Introduction: A Few of My Favorite Reads
Get to know more about me & Alienated Young Woman with this guide to some of my favorite fiction!
Hello and welcome to Alienated Young Woman! I’m so glad you’re here. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be establishing my regular publishing schedule, starting with a monthly long-form essay or review. I’ll be writing mostly about literature for now, but plenty about film, TV, and pop culture as well. I’ll also be dropping biweekly Recommendation Guides, where I’ll share some of my favorite novels, films, TV, and other writing, guided by a new theme for each issue. (Scroll to the bottom of this article for a peek at what’s next, and subscribe to ensure you never miss an issue!)
Before then, I thought I’d introduce myself through the subject I love writing about most: my favorite fiction. So, without further adieu, here are a dozen or so of the novels that I adore, the ones that have spoken to me the most and shaped my love for reading. Consider this your beta-Recommendation Guide. As always, my comments are open, so feel free to share your own favorites!
Bunny by Mona Awad
To be honest, Bunny is a tricky way to start off this list (which is organized alphabetically by author, not ranked). Part of what attracted me to this book in the first place was how much it has in common with two of my other favorite novels, Shirley Jackson’s Hangsaman and Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. When I’ve recommended this book to friends in the past, I’ve pitched it as the love child of a three-way between those two novels and The Rocky Horror Picture Show. That’s also about as much plot as I can share without giving away the many twists in this absolutely batshit—and still somehow incredibly original—story. Awad is one of the most fascinating authors working in contemporary fiction today, not just for her wild hybrid lit fic/horror/fantasy premises, but also for the winding, multilayered, satire-tinted bait-and-switch that is her narration. (I wrote more on this last year when I reviewed her latest novel, Rouge!). While I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend any of her other work, Bunny holds a special place in my heart, and it feels like the perfect introduction to the labyrinthine fantasy land where Awad’s fiction lives.
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
Besides having one of the best opening lines in fiction, Rebecca is also one of the best ghost stories of the 20th century. The novel follows an unnamed young narrator as she’s swept off her feet by Maxim de Winter, a wealthy older Englishman, before returning to his vast country estate to discover the rest of his world is still obsessed with his late, enigmatic first wife. I hesitate to write much more, both because the novel is so iconic and because it appears in another upcoming post (and because, like Bunny, it’s full of twists and turns), but for fans of mysteries, Gothic fiction, or just excellent classic literature, Rebecca is an absolutely stunning must-read.
Dreaming in Cuban by Cristina Garcia
If Rebecca has one of the best opening lines in literature, then Dreaming in Cuban (though I won’t spoil it) has one of the best final pages.* Following three generations of women in one Cuban family from the mid-1930s to the mid-80s, Garcia’s formally innovative classic grapples with the Cuban Revolution and its aftermath from all sides. In the world of Dreaming in Cuban, the personal is always political—the revolution is told through the lens of family conflict, and diaspora, dispossession, and national memory are all reckoned with through the relationship between mother and daughter.
*The best final line in literature is obviously Zora Neale Hurston’s “She called in her soul to come and see,” from Their Eyes Were Watching God, but Garcia’s is close.
Hangsaman and The Sundial by Shirley Jackson
While any of Jackson’s books could have made this list (and most did), Hangsaman and The Sundial are some of her most interesting—and most overlooked—works. In Hangsaman, a young writer finally escapes the purview of a domineering writer father, only to (quite literally) lose herself in her first semester of college. In the more satirical but no less horrific The Sundial, members of an old money family sequester themselves in their sprawling estate after becoming convinced that the apocalypse is imminent for everyone outside the gates. The Sundial might be an intense introduction if you’re new to Jackson (in which case, you should absolutely start with We Have Always Lived in the Castle), but it's where her prose is at its sharpest and most biting. I’ve saved my extended thoughts on Hangsaman, arguably Jackson’s most vulnerable book, for an upcoming review, but like The Sundial, it’s a criminally underrated entry in the author’s canon of haunted women.
Passing by Nella Larsen
What can I write about Passing that hasn’t already been said? Nella Larsen’s iconic 1929 novella, which follows two childhood friends—one living in Harlem as a Black woman and the other living in Chicago and passing for white—is well-deserving of its status as an American classic. Passing is a story about masks—the masks we adopt when we fall in love, the ones we adopt in order to be loved, and the ones we use to survive. It’s also a story of fluidity—fluid racial identity, fluid sexuality, fluid desires—in an era where fluidity of any kind feels impossible. It defies genre—part domestic fiction, part social commentary, part psychological horror—but is singular enough that it doesn’t need to be categorized at all. It’s one of the most important books of the 20th century, but it’s also one of the best. (On another note, it’s also the source of one of the most well-crafted literary adaptations in recent film history. Please become the seventh viewer of Rebecca Hall’s Passing on Netflix; it’s absolutely worth it).
Jazz by Toni Morrison
There is no incorrect favorite Toni Morrison novel to have, but Jazz was my first, and it holds up as one of her strongest. Following an intergenerational tapestry of characters from 1920s Harlem to the pre-Civil War American South, Jazz is a masterwork from a master of American fiction. Despite being just one part of a thematic trilogy for Morrison (alongside Beloved and Paradise), Jazz—non-linear, sprawling, and guided by Morrison’s most fascinating narrator—feels like one of the most distinctive entries in her body of work. With Jazz, Morrison accomplishes with ease a task that would be difficult for anyone else: experimenting with innovations to her form while maintaining the same kind of complex, layered plot that makes her fiction so compelling.
The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell
While I’m not the most frequent reader of historical fiction, I’ve recently enjoyed several novels that revisit marginalized and overlooked historical figures. In a (forthcoming) review of Xochitl Gonzalez’s Anita de Monte Laughs Last for CJLC, I wrote about using historical fiction to reimagine and reclaim lost histories, and O’Farrell’s novel is another masterclass in doing just that. Inspired by the real-life 16th-century marriage portrait of Italian duchess Lucrezia de Medici, who died under curious circumstances at age 16, The Marriage Portrait imagines a life for the enigmatic figure and what happened before, during, and after her mysterious death. Published two years after O’Farrell’s Hamnet, where the story of a historical icon is reimagined as an intimate family narrative, The Marriage Portrait sees O’Farrell perfect her craft as she blends a heartbreaking drama about sisterhood and familial duty and a reckoning with womanhood and history.
The Four Humors by Mina Seçkin
As you might have guessed from this blog’s title, I’m partial to the Alienated Young Woman novel. When I had the opportunity to interview Mina Seçkin in 2022, she discussed unmaking and reshaping the genre to decentralize the white, blonde, Western protagonist, and The Four Humors does just that. The novel’s protagonist, 20-year-old Turkish-American college student Sibel, certainly feels alienated, but not in the way we’ve come to understand the archetype through novels like My Year of Rest and Relaxation or The Bell Jar. Instead, Seçkin breaks apart the isolation trope, carving out a space for multigenerational immigrant narratives in the bildungsroman. Set over the course of one summer spent in Istanbul with her Turkish grandmother and American boyfriend, The Four Humors follows Sibel as she attempts to distract herself from the sudden death of her father by seeking out alternative treatments for her chronic headaches, and eventually uncovers a long-hidden family mystery along the way. If you only read one novel about a sad woman’s coming of age, make it this one.
Big Finish: Dracula by Bram Stoker, Carmilla by J. Sheridan Le Fanu, and Woman, Eating by Claire Kohda
Who is Count Dracula, if not an alienated young woman? He’s alone in a new land known to him only through his books. His romantic relationships are fleeting. He attempts to put on his most charming self in a bid to impress new friends—it doesn’t work. But long before Stoker created his iconic character, Irish author J. Sheridan Le Fanu had already written a prototypical vampire (and a prototypical alienated young woman) in his formative Carmilla. Yes, nearly three decades before Dracula pondered sexual repression, taboo, and isolation through the lens of supernatural monsters, Carmilla shaped the genre another way, imagining both monster and victim as teenage girls. Still, there’s a reason that Dracula, so seminal in its approach to vampirism-as-taboo, its masterfully crafted Gothic setting, and its enigmatic, perfectly menacing antagonist, is so widely celebrated even 127 years later. The only solution is to read both novels—and preferably a few times.
A century and a half later, Claire Kohda got at the heart of these formative novels in a way so little vampire media has with her debut novel Woman, Eating. The novel follows Lydia, a 23-year-old multiracial vampire navigating life on her own in London. More bildungsroman than traditional horror, Woman, Eating may first appear an unlikely successor to Dracula and Carmilla, but in it, Kohda captures the longing, taboo, and fundamentally, the isolation that underpins Stoker and Le Fanu’s iconic vampires.
You’ll read more about Dracula, Carmilla, Rebecca, and an all-new slate of books in my next Recommendation Guide. Until then, I’ll leave you with one last tip: for those interested in Carmilla, seek out the 2019 edition, edited by master of horror Carmen Maria Machado (personally, I’d read the full text once on its own before diving into Machado’s introduction and footnotes, but they’re a can’t-miss addition).
Honorable Mentions: The Vanishing Half and The Mothers by Brit Bennett, Heartburn by Nora Ephron, The Adult by Bronwyn Fischer, Anita de Monte Laughs Last by Xochitl Gonzalez, Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Jackson, Hamnet by O’Farrell, Sula by Morrison, Monstrilio by Gerardo Sámano Córdova (another recent CJLC review!), and, of course, The Secret History by Donna Tartt.
Up Next on Alienated Young Woman…
If you enjoyed this brief introduction, subscribe to Alienated Young Woman and never miss an issue! Next week, I’ll share my first Recommendation Guide, a primer on Gothic literature. In March, we’ll be talking Feud and Truman Capote’s Answered Prayers.
Collage by the author
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