The best books that capture the inner lives of girls as they come of age

I read this book in two sittings. I could not put it down. Not only is the author a fine writer, but she tells a compelling story of her childhood and resilience. An unknown author, her book was as similar and compelling as The Glass Castle and as Uneducated as The Liar’s Club—the voice of a plucky young girl telling us her tale in an uncynical voice while revealing the troubled lives of the adults who cannot seem to raise her and her siblings.

When I read it, her book was published at the same time as my own, and I was deep in the mindset of coming-of-age tales. It’s a beautiful book that I think about over and over.

This is a lovely memoir of falling in true love for the first time. The author was the same age as me when she fell in love for the first time in a magical Paris when she was there as a serious musical student.

As I read, I was transported with her to that time and sent spinning back into my own life at the same age as a serious drama student falling in love in Amsterdam.

The book is romantic at first and so true to the heart, as well as the experience of losing oneself to another for the first time. I loved experiencing Paris with her and her love of music. A not famous author who deserves to be.

We all know the incomparable poet, writer, and speaker she became, but before that was her coming-of-age story. Raw and painful yet written with Maya Angelou's lyrical and insightful eye, this too was a book I started and could not put down.

Drawn into her world as a girl feeling imprisoned inside herself for terrible reasons, she finds that self-love and kindness and the world of words, books, poetry, and writing unlock the cage she was in.

As a woman, as a girl, I would never know the cruel racism she experienced, but her journey into art and its ability to heal and set one free was something I felt kin to.

Although we have very different voices and approaches to a similar question, ‘How do society and our patriarchal conditioning warp our girlhood?’, we write about it in very different voices and from a different perspective.

I read her to hear what another girl/woman who felt the same pressure was able to express and move on from. Interestingly, I grew up and seemed at home as an escort, and in another of her memoirs, Ms. Febos became, for a time, a dominatrix. I found that fascinating as well.

Of course, as young adult fiction, it’s far from being a memoir, but once I came upon this series (not until I was in my twenties), I held tight to it, reading it and watching it over and over. I wished I had something of Anne’s spirit when I was growing up and still, in my twenties, wished to learn and embody.

I, too, had felt like a little girl lost in romance, poetry, and hope, but when the world came at me hard, I didn’t have Anne’s way of handling it. My coming-of-age memoir would have been different.