new england feeling i was looking for.

“The moon is always jealous of the heat of the day, just as the sun always longs for something dark and deep.”

In my experience, the novel has only increased in popularity throughout the past two decades. Why was it that when I was in middle school and high school, I was the weird girl, embarrassed to always be reading books? Why was it that when Instagram and TikTok drastically rose in popularity during my university years, it suddenly became “cool” to read, and in fact, an indicator that you are smart, interesting, and not just surface level? My Instagram feed became filled with people posting pictures of themselves reading books at the park, on vacation, and so on. A part of me had to wonder: what gives someone the urge to take a picture and share with others that they are reading something, as opposed to just actually reading it without sharing that online? Are people actually reading the books that they post online? Why has the book become a prop?

In 2019, Kendall Jenner posted a picture on Instagram of her lounging on a boat, reading the book Tonight, I’m Someone Else by Chelsea Hodson. Later, she posted a picture of the cover of The Houseguest: And Other Stories by Amparo Davila. And after that, The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington. Being 19 at the time, I rushed to order these books from the bookstore. Not only did Jenner reading a book prove just as effective to me as a recommendation from a friend, but she also advertised an entire aesthetic. If you read these alternative, formerly less widely known books from female authors, not only were you smart and intellectual, but you were also a deep, darker, multi-dimensional cool girl. These books also had another thing in common: each had an aesthetically pleasing cover, with a minimalist, artful design. It wasn’t just books with specific content that Jenner was curating for fans, but in fact, books as a kind of visual art form, each one that specifically matched and perfected her social media feed. Jenner seemed to be communicating that if you curate your reading list carefully—selecting titles that fit a particular aesthetic or vibe—you can craft an identity, signaling a lifestyle and taste that others want to emulate.

This was when I realized that my experience actually fit quite well with what the guest lecturer was saying about the validity of the novel as a serious art form. In the mid-1900s, the works of writers like Toni Morrison, Vladmir Nabokov, and James Baldwin were analyzed, discussed, and heavily influenced larger social, political, racial and philosophical conversations. There has been a shift from how novels are consumed and valued by the larger public with the rise of mass and digital media. Evan Brier writes: “Books became valuable not only for what they said, but for what they allowed their readers to say about themselves” (Brier 2012). And with the rise of social media, people can strategically curate the identity or performance they would like to put on for others, allowing them to use books as props in doing so. The novel has increased in popularity in recent years due to its ability to circulate within commercial institutions, rather than as a serious art form that is able to significantly impact public discourse and larger cultural values. Now, books gain popularity not through critical engagement and for their complex literary themes, but as cultural symbols. Take even the recent resurgence of Lolita by Nabokov, which has become trendy to read due to Lana Del Rey’s frequent invocation of the novel’s themes, imagery, and even quotes in her music.

At first glance, I was not entirely upset about the rise of books in this way in the recent years. People are still reading books. People that would not normally read books are reading books because of social media. And instead of spending that time on TikTok or surfing the internet, they are reading. This is all positive, right?

Not exactly. The problem lies in the way we engage with books, as objects and signifiers, rather than as an item that is filled with the human experience, used to provoke questions about our own lives and larger culture. Bourdieu writes: “The propensity to distinguish oneself by the culture that one possesses is inseparable from the propensity to play a social game of which the stakes are the symbolic profit linked to the possession of legitimate culture and the social power that goes with it” (Bourdieu 2010). So when taste becomes a form of social performance, we risk that critical engagement with art will be replaced by the surface-level display of posing with the book.

For example, when we read Lolita to signal a particular aesthetic, are we actually reading the novel to understand Humbert’s narrative unreliability and our complicity in that? Are we questioning the ways in which Dolores lacks a real voice, or even a memorable name throughout the book? How are beauty and horror blurred—how is this relationship unsettling? Or are we just quoting the dreamy passages from the novel, like “Light of my life, fire of my loin,” as a way to signal taste or identity, while ignoring the themes it raises? (Nabokov 1955) Of course, there are valid debates about whether the book romanticizes abuse, but these complexities are often erased altogether when the book is a cultural object rather than engaged with as a serious work of art requiring critical discussion.

There is also the risk of losing the ability to curate one’s own personal taste. Theodor Adorno writes: “The triumph of advertising in the culture industry is that consumers feel compelled to buy and use its products even though they see through them” (Adorno 1981). Similarly, Guy Debord in The Society of the Spectacle states: “The spectacle is the self-portrait of power in the age of its totalitarian management of social life” (Debord 1977). Although we may feel a sense of freedom to choose cultural products, our decisions are always dictated by the media, how people—especially celebrities and influencers—are represented in the media, and who we feel compelled to identify with. Even if we are aware of these factors at play, we are still drawn to participate in these patterns of consumptions. And as a result, personal taste becomes less about our own preferences and instincts and instead socially-engineered trends. As culture controls our personal taste, we are constantly at risk of losing our individuality of thought and aligning with narratives and imagery we see in the media. Ironically, through the effort to curate and define ourselves via social media, we can actually lose the true heart of our individuality—our unique and independent tastes. Are we rating a book five stars on Goodreads because we genuinely enjoyed it, or because the cultural groups we identify with have deemed it good?

I am aware that most of the examples I have brought up include women from pop culture. Is this tendency to use books as props to indicate a sense of multi-dimensionality and intellectualism a response to a patriarchal culture, which has reduced women to nothing more than their appearances? Most definitely. I don’t blame anyone for using books as a cultural prop to their identities, as I do it too. But by reading books that don’t necessarily fit with our aesthetic tastes, and approaching reading books with an open and critical mind, we can begin to understand our own personal taste and move beyond superficial performances to also engage with literature as a meaningful art form.

As Adrienne Rich has said: “Re-vision is the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction” (Rich 1999).

Sources:

Adorno, Theodor W. The Culture Industry. London: Routledge, 1981.

Brier, Evan. A Novel Marketplace: Mass Culture, the Book Trade, and Postwar American Fiction. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012.

Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. London: Routledge, 2010

Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. Detroit: Black and Red, 1977.

Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1959.

Rich, Adrienne. When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Revision. Alexandria, VA: Chadwyck-Healey, 1999.

Whittle, Andrea. “How Kendall Jenner Became the Patron Saint of Alt Lit.” W Magazine, December 17, 2019. https://www.wmagazine.com/story/kendall-jenner-reading-habits.