7 Novels About Women on a Journey to Figure Out Who They Are

From Electric Lit:

As an identity crisis just par for the course as human beings? Does it happen to everybody? I wondered this to myself as a friend told me that her brother-in-law had decided, in his late thirties, to hit the pause button on his life. He was going to Bali for two months, she said, to “find himself.” This was shocking not in the least because he had a family he would be leaving behind in order to go off and conduct this search, but also, because he wasn’t entirely clear about whether he would be coming back. A search for self on a paradise island free of responsibility. Only in a man’s world, I thought, enviously. A woman would never go about it like that.

I didn’t set out to write a story about a woman in search of herself. My original intention was to generate some acting work. If I could write a great play (or even just an okay one, I acquiesced, whenever I had writers block), produce it and perform it myself, then the “right” (whatever that means) people would see it, which would lead to more scripts—ones I hadn’t had to write myself—flooding my way. Then, I’d be in. I’d be a busy actor having no choice but to turn down parts and I would never have to write anything ever again.

. . . .

This is a reading list about women who, at any one time, have had their doubts about who they are and who they present themselves to the world as. In these stories, they are piecing together the puzzle of their own identities. For them, the importance of this notion waxes and wanes, it is not necessarily their primary preoccupation, but bubbles to the surface in varying degrees. The question of their own essence and what it means in a fast-paced world where it feels like everyone else is so sure of themselves and what they stand for, may not always be the point of these stories but it is certainly an essential by-product. To someone not in that questioning, contemplative place themselves, it may well be missed. For me, however, they became the parts of these books which spoke the loudest. Read these books for their keenly observed female protagonists’ exploration of the world around them—through language, location, love, politics, and friendship—and for the ways in which the lives they are leading or the new ones they are seeking out, speak to their essence. And as for my friend’s brother-in-law, he came back in the end. But, just as with the characters in these novels, finding yourself back where you started doesn’t make it all for nought. It’s in the journeying that we find our essence, not necessarily at the destination.

Swing Time by Zadie Smith

Two mixed-race best friends who meet as youngsters at dance class, find themselves on divergent paths as one (the unnamed narrator) watches the other—Tracey—achieve their shared childhood dream becoming a dancer. Through her teens, twenties and thirties, we see the narrator going through the motions: university, first job, short lived love affairs, the allure of orbiting a celebrity when she lands a job as assistant to a pop star the girls idolized growing up. She watches on as Tracey’s career fizzles out, replaced by the challenges of  motherhood on the same council estate they were raised on. Smith’s thought-provoking insights on race, trauma, aging and the choices we make in life and where they lead us subtly force the reader to consider these things in relation to themselves at every turn. On reading the last page, I thrust the book into the hands of the nearest person in my vicinity telling them to read it. I defy you not to do the same thing.

. . . .

Temper by Phoebe Walker

Purpose and identity are often inextricably linked to place for many women. We feel this in almost every line of Phoebe Walker’s debut. Infused with her characteristic poetic imagery and keenly observant eye for the world around her, she gives us yet another unnamed narrator (a theme worthy of a reading list of its own!) who has left London on the coat tails of her corporate boyfriend and his new job. Being a freelance writer, she has the freedom to work from anywhere, and the Netherlands, she reasons, is as good a place as any. But the promise of expat life, with its shiny, social media-ready exterior and the feeling of excitement in the first days and weeks, quickly fades. What our protagonist is left with is creeping isolation, loneliness and a lack of purpose. When she reluctantly befriends an untrustworthy fellow expat who has been shunned by everyone else who knows her out there, the narrator’s reflections on just how and exactly where to go about building a life for oneself in a big world, becomes all the more intriguing and absorbing. 

Link to the rest at Electric Lit