Six Books About Writing and the Body

I’ve been telling everyone who will listen to read Manguso’s newest novel so we can talk about it over drinks. Rendered in clear, sharp prose, "Liars" is a searingly honest portrayal of what it means to be a wife, mother, and writer while married to a narcissist. If you’ve ever struggled to carve out time for creativity within the constraints of womanhood, this virtuosic book is for you.

I love teaching this beautifully wrought book about archives, family, race, art, and so much more. Through myriad sources, Sharpe weaves an intricate, multivalent tapestry of both historical and contemporary Black life.

This is a stunning debut novel about a single day in the life of a young woman attempting to write about Shakespeare’s sonnets. This is also a book about how writing is always also about eating, masturbating, daydreaming, and all the other human hungers that exist off the page. I read "Practice" on an overnight flight to London and started it immediately again once I finished.

I read this work of autofiction in one delicious gulp last summer, in a purely animal state. Hall’s book follows a novelist attempting to write about a book about Mary Shelley, but it’s also about the perils of pregnancy and the pleasures of motherhood. The voice of the protagonist is pitch perfect. I came away from Reproduction wanting to write which is the highest honor I could bestow on any book.

Newly re-released from Dorothy, a publishing project, Gladman’s metatextual book is about drafting and writing a novella. It’s also about how a deep engagement with our writing practice reveals new understandings of ourselves – and the various versions of selves that live within a single body.

I read this book probably once a year to remind myself that embodied knowledge is as important, if not more so, than anything empirical. It’s part theory, part memoir, told in the voice of a poet. An incredible achievement of the assertion of a self.