100 books like Love Me Tender

I was absolutely riveted by this huge doorstop of a biography exploring the life of Sylvia Plath. I’m not a diehard Plath fan per se, but I am always drawn to books about writers’ lives.

The intersection of Plath’s death with her experiences of motherhood, her writing life, and the failure of her marriage also brings this story firmly into my wheelhouse. (While Plath might not technically have been in midlife, I would argue that she was already precociously facing many of its common pitfalls when she died.)

This book is meticulously researched and includes new archival evidence. I loved it so much that after I finished its 600-something pages, I wanted to start over immediately.

This book is a bible for women in midlife. One of Levy’s ‘living memoirs’, it captures the author’s experience of leaving her marriage at fifty and remaking her life as a writer.

The pose is beautiful: spare and elegant. Importantly, the book explores how it is possible to create a life focused on artistic pursuit, children, and friendship, as opposed to romantic partnership, material wealth, and conservative notions of stability.

I reread it every year to remind myself of what is possible.

This is the diary Australian writer Helen Garner kept during a difficult period of her life: the period when she was married to (and eventually separated from) her third husband.

The writing is exquisite, which is why I love this book. Garner records the intricacies and intimacies of the marriage in such exacting terms. Her observations about marriage and the world leave me breathless. 

This book might be my favorite of the year. In it, a semi-famous artist in midlife wrestles with marriage, motherhood, and desire.

The work is exceptional in its artistry and literary merit; it gives voice to otherwise silenced realities in women’s lives: motherhood, aging, sex, artmaking, and freedom—all topics close to my heart. It’s also extremely funny.

Crusoe is a failed slaver, a reckless son, a bad sailor, a pretty crap boss, a parrot lover and, in all of that, he shows us how damaged and imperfect a system we have inherited.

I love Robinson Crusoe for its audacity. When it was first published in 1719, readers were furious to discover that there was no such person as Crusoe but that, instead, the story was fabricated by one Daniel Defoe, who had recently spent three days in the stockades for seditious libel. I love the insanity of this story, how it wants us to believe that a man spends 28 years on a deserted island and still comes home to England richer than when he left. A flawed novel but our first in English, it is also our first autofiction. 

As a writer, I am always pondering the question of how our lives inform our work. As one of my fellow writers, Melissa Ostrom, put it, our experience is the rich compost from which we form our fictional narratives. To use a Freudian dream analogy, I like to think that our lives are the “day residue” of the work—elements from daily life show up in different contexts or transformed in some other way. The twentieth-first century has witnessed an explosion of so-called auto-fiction, fiction that more consciously underscores this process of transforming life into art—think of the work of Ben Lerner, Rachel Cusk, and Karl Ove Knausgard. This recently-released anthology, edited by Caitlin Forst, features work by established writers as well as new voices that interrogates the relationship between writer and text, between art and life.

Anna Kavan’s Asylum Piece presents exciting stylistic possibilities for the world of “personal fiction.” The book defies easy genre categorization, but one might describe it as an experimental, thematically connected collection of autofiction. Drawing on her own experiences in a Swiss sanitarium (from which she was dispatched in 1938), Kavan excavates her psychological traumas and filters them through sequences of vignettes and short stories, conveying states of extreme emotional distress through a restrained, intensely lucid form. An unblinking study of alienation, mental disarray, and feelings of helplessness under bureaucratic control, Asylum Piece takes up a lot of space in my mind.

I didn't realize a book could get the zoomies. América del Norte has instilled in me such great wonder and vicious prose envy that I may never recover. Rambunctious, bombastic, and sprawling, this work of autofiction left me saying things like, “No way!” and “What the hell?!” out loud like a complete buffoon. Sometimes because of the story and sometimes because of the audacity of the sentence structures.

Medina Mora weaves history, literature, politics, translation, and much more into a grand chronicle. Amid devastating historical narratives and global tragedy, I still laughed out loud at some parts and startled my little cat, who then also got the zoomies.

After eight successful books, Marie Chaix was abruptly dropped by her publisher. An editor-in-chief of another publisher picked her up, helped her dust herself down, became her writing support, friend and best reader, and published her next book. Three months later, he went to bed and never woke up. Shattered, Chaix decided that she couldn’t—wouldn’t—just didn’t write, not for thirteen years. In finally breaking her silence, Chaix draws a strange, delicate self-portrait of a writer paradoxically both stubborn and profoundly unconfident. I’m not Chaix, and I don’t always like autofiction, but as she weaves in and around the causes and consequences of her decision, her story seems to be about all writers.

This novel brings together the past and present experiences of Asian Canadians in a story that’s bursting with light and energy. Much of the book depicts the discrimination faced by Chinese immigrants in Newfoundland in the early 20th century, and I loved how humour was interspersed between moments that stirred feelings of intense anger and sadness.

Throw in a cheeky, time-travelling spirit named Mo and the privileged millennial who learns about the hardship that’s granted him the life he leads, and we’ve got a fresh take on a tragic history from an exciting new literary voice.