83 books like A Madness So Discreet

The Yellow Wallpaper inspired my book and brand. Gilman not only defined the madwoman of Gothic literature by writing one of the most haunting and empowering stories of the 19th century, but she also lived it. Her experience inspired her story and exposed the horror of hysteria treatments. This story inspired me because I could relate to Gilman and her main character. Though hysteria is no longer a recognized condition and women have gained many more rights, ideologies left over from the hysteria panic still creep in our culture and generational memory. Women are still called crazy. The assumption that women are emotionally unstable is still used to discredit, invalidate and control women. In an era where women couldn’t fight for their rights as we do, Gilman found her power by embracing madness, and so do I.

A startling kaleidoscope of a novel – indicated by the arresting cover.

Mas’ book whirled me into the heart of its narrative with fast-moving stories of women whose lives are radically changed by supernatural encounters – which, in 19th century Paris, invite diagnoses of mental illness. What follows is a disorienting but compulsive account of 'madness', ‘other-world-ness’ - and the dangers of being different.

Beautifully imagined and expertly crafted, this novel engrossed me – and I learned a lot about mental asylums, and attitudes to women, in rather unenlightened times. A fabulous book.

Most of this novel is narrated by Grace Marks, a servant girl who is supposed to have committed a murder but says she doesn’t remember doing it.

She is being interviewed by a psychiatrist who is trying to jog her memory. But is she telling him the truth? I love this use of a possibly unreliable narrator, based on a true story that remains unresolved to this day. It’s a disturbing and compelling read.

I read An Inconvenient Wife years ago and it has always stuck with me.

As I dove into my research for my book, I reread this book and was just as impressed with it as I was the first time.

Lucy is the epitome of the upper-class New York Victorian woman but only if she bends to the will of her husband and physicians. It is a classic tale of yet another 19th-century woman forced into an asylum.

Lucy is subjected not only to medications but treatment for her “hysteria” which was the common diagnosis for most women in the asylum at the time. It was brilliantly researched and written!

I’m drawn to sister stories, which is something I only realized when I started writing this list, and it occurred to me that a number of my recommendations use the slowburn mystery as a means to explore sisterhood (something my own book does, as well).

I have a sister (hi, Diana!) and we have an uncomplicated and happy relationship. So maybe I subconsciously craved more drama growing up? Kidding aside, there’s something innately compelling about the dynamics between two people who may be very different or very similar, who share blood and memories, and who are tied together, for better or worse, for life.

How to Live Without You is a sister story at its best, as Emmy is the only person who’s capable of following Rose’s breadcrumbs.  

Fitzsimons’s debut, about a stealth trans soccer player named Spencer who’s crushing on a teammate at a new school, is sweet, funny, warm, sporty, and all too relevant. When Spencer’s benched due to the F on his birth certificate, he can either ride the pine with the secret intact, or fight for his right to be on the field, outing himself in the process and risking his crush.

When I became a chairperson at Ohio State the year after I received tenure, I found this book on my desk, a gift from the provost, presumably sent to all new chairpersons.

The book had a good bit of practical advice on a wide range of subjects, and I have held on to my copy, even though I have long since moved on to other positions. The chapter on “Faculty Evaluation” was particularly helpful to me when for the first time I had to evaluate colleagues and recommend salary adjustments.

Based on the boyhood memories of author Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio is one of the best portraits of small-town American life in the 19th century.

Centered around the coming-of-age of George Willard, the 22 stories in the book provide numerous character sketches of people in the fictional town of Winesburg. Anderson writes in a plain style that suits the world he describes.

The book pioneers an approach to fictional portraiture also taken up by Wiseman in his later Our-Town cycle of films that focus on individual rural communities—Aspen, Belfast, Maine, In Jackson Heights, and Monrovia, Indiana—and adopt a seemingly similar straightforward style. Like those films, the book features a series of glimpses that together add up more than just the sum of its parts.

Dawn Powell is one of the most overlooked literary figures in America from this time. Her acid wit (and gender) immediately begs comparison to Dorothy Parker. A New Yorker transplanted from Ohio, she wrote many plays and novels from the 30s to the 60s. Wicked Pavilion was published in 1954 and is a delicious satire of a group of artists who frequent a small bistro near Washington Square Park – hard-drinking writers, poets, and painters. It features a hilarious subplot of a painter who stages his own death so the value of his paintings will increase. The antidote to Henry James, Dawn Powell writes like Edith Wharton on laughing gas.

Sula is a slim book and not only my favorite Toni Morrison novel, but one of my favorite novels. Although set in Ohio, Sula reveals more about American history and American Southern history than most historical tomes. 

“What was taken by outsiders to be slackness, slovenliness or even generosity was in fact a full recognition of the legitimacy of forces other than good ones. They did not believe doctors could heal—for them, none ever had done so. They did not believe death was accidental—life might be, but death was deliberate....”

Sula, a singular character in a singular novel by a singular writer.