Who or What is an Alienated Young Woman?

Reading recommendations for an (incomplete) introduction to girlhood’s bildungsroman

Apr 06, 2024

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Jump To: Running List of Alienated Young Woman Novels

Welcome back! After a month of introducing myself through reviews and recommendation guides, a thought occurred to me: I haven’t quite introduced the genre that inspired my publication title. So, if you’re not already familiar—or if you are—today, we’re discussing the big one: it’s the alienated young woman novel.

As the name implies, the “alienated young woman” generally refers to a young woman protagonist whose story is, in some sense, a coming of age, but who experiences that coming of age, for some reason or another, largely alone. Perhaps, like Jane Eyre, she’s devoid of family and origins, or perhaps she’s actually physically surrounded by people, but struggles to connect her own plight to theirs. Other times, she might just be deeply unlikable.

Because the bounds of what makes her are so permeable, there is really no one point in history where the alienated young woman begins. A classic example might be Sylvia Plath’s semi-autobiographical The Bell Jar, published in 1963 and following a 19-year-old aspiring writer who descends into mental illness over the course of a summer. But a decade before Plath, there was Shirley Jackson’s Hangsaman (1951), a campus novel about a 17-year-old writer who gradually loses her sense of self—and of reality—in her first year of college. And even before Jackson, there was Daphne du Maurier’s Gothic classic Rebecca (1938), in which an unnamed, unmoored 21-year-old narrator finds herself wrapped up in a relationship with a mysterious, wealthy older man, only to realize he may not be what he seems. (There’s an element of the alienated young woman who has always existed in horror—in The Haunting of Hill House’s Eleanor Vance, in Carmilla’s Laura, and certainly in Jane Eyre’s Jane Eyre.) Just as there is no shortage in literature of the bildungsroman—the story of a protagonist as they come of age and in doing so, come into their own moral existence—there is no shortage of literature about young women confronting their precarious social positions to make sense of what it means to come of age in the first place.

That said, the recommendations in this guide are contemporary, and for good reason—while the genre (if you can call it one genre) has existed for decades, the alienated young woman has become a particular fascination in the literary mind of the last few years. Call it the latent effect of HBO’s Girls, or the rise of the millennial novel, or a pandemic-era preoccupation with solitude, but the 2020s have shaped up to be the alienated young woman’s most prolific era to date. Her authors—Sally Rooney, Ottessa Moshfegh, Elif Batuman, and Mona Awad, to name a few—dominate niche Barnes & Noble displays under title cards like “Girlhood” and “Unhinged.” Film Twitter begs Kirsten Dunst to revisit her fabled potential adaptation of The Bell Jar. Everyone you know who reads has been pressured into having an opinion on My Year of Rest and Relaxation.

We love the alienated young woman, or else we love to be alternately amused and annoyed by the alienated young woman. We love that she is not a “we”—not some cohesive, bound chorus of comrades like the boys in The Virgin Suicides or the teen girls in Dizz Tate’s Brutes—but an “I,” left to figure things out alone. We love when she feels like us, but we love even more when she’s hateable. We love to feel seen by her, in some way deep and intimate and private, or to look at her from a distance and feel a sense of pride at not being her, or look back at her from greener pastures. We love to watch her get progressively older as the genre evolves—from her late teen years for Jackson and Plath to a comfortable 27ish for Rooney et al—and to lament the plight of the teenage-girl-in-her-20s in response. We love to watch her fall into unhealthy relationships or be misled by someone older and more powerful. We love to watch her fight with her mother. We love to watch her alienation push her toward something impulsive and entirely beyond the pale—fraud, theft, even murder. We love it when she has almost no plot at all.

I think we love the alienated young woman for many of the same reasons we love any bildungsroman; but we love equally when her coming of age doesn’t take her on some grand, romantic adventure, or even out of bed. We love her for her interiority even when she’s self-obsessed, or we can’t stand her internal monologue. We love that she is not at all universal, nor is she intended to be. She is a hyper-specific homage meant for the readers who see a bit of themselves in her struggle to negotiate with the world around her. Or else she’s an escape, or a cautionary tale, a peek through the looking glass at what could happen if we just stopped trying to negotiate in the first place.

With that in mind, this recommendation guide will feature a sampling platter of takes on the alienated young woman, from the classic bildungsroman to the supernatural. As I mentioned, the recommendations will be contemporary—mostly from the late 2010s and early 2020s—and will range from bestselling modern classics to lesser-known interpretations, to some that subvert the conventions in form or content altogether. I’ve tried to sort the recommendations into some loose categories or sub-genres, though I’ll note that the bounds are very permeable—the alienated young woman is a phenomenon that gives its authors space to explore genre, trope, and theme to their hearts’ content.

The Domestic Bildungsroman

We’ll open this guide with perhaps the most straightforward variety of alienated young woman novel. This genre has no shortage of novels that take the general shape of a bildungsroman, in that they are the story of their protagonist coming of age, confronting the realities of adulthood, and negotiating their own moral existence in that adult world. But unlike most classics of the bildungsroman genre, where this coming of age often happens through some adventure away from home, for the young women in this category, the story of that development is largely interior. It happens through emails with friends, through fights with parents, through breakups—and most of the time, it’s woven into their daily routine. Perhaps a marker of the digital age (or just an entertaining literary device), here, the alienated young woman is made a new woman, journey and all, largely within the confines of her studio apartment.

Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney (Faber & Faber, 2022)

Sally Rooney’s third book actually follows two alienated young women: best friends Alice, a buzzy novelist attempting to navigate her literary fame, and Eileen, a less-successful editor. Through alternating perspectives and interludes in the form of emails between the two friends, we follow Alice and Eileen as they navigate romantic interests, class divides, and their changing friendship. Though Rooney’s novels are so beloved in part because her characters feel lived in and real, these protagonists feel especially like two different Sally Rooneys—one a struggling writer attempting to hold onto passions as the world hustles around her, the other a famous author struggling to maintain a sense of self in the face of her growing personal brand. Like all of Rooney’s books, Beautiful World is driven far more by character than plot, but this one’s focus on the evolving friendship between two women as they settle into adult life (and adult morals) against the backdrop of an increasingly collapsing world makes it particularly compelling on both fronts.

The Four Humors by Mina Seçkin (Catapult, 2021)

At the start of The Four Humors, Sibel is 20 and reeling from the sudden death of her father, a death for which she can’t help but feel responsible. While spending the summer at her family’s home in Istanbul with her Turkish grandmother and her American boyfriend, Cooper, Sibel becomes desperate to find a cure for her mysterious, chronic migraines, putting off her responsibilities and turning to ancient medicine for answers. Along the way, she finds herself at the center of a multigenerational family secret, and realizes her own unraveling may be part of a larger thread. In her debut novel, Seçkin intricately constructs—then disrupts—the alienated young woman, weaving multigenerational family narratives and historical fiction into the fabric of a classic bildungsroman.

Maame by Jessica George (St. Martin’s Press, 2023)

In London, late bloomer Maddie is struggling to break away from her Ghanaian parents—her emotionally (and physically) distant mother and her disabled father, for whom she serves as primary caretaker—and start her adult life. She moves out of her childhood home, and the balance of her new friend group, dating life, and job start to make her feel like a real grown-up—until a family tragedy strikes, and she’s left to pick up the pieces. Maame is part Sex and the City, part Chewing Gum, part Lady Bird, a poignant story about self-discovery, familial bonds, and growing up.

The Rachel Incident by Caroline O’Donoghue (Knopf, 2023)

I’ve mentioned this novel before as one that complicates the notion of an alienated young woman novel by placing a platonic love story at the center, so alongside Beautiful World, I think it makes for an interesting bookend to our first section. The titular Rachel begins the novel in her final year of college as she nurses a crush on her mild-mannered literature professor, Dr. Byrne. Then, she meets James Devlin, her charismatic, spontaneous, closeted coworker and eventual roommate, and her life is never the same. Against the backdrop of the post-2008 Irish recession, James and Rachel form an intricate, inextricable bond that only grows more complicated when they find themselves wrapped up in the marriage of Dr. Byrne and his younger wife, Deenie. Funnier than most of the books on this list—though just as poignant—The Rachel Incident is an intimate exploration of codependency and self-discovery that feels like a blend of Rooney’s literary ennui and the best of HBO’s Girls. In short, it’s a truly seminal work in the millennial canon.

2025 Addition: Margo’s Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe (William Morrow, 2024)

In a genre where prose can feel exceedingly trancelike and stories exceedingly bleak, Margo’s Got Money Troubles is a refreshing change of pace. Margo Millet is hardly the depressed, brooding, upper-middle-class liberal arts student often synonymous with the genre; by the time we meet her, a whirlwind year has struck her off that path entirely. Now, she’s a single teen mother with a fast-increasing rent and limited options to get by. She is, as I recently described her, an “alienated young woman not afforded the luxury of wallowing in this title.”

Much like The Four Humors or Maame, Thorpe’s take on the alienated young woman also brings us one for whom alienation does not mean isolation from her dysfunctional family. When Margo’s semi-estranged father, a former professional wrestler, turns up at her door, she sees a unique opportunity to use his promotional prowess to remedy her financial situation in a new way: by helping to make her an OnlyFans sensation. But how long can the precarious conditions of her almost-happy family really last? With a witty, formally inventive narrator at the helm who oscillates between naivete, regret, and acceptance, Margo’s Got Money Troubles is a bildungsroman for a protagonist forced quickly and brutally into adulthood. But, in a refreshing twist on the genre, it manages to find humor and promise at every turn.

The Campus Novel

While the previous category may have been the most straightforward interpretation, perhaps the most prolific category of alienated young woman novel has been the campus novel—which is exactly what it sounds like, a novel that takes place predominantly or entirely on a university campus. Granted, this is more of a Venn diagram situation: while there’s certainly overlap, the “campus novel” designation applies to far more than just alienated young women. Some of this canon’s most famous examples, like Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, are outside of the alienated young woman category entirely. Still, the two classifications share a long, winding history, from novels like Hangsaman to contemporary classics like Elif Batuman’s The Idiot. After all, where better to be alienated, young, and barrelling into adulthood than on your college campus?

The Idiot by Elif Batuman (Penguin, 2017)

In Batuman’s semi-autobiographical debut, the author follows Selin, an 18-year-old Turkish-American freshman at Harvard, in the year following her first day of school. Shy, awkward, and realizing she’s easily susceptible to the influence of her peers, Selin soon becomes enmeshed in a half-friendship, half-crush with Ivan, an older student from Hungary, until she finds herself quite literally alone in a remote Hungarian village in a half-hearted attempt to stay close. In The Idiot, Batuman’s prose is precise to an almost anthropological degree, making Selin part character, part observer—a protagonist who must first stumble toward the realization that she is a protagonist. Guided in part by Selin’s desire for Ivan, in part by her lopsided friendship with the far more decisive Svetlana, and most of all, by her desire to uncover some hidden sense of self, The Idiot is almost deceptively removed, an endless series of pithy observations giving way to a deeply personal narrative underneath.

An honorable mention goes to the novel’s 2022 sequel, Either/Or. Here, Batuman tracks Selin’s return to campus for sophomore year in a story that stays true to what enraptures readers about The Idiot while refining Batuman’s singular prose.

The Adult by Bronwyn Fischer (Algonquin, 2023)

At a large, impersonal university in Toronto, 18-year-old Natalie begins her freshman year by struggling to adjust to the move from her small hometown. That is until she meets Nora, an older, somewhat mysterious neighbor whose grown-up life becomes the object of Natalie’s constant desire. The two begin an affair that quickly evolves from casual to obsessive, and Natalie begins to suspect there are things about Nora—and adulthood—that she has yet to discover. With hypnotic prose and a narrator tracking their own depersonalization in real-time, The Adult reads like a trance; albeit, one where insidious realities loom around every corner.

My Last Innocent Year by Daisy Alpert Florin (Henry Holt & Co., 2023)

In 1998, as the country obsesses over the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, college senior Isabel is reeling from a nonconsensual sexual experience in her close-knit undergrad community. Then, she meets R.H. Connelly, a past-his-prime English professor with an exceptional interest in her. As she attempts to simultaneously navigate her budding relationship with Connelly and forget her assault, Isabel begins to realize adult womanhood may not be what it seems—and she may have entered it faster than anticipated. With one eye carefully fixed on history, Florin creates a novel that is masterful in its interiority, an alienated young woman novel for anyone looking back on their own coming of age, or anyone right in the middle of it.

Mrs. S by K Patrick (Europa Editions, 2023)

This is the second appearance of Mrs. S in a recommendation guide after its feature in last month’s A Primer on Haunting, but for good reason. There’s no shortage of overlap between the alienated young woman and the Gothic novel, and Patrick’s debut is a formally innovative twist on both. Following a 22-year-old nameless narrator who has left Australia for a job at an elite Catholic girl’s school on the English countryside, Mrs. S pushes the bounds of what, and who, an alienated young woman can be. The narrator—identified as a woman by others, but whose actual gender identity isn’t revealed firsthand—is unlike the archetypal alienated young woman in more ways than one, including because they enter the world of Mrs. S feeling relatively secure. Then, in a turn very much like the archetypal alienated young woman, an affair with an alluring, mysterious older figure—the titular Mrs. S, guidance counselor and wife of the headmaster—throws their sense of self entirely off course. In Mrs. S, Patrick’s winding prose captures loneliness in a way only the best alienated young woman novels truly have, to build a story that about finding someone else that is really a story about losing oneself.

Anita de Monte Laughs Last by Xochitl Gonzalez (Flatiron,2024)

In 1998, Raquel Toro is a junior at Brown, studying art history and preparing to enter a lily-white art world where she only rarely sees herself reflected. In 1985, Anita de Monte is a rising star in the world of postmodern art—until her sudden, suspicious death brings her legacy to an immediate halt. Partially inspired by the true story of Cuban artist Ana Mendieta, Anita de Monte Laughs Last oscillates between these two alienated young women narrators to tell a story about representation, memory, and what it means to make space for yourself in a world designed for someone else.

Full Review Here

2025 Addition: Disorientation by Elaine Hsieh Chou (Penguin, 2022)

At 29, Ingrid Yang is pushing against the clock of alienated young womanhood—and against a much more tangible academic clock as she enters the eighth year of a PhD she can’t seem to get excited about. She’s lost interest in her dissertation subject, the iconic Chinese-American poet Xiao-Wen Chou, and dreams of the day she can escape the confines of studying only the “Chinese-y” themes that everyone in her life, from her enthusiastic white advisor to her passive white fiancé, insist she’s uniquely suited to explore. But her late nights searching for inspiration in Chou’s archive soon lend themselves to another kind of discovery about the so-called icon—one that threatens not just her future in academia, but the very foundations of her chosen field. Despite its over 400-page length, Disorientation operates at breakneck speed, sending Ingrid through a sometimes hilarious, sometimes harrowing (but always thrilling) roller coaster of losing her naivete as she confronts the very institution where she’s built her life.

The Alienated Young Criminal

In 1862, British novelist Mary Elizabeth Braddon released Lady Audley’s Secret, in which the titular Lady Audley deceives, manipulates and possibly even murders the men who surround her, motivated purely by her own self-interest. Early critics panned the novel, chastising Braddon for writing a “female Mephistopheles”1 when she should have known that “a woman cannot fill such a part.”

A century and a half later, we’re still wrestling with the idea of the unlikable female protagonist, much less one who commits unabashed wrongs. But perhaps the most fascinating alienated young women are the ones who do just that—those whose alienation leads them down a path of wild, sometimes surreal destruction. If the typical alienated young woman is a trainwreck, this version of her was derailed long before she left the station. What starts as a fairly standard entry into the canon subverts expectations—and goes completely off the rails—when its protagonist is revealed to carry some dark, unhinged desire. And really, we can’t help but root for her to act on it.

Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh (Penguin, 2015)

In 1960s New England, Eileen is a lonely 21-year-old living with her alcoholic father and filling her days as a secretary at the local men’s prison. Then Rebecca, the prison’s enigmatic, alluring counselor, takes a special interest in Eileen, and Eileen begins to question if there’s anything she wouldn’t do to get out of her small town. Moshfegh is clearly no stranger to alienated young women, amorality, and characters who are difficult to root for, but this, her debut novel, feels realer, more visceral, and ultimately, more engaging than anything she’s done since.

Bunny by Mona Awad (Penguin, 2019)

You might remember this one from my Favorite Reads roundup back in February, and it ranks quite highly on this list as well. In Bunny, an introverted MFA student finds herself drawn into the exclusive world of her wealthy, secretive classmates, only to find there’s much more to their artistic process than what meets the eye. Mona Awad is simultaneously a master of the alienated woman novel and an author whose novels are unlike anything you could possibly expect. Part Frankenstein by way of Rocky Horror, part The Secret History, and part Heathers, Bunny is Awad’s chaotic surrealism and deceptive prose at its peak.

Dreaming of You by Melissa Lozada-Oliva (Astra House, 2021)

In Dreaming of You, Melissa is a young, creatively-blocked writer who, in a desperate bid for reinvention, resurrects the spirit of Tejana icon Selena Quintanilla. But when the pair’s budding friendship is disrupted by Selena’s resurgence to fame, Melissa’s font of inspiration gives way to something darker. Even among this group, Dreaming of You feels distinct, and not just because of its novel-in-verse format; its protagonist commits some of the most complicated, grievous acts of anyone on this list, but there is still some part of us that can’t help but love—or at least pity—her.

Full Review Here

The Guest by Emma Cline (Random House, 2023)

It’s late summer in the Hamptons, and 22-year-old grifter Alex has just been kicked out by her wealthy older boyfriend. But instead of returning to New York, where her resources are slim, Alex makes an impulse decision to remain on the island until she can regain her lover’s favor. Over the next five days, Cline follows Alex as she drifts from wealthy benefactor to wealthy benefactor, passing as a fellow resident of their exclusive community while secretly scraping by in a high-stress attempt to outrun her fate. Cline’s story is fiercely original and truly unlike anything else on this list, but her anxious prose makes Alex a paragon of the genre—her protagonist may be scrappy, amoral, and nihilistic, but more than anything, she’s alone.

Yellowface by R.F. Kuang (William Morrow, 2023)

It’s been years since her once-rising star burned out, and June Hayward is now a mediocre author brimming with envy for her sole, distant friend, literary darling Athena Liu. When a freak accident leaves June in possession of Athena’s final, unpublished draft, June sees an opportunity for reinvention. She becomes Juniper Song, the ethnically (and artistically) ambiguous author of a novel with equally nebulous origins, but her newfound literary stardom may come with a cost of its own. If any alienated young woman novel exemplifies the more unhinged side of the genre, it’s this one. June, though she can at times read as underdeveloped, moves through the world with no moral compass other than her own impulse, acting purely on desire. In its strongest moments, this makes the novel read like Dracula, if Dracula were the narrator. Granted, Yellowface isn’t all strong moments; Kuang’s first foray into literary fiction after reaching superstardom as a fantasy author sometimes feels inconsistent in its characterizations, and other times insistently, perpetually on the nose in its satire. But at its core, Yellowface is a smart, exceptionally biting novel that forces its readers to dig far beyond the moral quandary that makes up its premise and grapple with several unlikeable, unhinged—and most certainly alienated—young women.

2025 Addition: Poor Deer by Claire Oshetsky (Ecco, 2024)

There is perhaps no alienated young woman younger—or less assured she will make it to womanhood at all—than Margaret Murphy, the protagonist of Claire Oshetsky’s sensational second novel. When we first meet Margaret, she’s just four years old, and already swept up in a vivid world of imagination and storytelling that gives color to an otherwise mundane existence in the rural northeast. But when a tragic accident leaves her best friend dead, Margaret’s tacit, secret involvement in the incident—and her unmanageable guilt—throw the next dozen years of her life into orbit, threatening to combust everything she holds dear. Poor Deer is not just a magical realist fable about grief, guilt, and forgiveness, but a fractured, twisted elegy for two lost childhoods.

Introducing: The Alienated Young Cryptid

Every alienated young woman is isolated on some social-emotional level. Whether it’s warranted or not, she feels somehow fundamentally unlike her peers. In our previous category, that isolation was made tangible by some real-life sin—murder, theft, fraud, etc.—that left her quite literally separate from other women. But sometimes, at least in more recent additions to the genre, the alienated young woman is unlike her peers at all—in fact, we’re not quite sure whether she’s an alienated young human woman in the first place. Interestingly, however, these novels aren’t necessarily horror. Instead, the protagonist’s supernatural existence is simply a backdrop that catalyzes her bildungsroman. She is a vampire, shapeshifter, or some other mythical figure, but one whose story is just as much about coming of age and coming into her own as any shy college freshman or listless millennial writer.

You’ll notice this sub-genre is not (yet) quite as prolific as some of the other categories on this list, but the following books twist, contort, and reinterpret the alienated young woman trope, taking the anxieties of entering adulthood to a supernatural extreme.

Woman, Eating by Claire Kohda (HarperVia, 2022)

In Woman, Eating, Lydia is a 23-year-old multiracial artist living on her own for the first time in the heart of London. She’s also, secondarily, a vampire, one who dreams of real food and is desperate to avoid consuming human flesh without her mother to guide her. When she finds herself struggling to source alternative blood, ill-suited to most human company, and incurably lonely, Lydia embarks on a journey—to reconcile her vampire and human sides, to come into her own as an artist, and to find something to eat. Clever, poignant, and hypnotic, Kohda’s debut novel is just as much a successor to Carmilla as it is a peer to the contemporary novels on this list like Beautiful World or Maame. Kohda has created a vampire novel in which monster and protagonist are one, and in doing so, expertly weaves classic horror tropes into a story far more interested in its alienated young woman’s coming of age.

Notes on Her Color by Jennifer Neal (Catapult, 2023)

In the heart of Florida, 18-year-old Gabrielle is hiding a secret: though her heritage is Black and Indigenous, she’s inherited from her matrilineal line the ability to change the color of her skin. She’s Black at school, eggshell white in the company of her controlling father, and on her own, any shade. Then her mother, the only person in her life who shares her ability, experiences a devastating mental health crisis that leaves Gabrielle alone with her father and struggling to retain a sense of self. But when she meets Dominique, a confident, proudly Black and openly queer musical prodigy, Gabrielle begins to discover not just her own talent, but a path toward existing outside of her parents and their secrets. Neal’s novel is sweeping, innovative, and singular, simultaneously a heartfelt ode to mothers and daughters and a fantastical journey of self-discovery.

2025 Addition: Thirst by Marina Yuszczuk, translated by Heather Cleary (Dutton, 2024)

As Carmilla—and much later, Claire Kohda’s Woman, Eating—made clear, the vampire genre is prime breeding ground for the alienated young woman. It’s natural; by nature, the vampire is doomed to live forever, and more often than not, does so alone. (So, while there may already be one vampire novel in this brief section, Thirst is worth the repetition, taking a similar inspiration in an entirely different direction). Like Carmilla before her, the nameless vampire who narrates the first half of Marina Yuszczuk’s Thirst spends most of that eternity wandering through Europe, occasionally taking a victim as she searches for a connection to end her desperate, all-consuming loneliness. And, like Carmilla before her, when that connection appears, it’s in the form of another desperately lonely human woman. Thirst transforms when the human subject of the vampire’s obsessions—an anthropologist wandering the cemeteries of Buenos Aires as she prepares for the death of her terminally ill mother—overtakes the narrative, shifting from the vampire’s meditations on an eternity of loneliness to a human on the knife-edge of mortality. Alternatively rageful and quiet, Thirst is a hypnotic take on the loneliest of monsters.

Honorable Mention

Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie (Riverhead, 2017)

In this modern retelling of Antigone, Sophocles’s royal family is reimagined as the British Muslim Pasha family. Three siblings—teenagers Aneeka and Parvais and their older sister, Isma—are the now-orphaned children of a jihadi father when they meet Eamonn, the son of the notorious assimilationist British Home Secretary Karamat Lone. When Parvaiz finds himself lured in by ISIS recruiters, the remaining characters find their relationships only grow more complicated, until they’re each forced to confront questions about identity, family, and the reality of Muslim life in an increasingly conservative Britain. This novel is unlike most of the other entries on this list—for one, it’s narrated by five principal characters, four alienated young people and the nebulous conservative authority who binds them together—but it is quintessentially a story about the harsh realities of growing up. Shamsie excellently blends the expected isolation of entering adulthood with larger questions about identity, assimilation, and who is allowed to mourn, and does so while barreling toward a devastating conclusion. Though a literal adaptation of the ancient Antigone, Home Fire manages to feel surprising and fresh at every turn.

Next on My Reading List

All-Night Pharmacy by Ruth Madievsky (2023)
In Every Mirror She’s Black by Lola Akinmade Åkerstrom (Sourcemarks, 2021)
Mona at Sea by Elizabeth Gonzalez James (2021)
Old Enough by Haley Jakobson (Dutton, 2023)
Sunset by Jessie Cave (2021)
Woo Woo by Ella Baxter (Catapult, 2024)

As always, my comments are open, so I’d love to hear your favorites if you didn’t see them listed here!

My Running List of Alienated Young Woman Novels

The Adult by Bronwyn Fischer (Algonquin, 2023)* **
A Hundred Other Girls by Iman Hariri-Kia (Sourcebooks Landmark, 2022)
A Lady’s Guide to Selling Out by Sally Franson (HarperCollins, 2018)
Anita de Monte Laughs Last by Xochitl Gonzalez (Flatiron, 2024) (full review here)**
All’s Well by Mona Awad (Simon & Schuster, 2021)**
All This Could Be Different by Sarah Thankham Mathews (Viking, 2022)**
Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2022)
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (Harper Perennial, originally published 1953)
Big Swiss by Jen Beagin (Simon & Schuster, 2022)
Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors (Random House, 2024)
Bunny by Mona Awad (Viking, 2019)*
Carmilla by J. Sheridan le Fanu, edited by Carmen Maria Machado (Lanternfish Press Clockwork Edition, 2019, originally published 1872)*
Caucasia by Danzy Senna (Riverhead, 1999)
The Coin by Yasmin Zaher (Catapult, 2024)
Disorientation by Elaine Hsieh Chou (Penguin, 2022)
Dreaming of You: A Novel in Verse by Melissa Lozada-Oliva (Astra House, 2021) (full review here)
Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh (Penguin, 2015)
Elsewhere by Alexis Schaitkin (Celadon, 2022)
Emma by Jane Austen (Penguin Classics, originally published 1816)
The Four Humors by Mina Seçkin (Catapult, 2021)* **
The Girls by John Bowen (McNally Editions, originally published 1986)
The Glow by Jessie Gaynor (Random House, 2023)
The Guest by Emma Cline (Random House, 2023)**
Gunk Baby by Jamie Marina Lau (Hachette, 2021)
Hangsaman by Shirley Jackson (Penguin Classics, originally published 1948)* (full review here)
The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson (Penguin Classics, originally published 1959)*
Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie (Riverhead, 2017)
Hungerstone by Kat Dunn (Zando, 2025)
The Idiot by Elif Batuman (Penguin, 2017)
Lucky Dogs by Helen Schulman (Knopf, 2023)
Maame by Jessica George (St. Martin’s Press, 2023)
Margo’s Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe (William Morrow, 2024)
Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (Del Rey, 2020)
Mrs. S by K. Patrick (Europa Editions, 2023)
My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell (William Morrow, 2017)
My Last Innocent Year by Daisy Alpert Florin (Henry Holt and Co., 2022)**
My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh (Penguin, 2018)
Natural Beauty by Ling Ling Huang (Dutton, 2024)
Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen (Penguin Classics, originally published 1817)
Notes on Her Color by Jennifer Neal (Catapult, 2023)
Nothing To See Here by Kevin Wilson (Ecco, 2019)
Poor Deer by Claire Oshetsky (Ecco, 2024)
The Princess of 72nd Street by Elaine Kraf (The Modern Library, originally published 1979)
Private Rites by Julia Armfield (Flatiron, 2024)
The Rachel Incident by Caroline O’Donoghue (Knopf, 2023)**
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier (Avon, originally published 1938)*
Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark (Tom Doherty Associates, 2020)
Ripe by Sarah Rose Etter (Scribner, 2023)
Rouge by Mona Awad (Penguin, 2023)
Sirens & Muses by Antonia Angress (Ballantine, 2023)
Sisters of the Lost Nation by Nick Medina (Berkley, 2023)
Sour Cherry by Natalia Theodoridou (Tin House, 2023)
Sula by Toni Morrison (Knopf, 1973)
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston (Amistad, originally published 1938)*
Thirst by Marina Yuszczuk, translated by Heather Cleary (Dutton, 2024)
We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson (Penguin Classics, originally published 1962)*
Woman, Eating by Claire Kohda (HarperVia, 2022)* **
Villette by Charlotte Brontë (Penguin Classics, originally published 1853)
Yellowface by R.F. Kuang (HarperCollins, 2023)

* Mentioned in “A Few of My Favorite Reads”
** Mentioned as one of “My 20 Favorite Novels of the 2020s”

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