Emma's Reviews > Heroines

This felt almost crafted just for me! The personal nature of this was wonderfully specific - all the better to connect with for this compared to the distance and self-declared universality of the men of modernism (and really, the rest of the 20th century and the 21st too) so often discussed in the book. Though I wouldn't like to overstate the importance of men in the book too much - while it is about women placed in the shadow of their Great literary husbands, these women are emphatically centred, the men really only considered in relation to the women. There were a few things I found a little grating - in dismissing much mental illness diagnosis of fucked up girls as pathologising I felt she went a little too far. While women have so often been deemed mad to control them + prevent attempts to control their own narratives, the abuse + neglect (that Zambreno discusses so much!) is inevitably traumatic. I think there was some space for nuance there that was missed a bit (women given highly gendered diagnoses -schizophrenia in 20s and then bipolar, bpd etc nowadays - that pathologise feminine emotionality etc etc AND women exp so much interpersonal trauma that they often become mentally ill as a result? Idk it felt like she missed the opportunity to talk abt these two things at once). Also was not keen on the menstruation metaphors + their implicit gender essentialism. But that said still one of the best books I've read all year, spoke to me so much as a writer (albeit an aspiring one) and as a fucked up girl and as a lover of the overly emotional honest diary-obsessed modernist women. (I hope this makes sense cos it's 2.30 am and I'm just trying to get this down before I forget)