The best books on texts, documents, journals, and books that were destroyed

Lacy Crawford’s memoir of sexual assault at the elite St. Paul’s School straddles the precarious line between lyric and reportage. Crawford shies from nothing: we are there as she is held down and orally raped by two upperclassmen; as she describes the consensual sex she undertakes in an attempt to reckon with her rape, as even her own parents abandon her.

Crawford spends the last third of the book untangling the web of documents that prove the school knew of both the assault and her resulting STI (oral herpes that went so far into her throat that doctors couldn’t identify the sores, leaving her sick for months). The horrific burning of her throat keeps her from being able to speak or sing in the school choir, a metaphor for St. Paul’s deliberate destruction of evidence of her rape and subsequent illness to ensure legal protection for her rapists and the institution.

But it is Crawford’s burning rage and incandescent empathy for her rapists, her parents, her classmates, and her younger self that land this book in a category all its own.

Likely the origin of my love for books within books, especially those lost or deliberately destroyed, this is the third book in the Emily Starr trilogy, the lesser-known series by Canadian author L.M. Montgomery, of Anne of Green Gables fame.

In it, budding novelist Emily decides against going off to college in the city with her three best friends to remain on her aunt’s Canadian farm, New Moon, and write. She finishes her first novel, A Seller of Dreams (what a title!), in a fit of creative joy but struggles to find a publisher.

Close to despair, she gives it to her bookish friend Dean Priest, an older man who’s in love with her, asking if it’s any good. Aware that her devotion to writing will keep her from him, he lies that the book is “artificial” and the characters “wooden.”

Emily throws it on the fire in her bedroom and, bleary-eyed from weeping, falls down the stairs and is nearly killed. I won’t say more!! But what ensues is complex and beautiful, a reminder of what we sacrifice when we ignore the source of our creativity and desire, what Sylvia Plath called “the voice within me that will not be stilled.”

I love nothing more than a book that unsettles me, that I grasp almost bodily in the reading but have to return to again and again to truly understand. Lose Your Mother is that kind of book. In Chapter Seven, Hartman tells us that, while working in the archive of the Atlantic slave trade, she came across a scandal: on board the slave ship Recovery, two African girls—one named Venus—are murdered by the captain, John Kimber.

A trial ensues. A mate is put on the stand, who admits there was a book on the ship, a list of all its horrors, The Dead Book, but it’s lost now. Lose Your Mother is Hartman’s attempt to write her version of The Dead Book without committing the same violence against the girls that they endured in their short lives. How she wonders, can we reimagine life for Venus when all we know of her life is scraps of violence against her, said to us by those who did her harm? “I was determined,” Hartman writes, “to fill in the blank spaces of the historical record and to represent the lives of those deemed unworthy of remembering, but how does one write a story about an encounter with nothing?” Rather than offer pat answers, Hartman writes in a series of ever more complicated questions, filling in space by opening up more space. Extraordinary.

One does not imagine a novel that takes place almost exclusively inside a 12th-century British convent to be a form of escapism, but then, one is often wrong. And by one, I mean me. I picked up Lauren Groff’s Matrix on a whim when my writer friend Amber Sparks posted illustrations her 8-year-old daughter did, inspired by the book.

From the opening page, I was moved and astounded by the depth of historical detail Groff imbues her heroine’s world with and by the sheer force of feminine, feminist creativity propelling the book forward. There are labyrinths and orchards, mystical visions, therapeutic cunnilingus, and an undying flame for Elinor of Aquitaine and the Women’s Crusades.

And there is a burnt book, just at the end, one that crushed me until, a few days later, I leaned my head back and thought, Ah, I see what you did there. Matrix is a whole world—one that will stay with you for a long, long time.

Emma Tennant was one of Ted Hughes’s lovers in the 1970s, at the height of Sylvia Plath’s early fame. I arrived at her memoir as research for Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation, but I stayed because Tennant’s writing is so witty and clever, full of riotous anecdotes of her time publishing chic literary magazines in 1970s London (she tries to steal, and sell, a family snapshot of Princess Margaret, nude on a French beach, for seed money, which ends in hilarious disaster).

Tennant never descends into self-pity or high drama in describing the dark and mysterious Hughes, who believes a random fox on the road is his dead wife returning to him and tries to convince Tennant that frozen salmon at a third-rate London restaurant is fresh and delivering life force to him. Instead, she sneaks in the violence done to her by Hughes in moments drenched in myth and poetry, so we almost don’t notice it—just as Hughes probably intended it.

Hughes famously burned Plath’s last diaries—this book is surely meant as an homage to what we might have found there, a way for Tennant to say, sotto voce, Me too, Sylvia. Me too.