It's a new year + Sasha Bonét's Unruly Women

THE WATERBEARERS author shares a list of books that inspired her debut memoir.

Hi, and happy new year :)

After a restful December, we’re feeling very back. Before we get into Sasha’s excellent reading list, which inspired her profound memoir THE WATERBEARERS, A few things we’re excited about this week:

• Cake Zine co-founder and baker Tanya Bush is doing a giveaway for her major debut narrative cookbook WILL THIS MAKE YOU HAPPY coming out in March. Preorder (and submit your info via Google form) and you’ll get a limited edition shirt, a 9x12” archival watercolor print from the book by Forsyth Harmon, and Tanya will make you the cake of your dreams if you’re in NYC. Don’t sleep on this!

• Thee party to be at this week is the Nine Orchard Hotel soiree for LOST LAMBS the highly-anticipated, incredible funny debut by Forever Magazine founder and one of our favorite people Madeline Cash. (Edited by Jackson Howard, who did one of our favorite Language Arts interviews this summer!) Hosted by Book of the Month, it is invite-only, but we’ll be publishing photos from the event on Friday :)

• ICYMI: Sophia interviewed Forever Magazine founding editor Anika Jade Levy about her excellent debut FLAT EARTH for i-D. (A DREAM PUB!). Thank you to editor supreme Nicolaia Rips.

• ICYMI PT 2: Sophia was interviewed for Ali Kriegsman’s revelatory Substack New Motives, which dives into the nitty gritty of (not having) $$$ and how to make it in Mamdani’s New York. Not in the interview: During drinks, Ali and Sophia realized they have the same agent <3 We love you, Sarah!

• The Midcoast Villager in Maine publishes a biannual literary supplement called Village Books. For this issue, they asked a host of Maine authors to tell them what their favorite Maine book is. It’s a great list—which includes picks other than just Stephen King—and is worth a read here.

Sasha Bonét’s Unruly Women Reading List

By Sasha Bonét

I love unruly women. In books, in films, and in life.

I do believe they push society forward in ways that we will never be able to truly innumerate.

While I was writing The Waterbearers, I kept a rotating cast of unruly women on my nightstand. The ones they call crazy, the ones they call witches, the ones they can’t stop calling. These books were my late-night company, cheering me on, pushing me forward, and reminding me that women have always found gorgeous, impactful ways to misbehave.

I am ever drawn to the figure’s history shoved in the margins, so of course my friend Camille Okhio recently handed me Mistress of the Vatican: The Story of Olimpia Maidalchini, the Secret Female Pope, because she knows I will drop everything for a subversive woman’s covert power.

These are the books I returned to while writing my memoir. Many writers don’t like to read while writing, but I see other books characters as an arena full of accomplices who cheer and shout and soothe me past the finish line of a draft. These characters make writing feel less like solitude and more like sitting at a kitchen table with women who have lived a thousand lives and are generous enough to share with you how they survived them.

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments by Saidiya Hartman

This book is a kind of bible for me. The ways that Hartman bent the form of nonfiction so that the stories of women lost to history can be told. There is a spiritual way that Hartman allowed the gaps in the archive to be filled by her own instincts and radical care, a practice she calls, “critical fabulation.” While I was researching women in Louisiana from my lineage, there were so many things that had not been recorded or had been destroyed by the hurricanes, so I was forced to imagine some moments. What was that time like between slavery and liberation? What were people doing in these camps they were held in during the Civil War? I love when a book blurs the line between fiction and nonfiction, where the truth is not only what was documented but also what was lived and felt. That liminal space is my favorite genre.

The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston

This book will never leave my bones. The haunting beauty. The silences and secrets that we keep in the family. Everyone knows but we never speak of them. This book is an incredible study on what exists between the words. A blend of memoir and myth. I love how eerie it is. I returned to this often while writing The Waterbearers. It’s restrained in what it shares. It’s not a story about complicated women governed by rules no one explains until you break them. The women in this Chinese family remind me so much of the women in my family with their quiet insistent power. Never not pushing back on their environs.

Girl by Jamaica Kincaid

So, this isn’t a book, but it totally should be. Maybe a pocket-sized book. This short form story is about the moment when a girl is edging into adolescence and she’s being urgently taught how to be. You only hear the voice of the mother, but you can infer that the mother knows she’s speaking to a wild one that needs to be tamed before the world tames her first. For her own sake. For survival’s sake. The only time the child speaks is to poke holes in the mother’s commands. To question. That’s the danger right? This is precisely the fear that society has for unruly girls and women, that they may expose the absurdities of the norms that suppress them. What’s interesting here is that the mother, also a subject of oppression, is the teacher. Not society, not the outside world. It is often those oppressed who help to aid in perpetuating the rules that have flattened them.

The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes by Janet Malcolm

What’s special about this book is that Malcolm is an unruly writer studying an unruly woman who, even in death, is being silenced by her widower Ted Hughes. While Malcolm writes artfully and critically about Plath and Hughes’ relationship, Hughes wants to limit her access to information and censor Malcolm. She ignores him and even includes in the end of the book a letter that Hughes sent in an attempt to intimidate. Malcolm includes her response to him. It is one of the best postscripts I’ve ever read. It is bold and she allows the subject to be his own undoing. I have so much fun reading this book and I return to it because it is audacious and honest, while also questioning the flaws of biography. A biography is always, in some ways, a memoir. What I love here is the vulnerability Malcolm allows herself. She questions the entire form of biography, including her own methods and biases. The book is as much about Plath and Hughes as it is about Malcolm. How she thinks, what she sees, where she pushes and where she flinches. She’s a master. And the queen of petty.

Looking for Lorraine by Imani Perry

When I need a reminder on how to write about subjects with a critical, careful and loving pen, I look to Imani Perry. She never shrouds away from the parts of her subjects that are messy or chaotic, but she somehow always renders them gorgeously flawed and impossibly human. This is just one book where I adore and identify with her subject Lorraine Hansberry. This book, in particular, gives us a Lorraine Hansberry who is not just the author of A Raisin in the Sun, but a radical Black lesbian married to a Jewish communist who supported her art, politics, and waywardness. Very Audre Lorde. Very “freedom is a practice.” When I’m stuck, or when I’m trying to write about someone I love without turning them into a symbol or a monument, I think of Perry. Of how she holds every part of her subjects with the same level gaze. How she writes them as if they’re people she once sat with, people she’s still learning from. This book helped me write toward my own lineage with a little more grace, a little more truth, and a lot more courage. Somehow whenever I finish reading anything by Perry, I think to myself, “she really loves us.”

The Book of Night Women by Marlon James

I find this book terribly underrated. What a masterpiece. The protagonist Lilith in this novel is full of power, chaos and mischief. What James recognizes is that power is not always good or bad. Sometimes it’s nonlinear. Sometimes you hate her, sometimes you adore her. Regardless, she refuses to fall in line. Both with the White slavers (her father) and the Night Women (her sistren), a group of enslaved women who are planning the revolt. I returned to this book while writing The Waterbearers to understand how to construct a complicated character who sometimes defies all reason but must still be granted the full spectrum of humanity. A character that a reader may consider morally complicated. I love these women. I felt in writing my grandmother Betty Jean, and the artist Camille Billops, that I needed to make sure the reader could connect with her even if her choices were wild, nonlinear, or opaque. Women like Lilith make their own rules for their own realities. My job was not to tame her, but to follow her. Just as James does.