On Vegetables; Ariel Levy; David Grann

“I HAVE always been desperate for more stories with female protagonists who tell us about the internal experience of being a woman. We have plenty of books with complicated male protagonists, and most women I know grew up finding a way to identify with them. If you read Greek mythology, who’s more interesting, Odysseus or the wife who’s waiting for him? Women have a lot of experience projecting ourselves onto male protagonists, and it’s such a thrill when we get really fine literature about a female character. So Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet shook me. It was thrilling to read a female protagonist who is flawed, who is ambitious, who is intellectual and sexual. It’s the full range of human experience told through incredibly precise, sometimes rageful language.

In my memoir inspired by my miscarriage, I tried to write in detail about the animal experience of being female and giving birth, something that literature underrepresents. Not all women get pregnant or have a miscarriage, but half the population is female, and most women will experience some drama around menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, menopause—that whole sphere of human, female, animal life. Ferrante is one of the few authors who really address this, and her voice is searing.” The Rules Do Not Apply by Ariel Levy is out now at $27 (£17).