The Books That Broke Me Open in 2024
A Year of Reading My Way Through the Contradictions of Womanhood
One night in July, I woke in the middle of the night. I was trembling. Sweat was gathering on my forehead, and I couldn’t tell if it was the heavy heat of summer or something burning inside me. I looked over at the familiar shape of my fiancé at the time–snoring, perfectly at peace next to me. How can one person in a partnership be so at rest–satisfied–when the other is warring with themselves? I gathered my things and moved out to the couch.
Under the spinning fan, I cracked open the book I had just started. Now, I have always been an avid reader. The first half of 2024 was filled with books about raising puppies, sobriety, and fantasy. But on this sweltering summer night, something in the literary cosmos shifted. Desperately lost in my relationship, unsure where to turn, what to do, and whether or not staying or leaving was the portal–I opened Glynnis MacNicol’s newest memoir, I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself. Earlier that day, I had told my now-ex about the book, and how much it made me want to return to Paris. He told me it was likely just fueling my escapist tendencies. This was one of the many methods of manipulation—being made to feel like my desires were maladaptive; that I wanted too much.
What I didn’t realize, as I laid in the dark reading MacNicol’s account of her pursuit of pleasure in Paris, was that I was embarking on a study of womanhood, desire, and, perhaps most potently, rage. This study coincided with a period of intense upheaval in my own life–the end of a four-year-long relationship, calling off an engagement, and buying a one-way ticket to Europe. These books were not gentle companions on this journey; they were confrontations. They cracked open the soft underbelly of womanhood, laid bare the raw nerve of desire, unraveled the mythos of motherhood, and exposed the uneasy seams of marriage. Some simmered with a quiet rage, others seemed to howl–begging me to make a change in my own life.
None of these books offered answers, nor did they ask for permission to be palatable. This–the complex depictions of womanhood–seemed to unleash something inside of me. They seemed to permit me to exchange my palatability for expansion. Each book mirrored, in its own way, the contradictions of being a woman–feral and tender, selfish and sacrificial, lost and entirely self-possessed.
Here are the books that wrecked me, rebuilt me, and made me feel a little less alone in the contradictions of womanhood last year.
The Dance of the Dissident Daughter, Sue Monk Kidd—June 2024
One afternoon in early June, I sat by the pool and cracked open Dance of the Dissident Daughter. My dear friend Kacie and I are constantly recommending books to each other, and she recently had been reflecting on this book nonstop. I believe books come into our life for a reason sometimes, and this one was no different. Although, Kidd’s story is less of a book and more of a map–a guide for women waking up to the silent agreements they’ve made with a world that asks them to shrink. It was this book that made me ask myself, where am I making myself small? Kidd’s journey from the confines of patriarchal Christianity to the expansive, untamed terrain of the Divine Feminine is both deeply personal and universally resonant. She writes with the clarity of a woman who has stared directly into the void of her own conditioning and decided to step through it. The story pulses with the rawness of transformation–the grief, rage, bewilderment, and ultimately, the reclamation. It is only with the hindsight of time and space that I see this story as a preview of the baptism by fire I was about to experience. Kidd’s words are a permission slip to unlearn, unravel, and find sacredness in your sovereignty. She seems to whisper, what truth have you been taught to forget?
I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself, Glynnis MacNicol — July 2024
When I saw the cover of Glynnis MacNicol’s book, I immediately ordered it. It was the amalgamation of the bold, chartreuse green font, the Renaissance painting of the woman lying in bed with her ass uncovered, and the subtitle–one woman’s pursuit of pleasure in Paris. I was sold. It is this book, on a hot, sleepless July night, that began my unraveling. This is the book that made me think, desperately and shamefully, is the life I’m building one I truly want or something I’ve been sold? As I voraciously read MacNicol’s story, I felt myself begin to reconsider my entire life. It feels like a manifesto disguised as memoir–sharp and unapologetic. As a woman in her forties who has consciously chosen not to have children or get married, MacNicol’s exploration of pleasure is both liberating and confrontational. It dismantles the cultural script that ties a woman’s worth to milestones like marriage and motherhood. Instead, she offers an alternative: what if joy, autonomy, and self-invention were the point? There is a rage tucked between the humor–this rage would become my greatest teacher in the coming months. MacNicol’s rage is the kind that fuels reinvention–a quiet rebellion dressed up as a good time.
All Fours, Miranda July—July 2024
As I finished the final pages of MacNicol’s memoir, I saw a post on Instagram. It was a woman holding I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself alongside a copy of a new novel called All Fours. The caption read, “These two books are like cousins that would get together, drink dirty martinis, and tell their darkest secrets.” I don’t think I’ve ever ordered a book so fast. Reading All Fours feels like eavesdropping on someone’s most private, unhinged thoughts–only they are your thoughts, too, the ones a woman could never dare say out loud. Miranda July’s protagonist navigates the mundane and the surreal in equal intensity, blurring the line between the two until you’re not sure you’re laughing because it’s funny or because it’s too real–poking at the ugliest, most hidden parts of your psyche. All Fours is a meditation on desire–not the glossy, cinematic kind, but the messy, inconvenient longing that creeps in when you’re supposed to be content. The book hums with July’s signature weirdness, but beneath its quirky veneer is a quiet desperation–a yearning for permission to want more without apology. This shame for wanting more cracked through the center of me. I had been carrying so much shame for wanting, and reading this book was the shift–towards what I wasn’t yet sure. July writes a story that is absurd, intimate, and disarmingly honest–a reminder that sometimes the most radical thing a woman can do is admit that she is not satisfied.
Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage, Elizabeth Gilbert—August 2024
I picked up Committed in early August. By that point in the summer, I was having frequent panic attacks, and it felt like the books I was reading were both helping and hurting—offering me language for feelings I didn’t want to name. Only now do I realize I was looking outside of myself for an answer to a question only I could answer. I had been engaged for a year with no wedding plans, caught between the life I was building and the quiet, persistent question: Is this what I want? How much of my life is my own idea?
Gilbert doesn’t write about marriage with the glow of happily-ever-after; instead, she unravels it, thread by thread, exposing its history, its contradictions, and the way it shapes—and sometimes stifles—women’s autonomy. It was both comforting and disorienting to see my own fears reflected back at me, not as personal failings, but as part of a much larger, messier story that women have been navigating for centuries.
What I appreciated most about this book is how Gilbert holds space for ambivalence, for the gray areas where love exists alongside doubt. Committed isn’t about finding the right answers—it’s about asking the right questions. Questions like: What does it mean to tether your life to someone else’s? Where do I end, and where does “we” begin? Is it okay to love someone and still feel trapped by the shape of the life you’re creating together?
Gilbert’s honesty gave me permission to sit with my uncertainty without rushing to resolve it. I realized that sometimes, the most radical thing I can do is admit that I am not sure.
Liars, Sarah Manguso—August 2024
In August, a month where everything felt brittle and sharp, like I was one wrong thought away from unraveling, I went to New York City for work. I sat on a park bench with my dearest friend, Joanna, and I told her everything that had been happening–things I’d been keeping too close to my chest for nearly two years. This was the moment something finally shifted for me–watching one of the women I love most in the world hear the pain I was experiencing, and seeing it mirrored back in her eyes. This is when I knew something had changed irrevocably.
That afternoon, I picked up Liars, in a bookshop somewhere in Brooklyn. Manguso’s writing didn’t soothe that sharpness in my chest—it leaned into it, pressed on the bruise, and asked me to look closer. Liars isn’t the kind of book you read for comfort; it’s the kind you read when you’re ready to interrogate the stories you’ve told yourself to survive.
Manguso writes with surgical precision, each sentence stripped to its barest, most unsettling truth. The book is about lies, but not the obvious kind. It’s about the quieter ones: the lies we tell to keep the peace, to maintain control, to convince ourselves we’re fine when we’re not. Reading it felt like holding up a mirror and realizing I’d been squinting past my own reflection for years.
What struck me most was how Manguso refuses redemption arcs or tidy resolutions. She’s not interested in moral clarity; she’s interested in the mess, the contradictions that make us human. Liars made me sit with the discomfort of my own hypocrisy, the ways I’ve curated versions of myself to be palatable—even to me.
By the end, I didn’t feel lighter—I felt exposed. But maybe that’s the point. Maybe the question isn’t, What lies are you telling? but What truths are you afraid to say out loud?
I Who Have Never Known Men, Jacquline Harpman—November 2024
My literary journey took a turn at the end of August. For a few weeks, I only listened to novels and stories that were as far apart from my own as possible. I needed a balm for the brittle ache in my body and heart. And then, in what felt like minutes and years, I found myself on my daily walks here in London and stumbled upon Jacquline Harpman’s 1995 dystopian novel, I Who Have Never Known Men.
The story follows a nameless girl imprisoned underground with thirty-nine older women, none of whom know why they’re there or what’s happened to the world above. It’s a novel about absence—of men, of history, of meaning—and what remains when everything familiar is stripped away. Harpman’s prose is stark, almost clinical, but it lingers like an echo, forcing you to ask: Who am I without the stories I’ve been told about who I should be? It left me feeling both devastated and strangely liberated.
Nightbitch, Rachel Yonder—November 2024
Nightbitch is the kind of book that sinks its teeth into you—feral, unflinching, and impossible to shake. At this point, it felt like something had converged in the cosmos for me to just continue reading complicated, wild depictions of womanhood–and I simply couldn’t stop this train. The story follows an unnamed mother who, suffocated by the monotony and invisible labor of domestic life, begins to believe she’s turning into a dog. What starts as surreal quickly feels visceral, a raw metaphor for the rage, loss of identity, and animal instincts buried beneath the facade of “good motherhood.”
But you don’t have to be a mother to feel the pulse of this book. It’s about the hunger that simmers underneath the roles we’re expected to play—the desire to tear off the polite mask, to howl, to reclaim the parts of ourselves we’ve been taught to suppress. Yoder’s prose is sharp, darkly funny, and brimming with a wildness that feels both liberating and deeply unsettling. Reading it made me sit with the parts of myself I’ve tried to domesticate: the rage I’ve dulled, the desires I’ve downplayed, the wildness I’ve tried to make small. It made me reconsider how desperate I was to step into motherhood, and made me wonder–what parts of myself have I domesticated just to survive?
Animal, Lisa Taddeo—December 2024
Things had begun to even out for me emotionally in the waning months of fall and early winter. At this point, with my own personal dramas slightly resolved, I found myself nearly addicted to these stories of female desire and rage. Reading Animal felt like being dragged through the darkest corners of this rage. Lisa Taddeo doesn’t ask you to sit down and get comfortable; she dares you to keep up. The novel follows Joan, a woman shaped by violence and loss, who abandons her life in New York for the blistering heat of California. Joan isn’t interested in being likable, or perhaps she’s so hyper-fixated on it that it's forever beyond her grasp. But one thing is for sure, Taddeo has no interest in her likability. She is vicious, unapologetic, impulsive–a woman orchestrating her own unraveling. The novel unspools in jagged sentences that seem soaked in desire, grief, and power. Taddeo reaches into the softest part of what it means to be a woman–the hunger, the humiliation, the heat–and then leaves it in pieces for you to reconstruct.