I’ve recently been reading more books by women authors, particularly writers who mine a dark seam between the pained confessional and body horror, sparking reflections on sex, art and death, and all the dirty, gritty places in between. It has been a great journey getting away from myself and reading out of my comfort zone into strange new places.
The tone of these books is often framed as decadent but also maintains a contemporary edge, between carnal desire and the need for mutilation of the self and others. These characters are often their own worst enemy—unreliable narrators who struggle in and out of positions of victimhood, they offer honest and very real reflections of the challenge of modern relationships of abuse traded on both sides. What makes these books such an invigorating read is their enthusiasm to show women as flawed, exploited and often ungovernable beings, meeting with various forms of resistance as they try to live within their own agency.
If this all sounds very dark, it’s because it is, but these books are sustained by great wit and insight on complications of the flesh and moments of love and obligation strained to the breaking point, seeing the brilliance in ugliness and the decay of beauty as a new kind of truth.
The Last Sane Woman by Hannah Regel
There is much to love in poet, artist and critic Regel’s first novel. The prose is really assured as she takes you beyond the clichéd world of the struggling young artist trying to make it in 21st-century London—an increasingly squeezed space compounding pressures of finance, fleeting tastes and the top-down force of nepotism and good connections.
An editor of the art journal SALT, Regel sends up art world schtick with great aplomb, skewering its myriad vanities but also exposes the driven egos of the artists all trying to be heard, known or “discovered.” Her increasingly wayward protagonist latches onto a bundle of letters, identifying with another female artist experiencing almost the same challenges as her decades earlier. This gradually tips into obsession and the novel gamely runs away with itself, revealing how for every overnight success there are hundreds who never fully “arrive” at the fame, success and critical praise they might have dreamed of, instead meeting with inevitable compromise where art and life collide.
The Last Sane Woman by Hannah Regel.
Verso Fiction
Boy Parts by Eliza Clark
Eliza Clark’s first novel was published by indie stalwart Influx Press in 2020. Arriving with a bang, she became a TikTok cause célèbre and reached a huge readership almost overnight. Fittingly, Clark presents us with a story of intense voyeurism, a kind of female rear window, following a photographer who is beautiful, damaged and suitably monstrous. We witness the steady car crash of her life unfold as she bares the often unseen scars of abusive relationships and faces up to the world’s willing exploitation of her because she is attractive. She turns this back onto the young male “models” of her photographs who increasingly become her victims in turn, posed in various states of compromise. She takes a kind of revenge against them while sinking into her own pit of narcissism, which further deadens her to the needs and feelings of the people around her. Clark has since gone “major” for Faber and written more novels further dealing with fractious and damaged relationships.
Boy Parts by Eliza Clark.
Harper Perennial
Which as You Know Means Violence: On Self-Injury as Art and Entertainment by Philippa Snow
This nonfiction book leans into one of Snow’s major themes as the go-to critic of the exploitation of the human form as a trigger of sexual desire, the expression of beauty and the decadence of brutality against the body. She writes about the horrors and challenges of performance art, from Jackass to Marina Abramović, how people who make themselves a moving target inevitably live through objectification, but in making themselves more vulnerable—for the sake of art—they can reach a higher place of confronting gender norms and what constitutes normalized sexuality. This is a rebellion wrought through a willing entrance to a world of pain, but also the need to make oneself vulnerable to undermine and subvert wider notions of conformity. Snow has since gone on to write more books in this field, marking out new territory at the intersection of post-feminism in the 21st Century.
Which as You Know Means Violence by Philippa Snow.
Repeater
My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh
I was late to this book, and then it languished on my to-be-read pile for a long time, and I put it off yet longer, foreshadowing its story and slightly intimidated by its legendary cult status. I’d be tempted to refer to this book as the female American Psycho, being the story of a woman who actively retreats from the world in a drug-induced haze, but that would be selling it short and doing a disservice to the author’s writing style.
The book digs deep on grief as an ongoing process, which helps lay the narrator low as she reflects on the neglect of poor parenting and cold relationships lived at a casual distance. Again, Moshfegh looks at the art world through its own skewed lens, revealing the ways in which women are expected to serve within a construct of “higher artists.” She also confronts the idea of the skinny, sensitive, creative male who, through “hidden depths,” somehow expects to outperform his more grounded and commonly masculine peers. The book is funny, mundane and punctuated by many beautiful moments that highlight why Moshfegh’s literary reputation and versatility remains so assured today.
My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh.
Penguin Press
Strange Heart Beating by Eli Goldstone
A damaged and difficult love story, where the male narrator is left in a state of grief and uncertainty after his wife dies suddenly in a tragicomic accident. The book could be presented as a mystery, as he travels to his wife’s hometown and tries to rebuild the facts of her past life. The book is powerful in the way it leaves lots of gaps and open spaces for the reader to make their own decisions about the progression of the relationship, almost as if we are seeing its collapse in real time, though the loved one has only recently departed. The protagonist is left wondering whether the woman he loved was only ever pretending to be someone else all along.
Strange Heart Beating by Eli Goldstone.
Granta Books
Deliver Me by Elle Nash
A gory and powerful novel which tries to expose the pressures of motherhood from men, society and family, but also within women themselves. The protagonist works in a chicken processing plant and dreams of having her own baby. Throughout, she is haunted by the Bible Belt hangover of her family, where Christianity remains the shadowing of spiritual deliverance at the sacrifice of the body and earthly happiness.
Nash embraces the knocks and bolts of body horror with relish, but also bears a great sensitivity to her subject: a woman forced into a corner of thwarted ambition and hopeless love. The prose is angry at these injustices but also tender in the moments of peace she finds here and there in a life already occupied within ruins. The book has been criticized for its explicit grotesquery but I find Nash’s reflection on the by turns vulnerability and strength of the female body particularly moving as we witness someone squeezed into a desperate corner by a seemingly commonplace small-town life.
Deliver Me by Elle Nash.
The Unnamed Press
The Glutton by A.K. Blakemore
A.K. Blakemore was long one of my favorite poets since I read her first collection, Humbert Summer, more than a decade ago. She has since pivoted to the new adventure of feminist revisionist historical novelist—but that tag does her a great disservice. The Glutton tells the true-life story of “Tarare,” the monstrous young man known for his ability to eat anything placed before him. Set in the immediate fallout of the French Revolution’s new republic, Blakemore gives a frank and sympathetic account of the young man lost in the world, driven by a hunger he cannot satisfy.
It’s an excellent account of the guts, stinks and greed of the period, setting us within the scene, but more importantly, the author brings an utterly modern sensibility to Tarare’s struggles to form meaningful relationships, as he tries and fails to fall in love, reclaim his lost family and find genuine friendship in a world driven to madness and moral extremes. The Glutton is a beautifully conceived account of a person who never feels fully human and is judged as a monster, expressing the fallout of someone who is forced to live without love.
Deliver Me by Elle Nash.
The Unnamed Press
Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer
Along with Lauren Elkin’s Art Monsters, this book dissects our relationship with challenging and beautiful art created by sometimes monstrous, damaged people. Dederer mines her own experiences of art that has shaped her life, only to have the rug pulled from beneath her when the artist is revealed to have committed heinous acts. She cites Woody Allen’s Manhattan, a movie already rife with difficult subtext of a huge age-gap relationship, and Allen’s exploitative marriage to his adopted child. Already we are in plainly murky waters where Dederer investigates whether we should make a choice between the work and the artist as distinct entities, but also the expectation that great art must come from pure-hearted, good people, particularly when it comes to the male artist’s treatment of the ill-fated muse, younger lover, new wife or exploited ingenue. Monsters digs deep into how we experience art and the ways by which we give it cultural value—an ongoing discussion, but hopefully one with an end in sight.
Monsters- A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer.
Knopf
Garments Against Women by Anne Boyer
One of the best poetry books I have read in recent decades, suitably recommended to me by another male poet, Boyer reflects on the obligations of a single mother, scouring thrift stores and raking through academic research on the French Revolution. The literal thread that binds these fragments and prose-poems together is the relationships formed out of austerity, and the pressures that bind women to rise up, perform and behave within the realms of perfection.
Garments Against Women by Anne Boyer.
Penguin
