Archives de catégorie : Feminism

HOW TO BE A GOOD GIRL de Jamie Hood

The ambitious and experimental debut by Jamie Hood, author of Trauma Plot, interrogating the “good girl” archetype and the price one pays to embody it.

HOW TO BE A GOOD GIRL
by Jamie Hood
Vintage, March 2025
(via Frances Goldin Literary)

In the thick of winter 2020, when so many books were buried beneath the catastrophe of the COVID-19 news cycle, one unlikely debut seemed to cut through the noise. Jamie Hood’s How to Be a Good Girl was an inventive and hybrid work of self-making, mingling diary entries, poetry, literary criticism, and love letters to interrogate the archetype of the “good girl,” and the ideas of femininity, passivity, desire, and trauma that come with it. Journeying from the ice age to our modern-day climate crisis, it devoured texts as expansive as Levinas and Plath to the Ronettes and after-school specials, all the while asking: what pound of flesh must a woman pay to be seen as “good.”

How to Be a Good Girl was a critical darling when it was first published by Grieveland. The Rumpus praised its “bold vulnerability,” and Vogue named it a Best Book of 2020. Now, Vintage is proud to reissue this provocative and genre-bending debut and find new readers for an exciting, new literary voice.

Jamie Hood is a critic, memoirist, and poet. Her work has appeared in Bookforum, The Baffler, The Nation, Los Angeles Review of Books, The New Inquiry, Observer, The Drift, SSENSE, Bookforum, Vogue, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn.

THE ANSWER IS IN THE WOUND de Kelly Sundberg

Sundberg focuses on the longer-lasting effects of trauma and PTSD on survivors, challenging a culture in which violence against women is normalized and illuminating the nonlinear, complex nature of recovery. For readers of In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado and The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison, this is a beautiful, devastating, and nuanced examination into embracing a new reality after trauma and finding power and beauty in it.

THE ANSWER IS IN THE WOUND
by Kelly Sundberg
Roxane Gay Books/Grove Atlantic, August 2025

The trauma of surviving an abusive marriage didn’t make Kelly Sundberg stronger. In fact, it nearly broke her. But leaving the abuse behind was not the end of the story, it was the beginning of a new one. In that journey, Sundberg learned in ways both good and bad, that one doesn’t necessarily get to leave abuse behind. Sometimes, everywhere you go, the memories of the abuse go with you.

THE ANSWER IS IN THE WOUND begins with the invocation “May this book be an exorcism.” Learning to coexist with her rage and then to turn that rage into strength, Sundberg’s journey to alchemizing her suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder into post-traumatic stress growth was neither easy nor simple. Far from bleak, her story provides vital insight into the little-known recovery process, and how healing is possible.

A narrative following a process of discovery as Sundberg’s personal story is juxtaposed against established research, The Answer is in the Wound offers a redemptive arc for trauma survivors, arguing for healing through an acceptance of their new state of being. Sundberg uses metaphors like the act of erasure—shown in erasure poetry created from her abusive ex-husband’s apologetic emails—and includes theories from psychiatrists and researchers like Judith Herman, Bessel van der Kolk, and Peter A. Levine to construct a balanced meditation on trauma and the imprint it leaves.

Kelly Sundberg is the author of Goodbye, Sweet Girl: A Story of Domestic Violence and Survival, published by Harper in 2018. Her essays have appeared in the New York Times Modern Love column, Alaska Quarterly Review, Guernica, and elsewhere. Her essays have been published or selected as notables in Best American Essays four times. She has a PhD in creative nonfiction. She lives, writes, and edits in Columbus, Ohio.

MISBEHAVING AT THE CROSSROADS d’Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

The New York Times-bestselling, National Book Award-nominated author of The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois and The Age of Phillis makes her nonfiction debut with this personal and thought-provoking work that explores the journeys and possibilities of Black women throughout American history and in contemporary times.

MISBEHAVING AT THE CROSSROADS: Essays & Writings
by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
Harper, June 2025
(via The Gernert Company)

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is at a crossroads.
Traditional African/Black American cultures present the crossroads as a place of simultaneous difficulty and possibility. In contemporary times, Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the phrase “intersectionality” to explain the unique position of Black women in America. In many ways, they are at a third crossroads: attempting to fit into notions of femininity and respectability primarily assigned to White women, while inventing improvisational strategies to combat oppression.

In MISBEHAVING AT THE CROSSROADS, Jeffers explores the emotional and historical tensions in Black women’s public lives and her own private life. She charts voyages of Black girlhood to womanhood and the currents buffeting these journeys, including the difficulties of racially gendered oppression, the challenges of documenting Black women’s ancestry; the adultification of Black girls; the irony of Black female respectability politics; the origins of Womanism/Black feminism; and resistance to White supremacy and patriarchy. As Jeffers shows with empathy and wisdom, naming difficult historical truths represents both Blues and transcendence, a crossroads that speaks.

Necessary and sharply observed, provocative and humane, and full of the insight and brilliance that has characterized her poetry and fiction, Misbehaving at the Crossroads illustrates the life of one extraordinary Black woman—and her extraordinary foremothers.

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is a fiction writer, poet, and essayist. She is the author of the acclaimed New York Times bestseller and Oprah’s Book Club Pick, The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and was nominated for the National Book Award, and five poetry collections, including the NAACP Image Award-winning The Age of Phillis, also nominated for the National Book Award. She teaches at the University of Oklahoma, where she holds the Paul and Carol Daube Sutton Chair in English.

WIR SUPERHELDINNEN de Dorothee Biener

What the female body does so exceptionally, and how there is much more to it than we suspect.

WIR SUPERHELDINNEN
(We Superheroines)
by Dorothee Biener
Penguin Germany, March 2025

Gynecologist Dr. Dorothee Biener is always surprised at how little most women, young and old, know about their bodies. Yet every woman’s body is a true marvel!

In her book, she describes just how the female body operates and what extraordinary powers it has. This includes in short, all of fascinating and unexpected things that makes women superheroes and each woman so special. The author also explains what is important at every age and what women should definitely be aware of according to their stage of life. She also focuses on female diseases – how to identify them and what can be done to prevent them – as well as explaining and dispelling the many myths still out there.

Female sexuality is just as much a topic as are interesting cases from the gynecologist’s practice. In an entertaining, accessible and trustworthy way, Dorothee Biener offers deep and comprehensive insights into the miracle of the female body and everything you need to know about it, as well as a guide to a healthy, happy, and mindful life along with it.

• Amazing facts, debunked myths, and fascinating cases from a gynecologist’s practice

Dorothee Biener holds a degree in biology and a doctorate in gynecology. She has worked for many years in gynecology in hospitals and practices, and has been conducting research into breast cancer and gene distribution in the cell nucleus. While her scientific mind is dedicated to research into the fantastic female body, her heart belongs to her patients and anyone else who wants to explore the marvelous topic of womanhood. WIR SUPERHELDINNEN is her first non-fiction book.

BIG GIRLS DON’T CRY de Susan Swan

Where do we belong if we don’t fit in? A memoir about what it means to defy expectations as a woman, a mother and an artist, for readers of Joan Didion and Gloria Steinem and listeners of the podcast Wiser than Me.

BIG GIRLS DON’T CRY:
A Memoir About Taking Up Space
by Susan Swan
foreword by Margaret Atwood
HarperCollins Canada, April 2025

Susan Swan has never fit inside the boxes that other people have made for her—the daughter box, the wife box, the mother box, the femininity box. Instead, throughout her richly lived, independent decades, she has carved her own path and lived with the consequences.

In this revealing and revelatory memoir, Swan shares the key moments of her life. As a child in a small Ontario town, she was defined by her size—attracting ridicule because she was six-foot-two by the age of twelve. She left her marriage to be a single mother and a fiction writer in the edgy, underground art scene of 1970s Toronto. In her forties, she embraced the new freedom of the Aphrodite years. Despite the costs to her relationships, Swan kept searching for the place she fit, living in the literary circles of New York while seeking pleasure and spiritual wisdom in Greece, and culminating in the hard-won experience of true self-acceptance in her seventies.

Swan examines the expectations of women of her generation and beyond using the lens of her then-unusual height as a metaphor for the way women are expected not to take up space in the world. Inspiring and thought-provoking, BIG GIRLS DON’T CRY invites us to re-examine what we’ve been taught to believe about ourselves and ask how it could be different.

“[Swan’s writing offers] not only an enjoyable read, but also the chance to think and reflect on the vast complex living entity that is the world. » —Nobel Prize-winner Olga Tokarczuk

Susan Swan is a novelist and non-fiction writer and a professor emerita at York University. Her books include The Wives of Bath, The Biggest Modern Woman in the World, What Casanova Told Me, The Western Light and Stupid Boys Are Good to Relax With. She is also co-founder of the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, the largest literary prize for women and non-binary writers in Canada and the United States.