From Oprah to Atwood, what we read says a lot about the times
This year promises a slate of sure-to-be women’s classics, Terra Arnone writes.
A voracious appetite for memoir and narrative non-fiction has endured since the millennial turn and doesn’t seem to be going anywhere soon.
But why should it? Truth-baring allows us a collective therapy session of sorts. Airing our own little grapples and day-to-day grievances can help this big old world feel just that little bit smaller, something about acknowledging shared experience making better people of us all.
And speaking of small, I hope you like ’em that way: Essay and short fiction still have a good grip on the zeitgeist. You could call it a sign of our times, attention spans waning with every new Snapchat filter, but we’re still making room in our backpacks for fat-spined fiction, so it’s hard to say for sure.
Either way, if you’re into the slimmer sort of thing, set some money aside for You Know You Want This, a short story collection due out from Kristen Roupenian, author of the viral 2017 essay Cat Person. (HBO’s already got dibs on turning You Know You Want This into a dramatic anthology.)
Look out for big books by bold women and, well, buy them. The 2018 book market left little room for doubting the unrivalled ability of women to — wait for it — tell their own stories.
The “phallacy” is over, so to speak, and 2019 promises a new slate of women’s sure-to-be classics.
We’ve got a few goodies from the old guard to look forward to: Oprah Winfrey (all rise) returns with The Path Made Clear: Discovering Your Life’s Direction and Purpose, a followup to her wildly popular 2014 handbook, What I Know For Sure.
Melinda Gates is set to publish her second book, this one modelled something like Sally Armstrong’s Ascent of Women, a look at the reasons investing in women makes society a better place to be. Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert’s back to fiction with her forthcoming City of Girls. And, well, maybe you saw Margaret Atwood’s tweet? The Handmaid’s Tale is fated for a growth spurt. Emily Bernard’s latest sounds about right for today, an essay collection contemplating the voices that gave rise to North America’s modern notions of race.
And there are some promising debuts on deck, too: Happy Fat by Sofie Hagen; Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino; and Running Home: A Memoir, by award-winning sports writer and champion trail-runner Katie Arnold.
The world’s still got work to do, but our bookshelves are looking good, bearing early harbingers of a better future to come.
Looking ahead makes you wonder if 2019 will set a precedent we can feel proud of 10 or 20 years down the line — if the world we’re forming today will feel just as fair tomorrow.
Scholars call that cultural context: how we actively craft the world around us — not the one we’re entirely aware of, but the one we’ll look back on in future’s rear-view mirror.
When we think of the top songs of 2018, what they meant and why in 2025 they could sound completely uncouth. It comes back to this notion that books themselves are historical currency — proof of the things we thought deserving enough to take to page, the things we accepted as true at some point in our past, whether that was the case or not indeed.
The books we read and the books we write are no small part of our willingness to tolerate the world around us, and reading them in retrospect speaks volumes about the era in which they’ve been written.
In a time when a 10-year-old tweet can take a business leader down in one go, it’s useful to remind ourselves that history isn’t really about the past, but the present in which we’re living and the people we’ll hand our world to.
So when you read your next book, be it Stephenie Meyer or Socrates, remember that the selection itself says something both of the time in which it was written and the time in which it was read. And in doing so, it also says something of you. Then when you buy your next one, keep that in mind too, that the things we read today offer evidence of the people we are together. And one day, whether we like it or not, we’ll stand trial en masse.
Here’s to our history in the making, whatever it is, whatever it’ll be, and whatever mess we’ll leave behind because of it. In the meantime, let’s do something right.