Everything a woman holds and the female gaze in literature
Nothing soothes me more than reading novels, memoirs and diaries written by women. Maybe it’s the recognition in their words. The shared experiences, the expectations we collectively struggle with: body image, balancing motherhood, career and holding space for ourselves, as we do for those we love. I’m always more drawn to their words than of their male counterparts. You could say it’s a feminist statement, but I think it’s more that I love to read about what I know and can relate too.
I've always gravitated towards art with a female or queer perspective. Whether it’s film, art, literature and even music, the perspective of underdog or outcast has always piqued my interest. But in motherhood especially I’ve felt drawn to the perspective of the elderly and wise women. I've found solace in the writings of matured women (60+), specifically in their introspective memoirs or diaries that offer an honest yet poetic telling of lived experiences.
Writers like Vivian Gornick, Patti Smith, and Deborah Levy have become my literary companions in the past years. Their work is a masterclass in observation, capturing life's nuances through conversations both mundane and profound, for an aspiring novelist like myself that’s a gem for one. But as a sensitive human being it is soothing too. These women write with a remarkable honesty that embraces life's complexities, love, pain, marriage, grief, without pretending to have all the answers.
‘Thinking of nothing. I remember my mother sitting like this. And I would ask, What is it mommy? And she would say, Oh nothing. And now I know what nothing is.’ Patti Smith
What resonates most is their calm approach to uncomfortable realities. Even though Vivian Gornick is a woman alone, childfree and consciously so. As a mother who is very persistent in having a ‘room of ones own’, I empathize with her meanderings on the paths not taken and relate to her relation with loneliness. Or how friendship is fundamental in forming and holding one’s identity, because to be fully seen by another validates your existence as a whole and complex being and makes it coherent.
We share the politics of damage, Leonard and I. An impassioned sense of having been born into preordained social inequity burns brightly in each of us. Our subject is the unlived life. The question for each of us: Would we have manufactured the inequity had one not been there, ready-made—he is gay, I am the Odd Woman—for our grievances to make use of? To this question our friendship is devoted. The question, in fact, defines the friendship—gives it its character and its idiom—and has shed more light on the mysterious nature of ordinary human relations than has any other intimacy I have known.
[….] The self-image each of us projects to the other is the one we carry around in our heads: the one that makes us feel coherent.
- The odd woman and the City: A memoir
Secondly her memoir was helpful in my acceptence of my permanent longing to move back to the city, because for me living in a diverse landscape is part of the anti-dote of anxiety and the loneliness I am always carrying.
Johnson hated and feared village life. The closed, silent streets threw him into despair. In the village his reflected presence was missing. Loneliness became unbearable. The meaning of the city was that it made the loneliness bearable.
And later in the same memoir she granted a way to cope with my loneliness in this village.
The habit of loneliness persists. Leonard tells me that if I don’t convert the loneliness into useful solitude, I’ll be my mother’s daughter forever. He is right, of course. One is lonely for the absent idealized other, but in useful solitude I am there, keeping myself imaginative company, breathing life into the silence, filling the room with proof of my own sentient being.
These words made it easier to accept the thing I cannot change, that I moved away from the only place that felt like I belonged, because the feelings were validated and sometimes that’s enough to go forward.
Deborah Levy, a mother herself, always in search of being your own woman and not just mother. She is honest in the pursuit of it and about how it’s almost always impossible to fully stay true to yourself. After she separated from the father of her children she wrote three memoirs, one about redefining herself and finding a new balance, on building a new home for yourself as a woman in your sixties and on grieving, looking back, writing.
‘The story in this book is about a woman who has gifted her life to a man. This is not something to be tried at home but it is usually where it happens.’
-Deborah Levy - Real Estate
Lingering with these existential questions my favorite authors demonstrate a wisdom on these themes that comes from truly living, not from having everything figured out, or trying to make a penny out of pretending you have it figured out (looking at you conscious momfluencers) but from navigating challenges with grace and introspection. For me personally in navigating life as a mother and a woman, their words offer both comfort and perspective. Or to quote Anais Nin, my favorite writer and the one whose writing started this niche-interest (obsession).
‘You live out the confusions until they become clear.’
Yes, this all began with Anaïs Nin. I discovered her diary by chance, in my early twenties, at a market in Amsterdam. I have a thing for buying secondhand books that look interesting on a first glance. I’d never heard of Anais Nin before, mind you- this was in 2010, before literary quotes on Instagram were a thing. Her writing changed my understanding of literature, self- and sexual expression. Her unapologetic emotional depth, strongly criticized by literary elites in her day as ‘too dramatic, hysteric’ became an anchor to me. I had never related to a book as I did to her journals, not even to Sylvia Plath’s, The bell jar. Her words, her thoughts, that was how I felt, what I had thought, yet way better and more poetically put. From Nin, my literary horizons expanded. Writers like Mary Oliver, Joan Didion, and others became my companions, each offering unique perspectives on life, art, and personal freedom. Their words became more than text, they were permission slips to explore, to feel, to exist authentically.
The female gaze in literature is not just storytelling. It's about creating spaces where complex emotions are validated, where personal truths are celebrated, and where the often unspoken experiences of women are brought into the light. In their pages, I find myself, complex, evolving, and beautifully imperfect. Yet more importantly I find empathy and understanding for everything a woman holds.
