An Avatar of Mine Own Self

Or, why I'm taking solace in the stories of women who only kind of existed

The world is patently terrible at the moment — and, it seems, it was also terrible in the moment before this one, and the one before that. In an effort to retain one’s humanity amidst all of this terribleness, a person is forced to cleave to whatever vice or virtue one thinks might fend off some of the looming horrors.

My small beacon in the dark has presented itself as an obsession with reading books about weird girls who somehow survive the terrors of a time long since past.

I have a certain set of criteria that lives in my brain when selecting these books, and it is as follows:

• Is it about a girl/woman?

• Does she have to spend the book Working Through Some Stuff?

• Is it written recently but set in a time before the current one?

• Will I be able to project myself onto her with wild abandon and feel a lot of things as a result?

If I’m able to answer yes to all four, then we’re good to go.

It turns out that quite a lot of books written in the last ten years fulfill these criteria, so my bookshelf is always heavily-laden with reading opportunities. However, because I am a historian at my core and I believe in collating meaningful evidence to support my argument, here are just a handful of the books I’ve read in the last 2-3 years that fit my needs:

• A Little Trickerie by Rosanna Pike

• West by Carys Davies

• Everyone Knows Your Mother Is A Witch by Rivka Galchen

• When We Lost Our Heads by Heather O’Neill

• Lucky Red by Claudia Craven

• Matrix by Lauren Groff

• The Vaster Wilds (also) by Lauren Groff

• The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell

• The Manningtree Witches by AK Blakemore

• Cursed Bread by Sophie Mackintosh

• For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain by Victoria Mackenzie

I reckon that if there were a Grand Unifying Theory of the kinds of books I like, it would be mostly that I like to read books about women having a hard time because they reflect something about my own experiences back to me.