Women NOT in Love

The other day I saw a great post that made me stop and think. It was a call for books about women that have absolutely nothing to do with romance. I was absolutely shocked by how long it took me to come up with a only handful of books. 

Think about it, how many can you think of off the top of your head? No young crush, no heartbreak leading to self-discovery, no casual dating, try to think of books that have no love in them at all. It's way tougher than it should be. 

The opposite doesn't seem to be true at all. I can think of a dozen books about men that don't involve romance. There are coming-of-age stories, thrillers, mysteries, and classics like Moby Dick and Heart of Darkness. There are so many! But when you hold up the same criteria for books with a woman protagonist, the options are scarce. 

I understand that love: having it, losing it, trying to find it, etc. can make a great story. But women are complex and there are a lot of stories to tell about them that don't include love. 

Here are the books that I finally came up with and honestly there's a couple that I think are questionable.

The Whale Rider, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Flavia de Luce series, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Kinsey Milhone series, The Handmaid’s Tale, Where'd You Go, Bernadette, Still Alice, Wild, The Eyre Affair, Emily of New Moon, The Optimist's Daughter, The Thirteenth Tale, The Likeness, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, True Grit, Little Bee

What books could you add to the list? 

Added suggestions from you guys:  Nervous Conditions, Code Name Verity, Dolores Claiborne, The Gathering, The Year of the Flood, The Invention of Wings, We Were Liar,  Silver Sparrow, Matilda, Vanessa Michael Monroe series, The Girl Who Played with Fire, The Nightingale, Alice in Wonderland, Room, A Little Princess, Station Eleven, The Just City, and Gray Mountain.

Lovely painting by Jacquelyn Bischak from here.

Tiny Beautiful Things

Tiny Beautiful Things 
Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar 
by Cheryl Strayed  
★★★★★

I was a bit wary of this book when I first heard about it. It’s a collection of advice columns about life and love, and I couldn’t think of why I needed to read someone else's advice about someone else's problems. But as I began to dig in to each letter I quickly realized that you don't read the book for Sugar’s advice. You read it because she manages to share intimate parts of her own life in a way that makes you feel connected to the entire human race in all its beautiful fallible glory.  

She is so honest and vulnerable in these columns. She uses examples from your own life to advise people on each of their issues. You don't have to be able to relate to her experience for these letters to touch you. They reach beyond the boundaries of what small sliver of the world each of us have seen. They get at the center of things, the piece of our hearts that drives us and scares us. She writes about losing love, being lonely, being brave, and being willing to do the right thing in the right moment even if it terrifies you. Often the thing she talks about our painful to read. There are people all over this world experiencing heartbreak in different ways and she never shies away from tough issues. 

I was completely blown away by her ability to expose herself to these strangers. By letting herself be so vulnerable even her harshest advice has a tender feel. I admired her ability to speak truth to people. Even if the answer isn’t what they might want to hear, she still told it like she saw it. 

Honestly, I wish I’d read this book before reading Wild. I was turned off at first in that book because it felt like she was using her mother’s death as an excuse for her bad behavior. It won me over in the end, but I think if I’d gotten to this one first I would have understood her better. She’s very honest and open about her failings and struggles and that’s incredibly rare. 

BOTTOM LINE: Loved it. You don’t have to agree with all or any of her advice, just treat the whole book as a unique memoir. Strayed personal history is woven into every single reply to a letter. She bares her soul to her readers to help them deal with their own issues and the result is beautiful.  

A Few Notes:
There are a couple times where she reads more than one letter in a row and then answers all of them at one time. The first time she did this I thought I missed something because I was listening, not reading a hard copy. I was worried that the chapter had skipped ahead of something, so just a heads up. 

In her review, Trish mentioned that you shouldn't try to plow through them quickly and I agree. I listened to an audio version and tried to just listen to a few at a time. I do think they have a bigger impact that way and they are pretty intense.

Wild

Wild 

From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

by Cheryl Strayed

★★★★☆

So I was really not excited about this book. People kept recommending it and I just wasn’t interested. I finally caved and decided to listen to the audiobook. I got about 1/3 of the way through it and I just couldn’t stand Cheryl. She was whining about everything and it seemed to me like she was just using the tragedy she’d experienced to justifying her bad behavior. My Mom died when I was younger too, so I feel pretty strongly about people using things like that as excuses to make horrible life choices. Grief does not give you the right to commit adultery or use heroine.

That being said, Cheryl grew on me as the book progressed. She was so honest about her experiences. She could have sugar-coated it or painted herself in a better light, but instead she just lays herself bare, faults and all. The result is an incredibly intense book that was surprisingly powerful.

Cheryl’s memoir mainly covers her time hiking 1,100 miles on the Pacific Crest Trail. It flashes back and forth between the grueling hike, her childhood and her early twenties when her mother died and her marriage ended.

She writes with such delicate attention to detail that you can almost feel the blisters forming on her aching feet. There’s one disturbing scene with a horse that remains particularly ingrained in my mind. Cheryl is just so raw throughout the book. She’s was an inexperienced hiker and wasn’t prepared for her trip, but she still pushes on. She is trying to process her grief, the bad decisions she’s made, her future life, etc. all while putting her body through the most intense physical experience of her life.

BOTTOM LINE: I struggled through the beginning, but I’m glad I stuck with it. Cheryl might be a very different person from me, but her willingness to be honest about her struggle made for an intense memoir that I couldn’t put down.

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Image from here.