Apparently, I’m not alone.

According to a recent survey on reading habits, 45% of female readers read mystery or crime novels, compared to only 28% of male readers.

Which raises an obvious question: Why are so many women relaxing by reading about scary sh*t?

Especially when there are also ready so many real-world dangers we have to think about on a daily basis. Let’s consider just a few I came up with off the top of my head:

Walking through a parking garage alone at night.
Walking through a parking garage alone during the day.
Going for a run by yourself.
Wearing headphones while you run.
Not smiling enough.
Smiling too much and giving someone the “wrong idea.”
Getting into an Uber.
Not getting into an Uber and walking home alone.
Getting into an elevator with a man.
Taking public transportation.
Accepting a drink you didn’t watch the bartender make.
Declining a drink from someone and making them angry.
Going on a blind date.
Staying alone in a hotel room.

Women spend an extraordinary amount of time assessing threats like these. (And so many more! Please add yours in the comments; I’m sure I’ve missed one or two or five million.)

So why, after spending all day scanning for danger and calculating risk, do so many of us want to curl up and read about a woman whose ex-boyfriend is stalking her?

I don’t think it’s because women are fascinated by danger. I think it’s because real world threats are amorphous. You don’t know whether the guy running on the path behind you is training for a 5K or planning to rape you, or whether your Uber driver took that sudden turn to avoid traffic or to traffic you.

You don’t know how the story ends.

A thriller, however, gives our fear structure. We get to experience it in a controlled environment where we are the one deciding when it starts and stops. We can close the book anytime. This isn’t true in a deserted parking garage.

I’m not a psychologist (please chime in if you are, I’d love to hear your take), but my hunch is that women don’t necessarily turn to thrillers because we need more fear in our lives, but because they give us the ability to experience fear on our own terms.

You weren’t imagining it

I think there’s another layer at play here, too. In a world that seems hyper focused on gaslighting women across all spectrums of their lives, thrillers also tell us, “you weren’t imagining it.”

Consider how many psychological thrillers begin with a woman sensing something is wrong while everyone around her insists she’s nuts. She spends the book being dismissed and minimized, and the emotional payoff when everyone learns she was right all along is HUGE.

Women spend a lifetime being told we’re overreacting, imagining things, being dramatic, being difficult. Thrillers, on the other hand, repeatedly validate female intuition. In this way, they don’t just offer us a fun distraction, they offer wish fulfillment.

The danger is coming from inside the house

There’s been a huge rise in thrillers that take place in spaces traditionally associated with women: homes, marriages, families, relationships.

Author Julia Crouch coined the term “domestic noir” to describe fiction largely centered on female experience and relationships, built around the feminist premise that the domestic sphere can itself be a dangerous place.

What I love about this definition is that is allows us to trace a line all the way back to Jane Eyre (1847) with stops at Du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938), Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train (1950), Mary Higgins Clark’s A Stranger is Watching (1977), The Ice House by Minette Walters (1992), Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn (2012) and pretty much everything by Freida McFadden.

Different decades, but the same unsettling premise: Home and marriage don’t automatically make women safe.

And then there’s justice

Crime fiction also gives us something reality frequently doesn’t: answers, justice, and sometimes even revenge.

In real life, the bad guys aren’t always caught. Missing women aren’t always found. Abuse victims aren’t always believed. But in thrillers, there is a sense of reassurance that comes from knowing the villains will be caught and punished; that order will be restored.

Which brings me back to all the women reading about murder in bed at the end of the day.

Maybe after spending the day navigating a world filled with risks and situations they can’t control, these women are looking not just to be entertained, but to visit the one scary place where they know the rules will hold.

And, whenever they’ve had enough, they get to turn off the light, close the book, and leave the danger contained inside.

If only the same could be said for the world we live in.

4 Thrillers I’ve Loved Lately

Here are some of the favorite murders I’ve curled up with lately:

Hot Girl Murder Club by Ashley Winstead - A firmly feminist thriller about a female a pop star in Los Angeles who becomes the prime suspect in a series of murders targeting powerful men.

Somebody Worth Killing by Jessica Payne - Nadia Davis is a suburban mother and wife who secretly works as a hired assassin—and then she discovers her next big target is her own husband.

Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll - Inspired by the 1978 Chi Omega sorority house murders committed by serial killer Ted Bundy the story shifts the narrative away from the killer to focus entirely on the resilience and alliance of his female targets.

We Would Never Tell by Anne-Sophie Jouhanneau - Three ambitious Hollywood women at the Cannes Film Festival become entangled in theft and murder when a necklace disappears and a body is found in the Mediterranean.

Quote of the Week

“They will call you hysterical no matter how much dignity you have. So you might as well do whatever the hell you want.”
— Jessica Knoll, from her book Bright Young Women

As always, I’m so grateful you here, helping me dismantle the patriarchy—one chapter at a time.

xo,

Caitlin

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But behind many of literature’s greatest works was someone else making that success possible: a wife.

In a recent post, I wrote about the women who’ve provided the domestic infrastructure that allows male authors to dedicate themselves to their craft: Vera Nabokov. Sophia Tolstaya. Tabitha King. (Read the post, but stay for the comments—people had MANY thoughts.)

But some wives did far more than wash the dishes, pay the bills, and type the manuscripts.

Some helped write the books.

Which brings us to George Orwell’s wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy.

Given the renewed popularity of 1984 (thank you, current dystopian political climate), Orwell’s work has had a resurgence. If you’ve read (or re-read) 1984 lately, you can thank Orwell’s wife.

When Orwell met Eileen in 1935, he’d published two commercially unsuccessful books and was working in a London bookstore to support himself. After they married, Eileen became the family’s primary breadwinner, working full time while Orwell wrote. She typed his manuscripts, managed their household, and cared for him through repeated illnesses, all while enduring painful uterine tumors that caused chronic bleeding and exhaustion.

Orwell, meanwhile, was by all accounts a gigantic grump who carried on affairs while expecting near-limitless devotion from his wife, and then failed to reciprocate that care when Eileen’s own health deteriorated.

Anna Funder’s excellent book, Wifedom, gets to the crux of this when quoting a letter Eileen wrote to a friend where she describes feeling less like a partner and more like “a piece of household furniture.” Talk about taking invisible labor to a whole new level.

But wait, there’s more.

Not only did Eileen create the conditions that allowed Orwell to produce great work, she shaped much of that work with her own ideas and editing.

Orwell’s career changed dramatically after he married Eileen. The obscure writer with two poorly selling books became the author whose works would define twentieth-century political literature. Spoiler alert, we have Eileen to thank for this glow up.

According to Funder, Eileen was Orwell’s most important intellectual collaborator. She extensively edited Animal Farm, challenging and sharpening his ideas, and her poem, End of the Century, 1984, is believed to have inspired the title (and even some of the conceptual foundations) of his most famous novel.

As usual, history remembers the name on the cover, but rarely asks who else contributed.

If you’re already indignant, buckle up, baby. Because imo, the most infuriating part of Eileen’s story isn’t how much she gave Orwell, but how completely he erased her from his life in his later biographical writings.

After Orwell was shot by a sniper in the Spanish Civil War, Eileen traveled to nurse him back to health despite her own health issues. When the political faction they supported was outlawed, Orwell went into hiding. Eileen stayed behind to clean up the mess. Facing police raids, she secured travel documents, protected his papers, and arranged their escape across the French border—actions that very likely saved his life.

Yet when Orwell later wrote about his time in Spain in Homage to Catalonia, Eileen was barely there. The woman who helped save both the man and the manuscript became a footnote in the story she made possible.

This post isn’t about diminishing George Orwell's brilliance as a writer (though inevitably some will read it that way). It’s about acknowledging the woman whose labor—both logistical and intellectual—helped make that brilliance possible.

And lest we think we’ve left this model behind, let’s consider how today, we marvel at creators who proudly claim they don’t use email or concern themselves with the logistics of everyday life. (I’m looking at you, Christopher Nolan.) We treat it as evidence of extraordinary discipline instead of asking the obvious question—who’s doing everything else? (*Cough* Emma Thompson.)

I was reminded of this while watching Ride or Die, the new Amazon series starring Hannah Waddingham and Octavia Spencer. (Side note: how have we not already seen Waddingham cast as an action hero??) Anyway, Spencer plays the dutiful wife of a rising British MP, covertly orchestrating his political career behind the scenes—until he asks her for a divorce. As he struggles to explain why, he blurts out, “I'm not good at this—you write the speeches.”

Exactly.

Whether it’s writing the speeches, editing the manuscripts, managing the logistics, or simply creating the conditions that allow someone else's genius to flourish, history is filled with women like Eileen O’Shaughnessy whose work has been treated as supporting instead of significant.

Books like Wifedom help to spotlight them, and we can also help—by sharing their stories in the hopes that, going forward, more women turn their talents to building a body of work with their own name on the cover.

What I’m Reading

No Higher Ground by Nicole Brooks: A slow burn domestic thriller that takes place entirely in the span of a few hours on a rooftop during a hundred year flood. The definition of a page turner! Pub date: August 11th.

Whistler by Ann Patchett: I just finished this and cried simply because it was over. Exquisite.

Books News

If you've been waiting for the right time to pick up one of my books, this is it! Who We Used to Be is on sale through August 9. I think it's in the secret author handbook that you’re not supposed to pick favorites amongst your books, but between you and me, this one is mine.

Order now

What if the person you trust the most did something you can’t forgive?

When Dana Blair’s teenage daughter ends up in a coma, Dana blames the ER doctor who treated her–who happens to be Dana’s best friend. As Dana’s grief turns to blame, she’s forced to make a decision that could either save her family or destroy the most important friendship of her life.

Quote of the Week

“Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

As always, I’m so grateful you here, helping me dismantle the patriarchy—one chapter at a time.

xo,

Caitlin

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Don’t get me wrong, I understand the appeal. I’m as susceptible as anyone to videos of homemade sourdough, sun-drenched kitchens, and slow mornings. In a culture defined by burnout, it makes perfect sense that so many women are captivated by the idea of dropping out of the unwinnable race we’re running.

But I think our fascination with trad wives is rooted in the fact that we’ve misidentified what we’re actually craving. What we’re really longing for isn’t linen aprons or the chance to frolic barefoot through a field, it’s the freedom to decide what our lives look like.

Of course real, actual trad wives don’t have this freedom. They’re not frolicking or posting on social media. Instead they’re performing relentless, unpaid labor, often with little to no financial independence, few choices, and no opportunity to clock out. They frequently live in poverty (because we can’t all marry the heir to Jet Blue), and many experience extreme social isolation along with physical, emotional, and financial abuse. Their days aren’t defined by freedom, but by obligation.

So, not the dream we’re chasing.

It turns out we’re not actually fascinated by trad wives, we’re fascinated by trad wife influencers. Because these women in our social media feeds have declared their independence from the modern hamster wheel of back-to-back Zoom calls and fast food for dinner on the way to baseball practice. Instead, they glide peacefully through monochromatic living rooms, harvest tomatoes from their gardens, and hug their adorable, stair-step children.

And yes, I know this is all curated. Even so, the important takeaway is that despite what these women would have us believe about “submitting” to their husbands, they are beholden to no one—except maybe their sponsors.

That, right there, is the dream for so many women: to be in charge of our own lives.

So while the publishing industry continues to churn out a steady stream of trad wife books, I think a much more interesting topic is the deep desire we have to build our days around our own values instead of someone else's expectations. To have white space in our calendars. To pursue work that feels meaningful and care for the people we love without losing ourselves in the process. To create the life of our choosing.

The good news is that there are so many books we can turn to for inspiration that have nothing to do with trad wives. Here are six of my favorites:

Behind White Picket Fences by Christine Gunderson - Exhausted by travel sports and homework, three moms join forces and agree to drop out scholastic rat race for one year to try to recreate the idyllic life they experienced as children—but then a series of unsettling events rattle their fragile utopia.

The Blue Castle by L.M. Montgomery - Convinced she has only a year to live, Valancy Stirling rebels against her controlling family, moving to a remote cabin and finding love and adventure.

Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner - A middle-aged woman leaves her controlling family, moves to the countryside, and commits the ultimate act of rebellion by becoming a witch.

The Island of Sea Women by Lisa See - Follows two best friends who live in a highly unusual enclave of matriarchal breadwinners on an island in Japan, where they free dive to support their families.

Miss Benson’s Beetle by Rachel Joyce - Two women leave postwar England to search for a mythical beetle in New Caledonia, choosing adventure over respectability.

Maame by Jessica George - A young Ghanaian British woman caring for her father finally begins asking what she wants from life instead of fulfilling everyone else's expectations.

What’s your favorite book about women choosing to live on their own terms?

📚 Book News

Shameless self-promotion alert! If you're enjoying this theme of women building lives on their own terms, the Kindle version of my novel The Good Mothers is on sale for 99¢ right now!

Order now

When Lacey moves into a house of other single mothers, she finds the supportive community she’s been seeking. But things are not what they seem. As they unravel, Lacey must decide how far she’s willing to go to protect her son – and the family she’s found.

Quote of the Week

“Above all, be the heroine of your life.”
― Nora Ephron

As always, I’m so grateful you here, helping me dismantle the patriarchy—one chapter at a time.

xo,

Caitlin

Order my newest book and win my undying gratitude!

Order The Good Mothers

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So, this week I’ve got a lighter newsletter for you. Please enjoy, and I’ll be back to regularly scheduled brain activity soon.

If Classic Authors Had Podcasts

Podcasting may feel like a modern invention, but at its core it’s just an updated platform for the things writers have always excelled at: monologuing, overanalyzing human behavior, and spouting opinions. Here’s a round up of classic authors I think would be topping the charts if they had a podcast today.

Ernest Hemingway

If any classic author were to start a three-hour YouTube show today, it would unequivocally be Ernest Hemingway.

Podcast: The Grindset

A long-form show about masculinity and productivity, including extensive coverage of his morning routine of being at his desk at dawn with a bulletproof coffee, writing until noon, tracking his word count obsessively, then spending the second half of the day fishing, reading, boxing, or drinking absinthe “for inspiration.”

Guests: A revolving door of deep-sea fishermen, big-game hunters, boxers, war correspondents, and fellow male novelists, all discussing “what it means to be a modern man.”

Recurring Segments:

Blood Sport: Stories about bullfighting, hunting, war, or bar fights.

Beef of the Week: Ongoing feuds with other writers.

Sample Episodes:

Episode 4: What a 14-Hour Fight with a Marlin Taught Me About GRIT

Episode 11: Running with the Bulls: Overcoming the Fear of Mortality

Episode 18: Why Comfort Is Killing Your Creativity

Sponsors: Protein powder, small-batch bourbon, and hand-crafted fishing lures

Jane Austen

Who wouldn’t want relationship advice from the guru, herself?

Podcast: Mastering the Marriage Mart

A relationship advice podcast dedicated to helping women of all socio-economic levels find love.

Guests: Sex experts, couples therapists, long-form interviews with women serving as cautionary tales.

Recurring Segments:

“Is He Into You or Does He Just Like Cake?”: Breaking down mixed signals from evasive bachelors who keep paying calls.

“Red Flag Roundup”: A running list dealbreakers, from men who have bad tempers, are financially unstable, or are suspiciously close to their mothers.

Sample Episodes:

Episode 14: He Has £10,000 a Year, But Can He Hold a Conversation?

Episode 22: Ghosted at the Netherfield Ball

Episode 35: Why Your Aunt Is Ruining Your Dating Life

Sponsors: High-end stationery, premium loose-leaf tea, and discrete travel services for couples eloping to Scotland

Agatha Christie

She was the original true crime girlie and would definitely top the charts today if she had a podcast.

Podcast: Poisoned Tea

A weekly true crime deep-dive into murders, motives, and why it’s always the husband.

Guests: Retired detectives, forensics experts, and the occasional nervous suspect who absolutely should not have agreed to come on the show.

Recurring Segments:

“The Poison Corner”: A breakdown of obscure toxins and how alarmingly easy they are to acquire.

“The Butler Did It (Or Did He?)”: Examining the obvious suspect and explaining why it’s never that simple.

Sample Episodes:

Episode 9: The Curious Case of the Missing Heiress

Episode 17: The Locked Drawing Room

Episode 26: Mind the Red Herrings

The Sponsors: Luxury train travel, premium bath salts, and high-end home security systems

Mark Twain

Twain would be the podcast host “just asking questions” and willing to entertain any conspiracy theory.

The Podcast: No Bull

A long-form show about politics, society, and whatever wild tangent the guest accidentally inspires.

Guests: Inventors, politicians, traveling mystics, conmen, ex-presidents, snake oil salesmen, and that one guy who swears he saw Bigfoot.

Recurring Segments: Zero. Just two hours of conversational chaos.

Sample Episodes:

Episode 7: Was Atlantis Just Florida?

Episode 14: What Your Doctor Doesn’t Want You to Know

Episode 21: My Ayahuasca Journey

The Sponsors: Vaping pens, questionable investment opportunities, and hair-growth supplements.

Mary Shelley

Long before anyone was arguing about AI or genetic engineering, Mary Shelley was already asking the central question of modern innovation: just because we can, should we?

The Podcast: What Have We Done? (co-hosted by Kara Swisher)

A snarky, skeptical tech podcast dedicated to interrogating innovation and understanding unintended consequences.

Guests: Bioethicists, AI researchers, venture capitalists, whistleblowers, and increasingly sweaty Silicon Valley founders trying to explain why this time it’s different.

Recurring Segments:

“Unintended Consequences”: A look at innovations that solved one problem and created five worse ones.

“Playing God”: Naming names in Silicon Valley of the architects of scientific breakthroughs that didn’t have proper ethics oversight.

Sample Episodes:

Episode 8: Your AI Therapist Might Hate You

Episode 21: Why Every Tech Founder Thinks He’s Prometheus

Sponsors: Solar-powered lanterns, perimenopause therapy, and encrypted messaging apps

This list could go on forever, but I want to hear from you: Which classic author’s show would be an instant subscribe for you?

What I’m Reading

I’m currently on a three-week trip, which means packing light—but these are the books I made room for:

Whistler — Ann Patchett’s latest. My library hold for this came up right before leaving and felt like I’d won the lottery.

Ninth Street Women by Mary Gabriel — A fascinating look at the women who reshaped modern art in postwar America, including Lee Krasner, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler.

Quote of the Week

“I always deserve the best treatment because I never put up with any other.”
― Jane Austen, Emma

As always, I’m so grateful you here, helping me dismantle the patriarchy—one chapter at a time.

xo,

Caitlin

Order my newest book and win my undying gratitude!

Order The Good Mothers

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My hunch is that this is because, for a long time, success for women has been defined by endurance. By holding it together and making the best of a bad situation. By staying.

As women, we’re taught that strength looks like persistence. That if something feels unsustainable, the answer is to become better at sustaining it through getting up earlier, taking the right supplements, or working smarter not harder (but also harder.)

Traditionally, women have been punished for walking away from situations the world deems “good enough.” Literature has reflected this for centuries. Think Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, or The Neapolitan Novels. In these books (all of which I love, for the record), the emphasis often isn’t on the woman’s liberation, but on the wreckage she leaves behind. The failed marriage. The broken home. The selfish choice.

In this way, female exit stories have historically been framed as ruptures, not freedom.

Men, on the other hand, get quests. They leave to seek their fortune or find themselves—noble endeavors that rarely raise questions about who’s left behind to absorb the fallout. (See: The Odyssey, Revolutionary Road, and Rabbit, Run.)

A man leaves and we ask what he’s searching for. A woman leaves and we ask what she’s abandoning.

Lately, though, I’ve noticed an exciting shift. Many of the books I’ve been reading are celebrations of women leaving—but these departures aren’t framed as failures. More and more often, the women who leave are the heroes of the story.

Here are some of the themes I’m noticing:

The Mid-Life Crisis Novel

There’s been an explosion of books centering on women who feel crushed under the weight of marriage, motherhood, or ambition. But, good news, they’re not throwing themselves in front of trains! Instead, their existential collapses are framed as the beginning of fulfilling reinventions.

Reading Recommendations: Fleishman Is in Trouble, The Lost Daughter, Where’d You Go, Bernadette, All Fours

Motherhood

Narratives about motherhood stories are shifting, too, and exploring the once-taboo idea that a mother can leave or reject motherhood as her total identity not because she loves her children less, but because she refuses to disappear.

What feels new about these stories is that they don’t focus solely on the damage a mother inflicts on her family by stepping outside traditional expectations. Instead, they flip the script and explore the possibility that a woman leaving—or redefining motherhood on her own terms—can itself be an act of love, survival, and liberation.

Reading Recommendations: Our Missing Hearts, A Woman Is No Man, The Mother Act, Mika in Real Life, Patsy, The Resurrection of Joan Ashby

The Divorce Memoir

Divorce is having a moment, too—not as a “failed marriage”, but as an empowering transformation. These stories center on the radical realization that many women end up feeling more whole on their own than they ever did inside a partnership—and that marriage, once sold as the ultimate marker of adulthood and security, can sometimes become its own kind of diminishment.

Reading Recommendations: Strangers, This American Ex-Wife, You Could Make This Place Beautiful

Other Kinds of Leavings

Not every woman blows up her life, files for divorce, or moves across the country. Some of the most important exits are much quieter than that. Sometimes it looks like walking away from perfectionism, or from the exhausting need to be liked by everyone all the time.

Sometimes it means letting go of friendships that no longer fit, beauty standards you’ve spent decades trying to contort yourself into, or a career that no longer brings you joy.

Reading Recommendations: Milk Fed, Black Girls Must Die Exhausted, Convenience Store Woman, I’m Glad My Mom Died, Natural Beauty, Johanna Porter Is Not Sorry, The Book of Essie

All these stories point toward a new kind of heroine’s journey: one where women aren’t rewarded for how much they can endure, but for recognizing when it’s time to go.

What’s your favorite leaving story?

Quote of the Week

“If you ever find yourself in the wrong story, leave.”

― Mo Willems

A Favor

I’m honestly in awe of how quickly the Read Against the Patriarchy community is growing, and I’d love to keep building this cozy, bookish, feminist corner of the internet.

If you’ve enjoyed this newsletter, would you share it with a friend? It’s the best way to help more like-minded readers find us, and I’d be so grateful.

As always, I’m so thrilled you’re here, helping me dismantle the patriarchy—one chapter at a time.

xo,

Caitlin

Order my newest book and win my undying gratitude!

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Back when I first started building an author platform, I wrote the blandest, most inoffensive newsletter imaginable, designed to appeal to everyone and no one. It was boring as hell, both to write, and—I suspect—to read.

Eventually, I started asking myself what I actually wanted to write about beyond vague, upbeat posts about my “publishing journey.” What would excite me enough to sit down and hit publish?

I zeroed in on two of my favorite things: books and dismantling the patriarchy.

Yet it still took me weeks to launch Read Against the Patriarchy. Weeks when I questioned whether it was really a good idea, because didn’t everyone on the internet hate angry, opinionated women? And if they realized I was one, wouldn’t people immediately unsubscribe?

And then I thought: f*ck it.

So I launched this Substack with a post about the Top 10 Cringe-Inducing Female Descriptions by Male Authors.

And yes, people unsubscribed.

But others flooded in to replace them. Soon I’d built connections with a new group of smart, funny, opinionated women (and a few supportive men), and the momentum has only grown from there.

It turns out that once you stop trying to be universally likable, you make room for the people who actually like the real version of you.

I’m not a big believer in regrets, but if I had to name one, it would be how much time and energy I spent in my twenties and thirties softening my opinions and apologizing for my boundaries.

These days, though, I mostly no longer feel care what people think. Not not at all, obviously. I’m still a woman, and have been socialized since birth to prioritize others’ opinions of me over my own.

But enough that it feels like a kind of freedom.

This lesson didn’t come naturally to me. I learned it by observing women who seemed much freer than I felt—some of them real, and some of them fictional.

Long before I summoned the strength to hold my boundaries and express my opinions, I’d always been drawn to girls and women in books to whom this came naturally: Anne Shirley. Jo March. Ramona Quimby. Elizabeth Bennett.

I looked up to them because they didn’t organize themselves around other people’s comfort, even if that meant they were sometimes selfish, rude, or abrasive.

They were the ones who planted in me the seed of an idea that wouldn’t sprout until much later in my life: That being liked is not the same thing as being free—and being free is always better.

If you need some inspiration for your own freedom, read on.

Recommended Reading: Fictional Women Who DGAF

Becky Sharp from Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray: Becky’s ambition is her defining characteristic. She’s manipulative, morally questionable, and singularly focused on her own needs and desires. Love her or hate her, she is the definition of a woman who puts herself first.

Shug Avery from The Color Purple by Alice Walker: Shug is unapologetically confident, sexually liberated, and financially independent. She defies 20th-century Southern patriarchal expectations by refusing to submit to men or traditional gender roles.

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout: Olive is blunt, judgmental, and often emotionally withholding, but what makes her compelling is her total refusal to strive for warmth or likability just because it’s expected of women. May we all have her courage.

Hayley Sinclair in Bring the House Down by Charlotte Runcie: When a theater reviewer gives Hayley’s one-woman show a scathing one-star review, then sleeps with her without revealing his identity before the review is published, she fights back with a new version of the show that is pure feminine rage—putting him at the center and his career on notice. Standing ovation!

Mama Day by Gloria Naylor: Miranda (Mama Day) is completely uninterested in respectability, external approval, or explaining herself to anyone. She exists entirely on her own terms—outside conventional femininity, outside male authority, and even outside the rational systems that try to contain her. Icon.

Who else would you add to the list?

Books News

If you’ve been meaning to read my books (or convince your book club to!), now’s your moment.

Such a Good Family—about two best friends torn apart after one of their teenage sons is accused of assaulting the other’s daughter—and Things We Never Say—dark academia, about three mothers at an elite private school unraveling a web of secrets with huge blowback—are both on sale as ebooks on Amazon in the U.S. and Canada through June 26 for just 99 cents.

Basically less than a coffee, and with (hopefully) far more emotional payoff. (If you decide otherwise I want to know where you get your coffee!)

Quote(s) of the Week

“The minute you start caring about what other people think is the minute you stop being yourself.”
― Meryl Streep

And this aspirational one:

“I don’t care what you think about me. I don’t think about you at all.”
― Coco Chanel

As always, I’m so grateful you here, helping me dismantle the patriarchy—one chapter at a time.

xo,

Caitlin

Order my newest book and win my undying gratitude!

Order The Good Mothers

Follow me on Instagram - I promise I’m fun and won’t try to sell you essential oils!

Join me on Instagram

And I don’t mean the manufactured shouting matches between C-list reality TV stars. I mean real celebrities. Gwyneth and Winona. Joan Crawford and Bette Davis. Nicki Minaj and Cardi B.

I exclusively love celebrity feuds between women—because if two famous men are fighting over who has the bigger, ahem, ego, I genuinely could care less. But I think I’m also obsessed with female feuds because I’ve always been fascinated by female friendship. Most of the novels I write are about the complexity of women’s friendships—the relationships that shape us and the ones that sometimes break our hearts.

To me, friendship is one of the most powerful forces in a woman’s life. Which also means that the breakup of a friendship can be just as potent.

That’s what makes celebrity feuds so irresistible—that beneath the gossip, they’re stories about betrayal, competition, ambition, and loyalty.

In other words, all the things that make great fiction.

And, just like in fiction, where an author manipulates her characters into arguing, so too are most feuds between famous women architected by a shadowy character lurking in the background: the entertainment industry.

Female celebrity feuds aren’t just gossip, they’re a product. The media has spent decades packaging women’s conflict as entertainment because it sells extraordinarily well. We love narratives with heroes and villains. We love picking sides. (I mean, Team Jen vs. Team Angelina, anyone?)

Take Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie. At the height of their fame in the early 2000s, their friendship imploded in spectacular fashion. Or at least that’s how it was presented in the media, which treated their split like an international crisis where every party appearance or offhand comment became evidence in an ongoing war.

Yet recently on an episode of Call Your Daddy, both women said the drama was greatly exaggerated by the toxic tabloid culture of that time—a culture that made enormous amounts of money turning female friendship into female competition. (I am, unfortunately, 100% guilty of buying those magazines.)

The same pattern played out decades earlier with Joan Crawford and Bette Davis.

From the get-go, studios and journalists relentlessly compared the two actresses, essentially guaranteeing that rivalry would trump any chance they had at friendship. Then Warner Brothers took it a step further and cast them together in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, a film whose plot mirrored their off-screen distaste for one another. And in the ultimate PR power move, the studio made the actresses’ supposed hatred for one another part of the movie’s marketing campaign.

Just, ew.

Unsurprisingly, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? became one of the studio’s biggest hits of the year and Warner Brothers made a ton of money off it.

And yes, there probably was bad blood between Crawford and Davis, and probably also between Paris and Nicole at some point. Because while ambition and jealousy are authentic emotional states, they don’t exist in a vacuum. Instead they’re often by industries that have a vested interest in keeping women at odds with one another.

Because if there’s one thing the patriarchy understands, it’s that women working together are threatening. Whereas women competing with each other are profitable—just usually less so for the women involved.

And this is why, despite the fact that I will absolutely read every listicle about celebrity feuds that crosses my feed, I also know not to trust them. I’m aware these stories invite us to pick sides, compare women, and treat female success as a zero-sum game where one person’s win must come at another’s expense. That they reinforce an idea women have been fed for generations: that other women are our competition–when really the opposite is true.

Most of the good things in my life—from my writing career to my book club to my general sanity—have come not from competing with other women, but from being supported by them.

Which may be why I’m ultimately less interested in the feud itself than in the friendship that existed before it.

Because that’s the real story. The feud is just the part that sells.

Reading Recs

If, like me, you love a good celebrity dustup, here are some titles to check out:

Carrie Soto is Back by Taylor Jenkins Reid - A retired tennis legend mounts a scorched earth comeback to defend her record against a younger rival who idolizes her.

L.A. Women by Ella Berman - Two aspiring screenwriters in 1980s Los Angeles forge an intense friendship that ends in betrayal when only one of them becomes a success.

The Animators by Kayla Rae Whitaker - When two childhood best friends go from art school outsiders to acclaimed animators, their complicated past catches up to them.

Wait for Me by Amy Jo Burns - When folk singer Elle Harlow rolls into Nashville with only her mandolin and big dreams, she’s befriended by a fellow aspiring singer songwriter. The resulting betrayal will make headlines in the music industry for years to come.

Honey by Isabel Banta - When Amber Young joins a girl group in 90s/early 2000s, fame doesn’t take. Then she goes solo, as does one of the other members. What follows is on-again, off-again friendship with her biggest rival.

Quote(s) of the Week

“Female friendships are fucking extraordinary. They don’t have to be sexual to be intense love affairs. A breakup with a female friend can be more traumatic than a breakup with a lover.”

― Keira Knightly

“You find out who your real friends are when you’re involved in a scandal.”

― Elizabeth Taylor

As always, I’m so grateful you here, helping me dismantle the patriarchy—one chapter at a time.

xo,

Caitlin

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Then, after marriage and kids, suddenly entire hours of my day vanished. Routines collapsed and I was constantly in catch-up mode. And yet I continued to assume the problem was me.

Surely there was a more optimized morning routine I could adopt, a planner I could buy, a book I could read that would finally help me get my shit together.

Except that all the productivity books I read felt completely out of sync with my life. They all had some version of the same advice: that I should block uninterrupted time for deep work, minimize time spent on low value tasks, and stick to a schedule.

Cool, cool. Because, kids are famous for never interrupting you, and I’m sure no one will notice if I stop packing lunches and tell the school nurse I can’t pick up my sick kid until I’ve finished my deep work time block.

This was when I realized the problem wasn’t me. It was that 93% of time management books are written by men.1

Most traditional, male-centered productivity advice is built around one central assumption: that your time belongs to you.2 And for many men—particularly affluent men with wives or paid staff managing the invisible infrastructure of daily life—that assumption is true.

Take Cal Newport, author of Deep Work and one of the patron saints of modern productivity culture. On its face, his advice sounds compelling. Focus deeply. Eliminate distraction. Protect your attention. But this ignores the fact that this advice is often less about superior discipline and more about superior conditions.

Likewise, a New York Times profile of Adam Grant described his “hyper-efficiency” while casually noting that his wife stays home and manages the household and cares for their children. It also noted that Grant works until 11 p.m. many nights and works one full day every weekend.

Oh, but don’t worry, he makes time for dinner every night with his family–cooked by his wife.

The irony is that these men don’t actually need a time management system because their time is wholly their own.

(Side note: Where are the time management books written by Cal Newport and Adam Grant’s wives? Now those I would read.)

Once I stopped taking time management advice exclusively from men, I noticed an interesting pattern in productivity books written by women. While some still offered the predictable advice about color-coded family calendars and crockpot meals, another group focused less on optimizing every second and more on doing less, accepting imperfection, and building systems around real constraints instead of pretending those constraints don’t exist.

Kendra Adachi sums this up beautifully in her book, The Plan: “The productivity industry makes a ton of money teaching us to produce, all within a culture that holds us to a startlingly high standard of what a woman’s production should be. We have no choice but to live according to the rules and strategies written by and for men.”

In other words, the reason “traditional” time management systems work so well for men is that they often have fewer interruptions.

The older I get, the more I think most women do not have a productivity problem. We have an interruption problem. A support problem. An invisible labor problem.

Because no productivity hack in the world is going to outperform having the help we need. And maybe that’s the real secret behind so much productivity advice–not better habits, better infrastructure.

Recommendations: Female-Authored Productivity Books That Actually Feel Realistic

Drop the Ball: Achieving More by Doing Less by Tiffany Dufu (forward by Gloria Steinem)

Overwhelmed by Brigid Schulte

The Fringe Hours: Making Time for You by Jessica N. Turner

The PLAN: Manage Your Time Like a Lazy Genius by Kendra Adachi

Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond Productivity Culture by Jenny Odell

Design Your Day: Be More Productive, Set Better Goals, and Live Life On Purpose by Claire Diaz-Ortiz

Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World by Anne-Laure Le Cunff

Books I’ve Loved Lately

Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke

Yes, I know this book is absolutely everywhere, but there’s a reason for that. I do have to caveat that while there were many things about the book I didn’t love, I did love the 2+ hour conversation it sparked with my book club on everything from internalized misogyny to trad wife fashion.

Behind White Picket Fences by Christine Gunderson

When three overwhelmed moms decide to drop out of the scholastic and travel sports rat race for year to homeschool their kids, they try to recreate the idyllic phone-free life they experienced as kids. But along the way they accidentally uncover some disturbing secrets about their picture-perfect suburban neighborhood. This comes out on June 9th and I highly recommend it!

Quote of the Week

“Most time-management authors and experts are men who do not have a boss, a home to run, or a menstrual cycle. I don’t know if you’re aware, but all three of them are notoriously unwieldy.”
— Kendra Adachi, The PLAN: Manage Your Time Like a Lazy Genius

As always, I’m so grateful you here, helping me dismantle the patriarchy—one chapter at a time.

xo,

Caitlin

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Considering Jane Eyre was published in 1847, when “marry well and hope for the best” was less a lifestyle choice and more a survival strategy, Jane’s rejection of the idea that a woman’s safety, status, and survival should come from a man was downright radical and has only become more so over time.

The first time I read Jane Eyre as a teenager, I saw it as a romance. But the older I get, the more it reads like a treatise on self-sufficiency, and how necessary it is if you want any real say in your own life. (Which, ironically, the trad wife influencers making money their content understand well.)

Look, I get it. On its face, the trad wife model is seductive. Who among us doesn’t occasionally fantasize about opting out of the daily grind to make sourdough in a cute apron?

But the idea that if align yourself with the right man and the right version of domestic life, you’ll be rewarded with stability, protection, and a beautifully curated existence (prairie dresses optional), comes with sobering terms.

Dependence. Limited autonomy. A power dynamic where your options are only as expansive as someone else allows them to be.

And Jane understood this from the get-go.

She was lucky, in a sense, to get an early crash course in how power works by starting out with no money, no safety net, and very few choices. Even now, in “modern” times, that’s a lesson many women learn too late—years into a marriage that falls apart, when the math suddenly starts to matter.

Take Rochester. On paper, he’s the dream. Wealthy, devoted, and able to offer Jane a life where all her material problems disappear. And, conveniently, she actually loves him. But unlike many trad wives, Jane is clear-eyed about what’s underneath his offer: dependence, and the conditions that come with it. (Also, there’s the not-insignificant issue of the wife in the attic, but that’s another post altogether.)

St. John, on the other hand, offers a different version of the same trap. A “good” life, full of purpose and societal approval. But he doesn’t want a partner so much as a very competent assistant with no personal needs.

Jane rejects them both.

The nearly 200-year-old lesson here couldn’t be more relevant today: while we want to believe it’s love that changes everything, more often than not, it’s money.

Once Jane inherits her own fortune, everything changes. For the first time, she doesn’t require a man, a position, or a compromise to secure her future. She no longer needs to be chosen, she can choose.

Jane goes back to Rochester only once she no longer has to. She returns with her own money, her own independence, and, crucially, the ability to leave again if she needs to—something true trad wives (not the cosplaying Hannah Neelemans of the world) don’t have.

Because contrary to what TikTok might have you believe, love without autonomy doesn’t lead to a happy ending. And as Jane understood long before the rest of us, financial independence isn’t just about comfort, it’s the foundation of freedom.

For fun, here are some other great books that feature women taking financial control of their lives—often by any means necessary:

Margo’s Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe

Lakewood by Megan Giddings

Counterfeit by Kirstin Chen

The Book of Essie by Meghan MacLean Weir

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte

Women Are the Fiercest Creatures by Andrea Dunlop

Quote of the Week

“People always say money isn’t the key to happiness, but I always figured if you have enough money, you can have a key made.”
― Joan Rivers

As always, I’m so grateful you here, helping me dismantle the patriarchy—one chapter at a time.

xo,

Caitlin

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Answer: Wives.

The comments poured in.

In one camp there were the people (mostly women) who were personally outraged on behalf of the wives. One commenter compared it to the early days of COVID, when she’d be on Zoom calls watching sandwiches and cups of coffee appear in front of her male colleagues, delivered by faceless pairs of hands, while she was juggling work, remote school, and wondering who, exactly, was supposed to make her a sandwich.

There were also, predictably, a number of “not all men” comments.1 And yes, of course. But I'd bet that if we ran the numbers on famous male authors over the last century, we’d find a consistent pattern: behind many of them was a woman making their lives possible—and not just metaphorically. Logistically.

Here are a few notable examples:

Tabitha King worked a second shift at Dunkin’ Donuts to support her family while Stephen King wrote. She also managed the household, raised their three children, acted as his first (unpaid) editor, and supported him through his drug and alcohol addictions. Fun!

While Gabriel García Márquez locked himself in his study to write One Hundred Years of Solitude, his wife, Mercedes Barcha, managed all household affairs while they sank deeply into debt. She even pawned her hairdryer and other personal items to afford postage to send his manuscript to his publisher. At that point, I might have pawned my husband, instead.

Henry David Thoreau famously wrote about self-reliance while his mother did his laundry and brought him sandwiches. (Again with the sandwiches!)

Eileen Blair, first wife of George Orwell, supported the couple financially while also acting as Orwell’s editor, typist, and creative collaborator. Fun fact: she was also much more highly educated than he was. (Anna Funder’s account of Eileen’s life, Wifedom: Mrs. Orwell’s Invisible Life, is on my TBR!)

Vera Nabokov, wife of Vladmir Nabokov, supported their family by working as a secretary and translator and took care of all the household details. Apparently she also even folded his umbrellas and licked his stamps for him.

Jane Howard, a novelist in her own right, married Kingsley Ami, and ended up sacrificing her own writing time to cook, clean, write his thank you notes, and even act as his chauffeur because he refused to drive. She later divorced him.

Now, I’m not saying these male authors didn’t earn their success, or that I don’t admire them. But I don’t think we talk enough about how the structural factors that made this success possible. (I.e., wives.)

Let’s now consider the other side of the coin: successful female authors.

Surely they also have dedicated spouses enabling their uninterrupted writing time. Like Rebecca Makkai, whose husband took a teaching job to support them while she wrote. Or Jodi Picoult, whose husband quit his job to stay home with the kids so she could focus on writing.

Unsurprisingly, these examples are the exception, not the rule.

For example, Jodi Picoult was already highly successful when her husband quit his job. In an interview from the early 2000s (when she’d already published seven novels!) Picoult described her daily schedule like this: wake up at 5 a.m., exercise, get the kids to school, write for a few hours, manage childcare all afternoon, make dinner, put the kids to bed, and then write again, late at night.

Likewise, Barbara Kingsolver got up at four a.m. every morning to write before her mothering duties took over.

Nobel Prize-winning author Alice Munro structured her writing around raising three children. She wrote in short bursts, choosing to write short stories over novels not because of artistic preference, but because they were the only form that fit into the margins of her life.

Now try, for a moment, to imagine a comparably successful male author being expected to write only a four a.m., while the kids are in school, or after everyone else has gone to bed.

I’ll wait.

We talk a lot about writing routines, but not nearly enough about writing conditions. Who gets uninterrupted time, who gets to close their office door (or who even has an office), and whose work gets prioritized.

So the next time you read about a man writing for ten hours a day, it’s worth asking:

Who is making the sandwich?

Books News

Speaking of writing routines, my bestselling debut novel, Such a Good Family, (which I wrote early in the mornings before my kids woke up) is on sale through April 26th on Amazon.

For fans of Little Fires Everywhere and Brit Bennett’s The Mothers, Such a Good Family is is the story of two longtime best friends who face a reckoning when the romance between their teenage children ends in a devastating accusation. One mother is fighting for her daughter’s justice, the other for her son’s innocence, as loyalty, truth, and the commitment to “believe women” collide.

Order Now

Quote of the Week

“Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses… reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.”
— Virginia Woolf

As always, I’m so grateful you here, helping me dismantle the patriarchy—one chapter at a time.

xo,

Caitlin

Order my newest book and win my undying gratitude!

Order The Good Mothers

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Now, for the record, I love a beach read. But I also deeply resent the way we talk about them.

For one, “beach reads” are most often centered on women’s lives, and thus labeled as “fluff” not because they’re shallow, but because our culture still struggles to take women’s inner lives seriously.

If a novel is about marriage, motherhood, friendship, love, domestic dissatisfaction, female ambition, identity, or emotional burnout, it’s more likely to be categorized as “light” or “perfect for the beach”.

For example:

Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Atmosphere, which showed up on just about every 2025 beach read list I could find, is about sexism in STEM, specifically at NASA, and the personal and professional constraints lesbian women faced in the 1980s. Such light, breezy topics, obvs.

Emily Henry’s Great Big Beautiful Life has a romance plotline, yes, but at its core it’s about strained mother-daughter relationships, family estrangement, and generational trauma. Super fluffy and fun!

And Carley Fortune’s Meet Me at the Lake deals with grief and postpartum anxiety, which clearly go perfectly with a pina colada.

Yet despite the weighty topics these books address, the implication is that, as “beach reads,” they are somehow less serious1 or less worthy of our time.

The escapism problem

A lot of the conversation around beach reads rests on the idea that there are two kinds of reading: reading for escapism and reading for enrichment. And people mostly place beach reads squarely in the escapism category.

Take this definition from a CNN article:

“Books labeled as beach reads tend to emphasize plot and characters over elegant prose and heavier themes. In other words, a beach read doesn’t ask the reader to ponder the grim realities of the modern world or plunge into the depths of the human experience.”

So. Many. Thoughts.

First, this is a false either/or. I would argue that all novels are a form of escapism. That’s the whole point of READING — to step outside our own daily lives and experiences.

Second, I don’t think readers are avoiding “the depths of the human experience” when they pick up a so-called beach read. In fact, I think many of us are looking for exactly that — to be plunged into the human experience in an emotionally intimate way. We want books that make us feel human.

Or maybe that’s just me? Maybe there’s a whole group of people out there who want to read books that have nothing to do with the human experience! In which case, maybe there’s a market for AI-authored books, after all.

So, what actually is a beach read?

To me, a beach read is less about intellectual seriousness and more about the reading experience. Because somewhere along the way, “compulsively readable” became conflated with “not serious,” and that downgrade lands hardest on books about women’s lives.

To me, a beach read:

Pulls you forward. It has narrative momentum, making you forget all about your melting frosé or reapplying sunscreen.

Is emotionally immediate. This doesn’t mean it’s simple or fluffy. It means it’s accessible. You’re in the story quickly. It has tension, conflict, and high emotional stakes.

Offers pleasure, which is not the opposite of depth. A beach read can still tackle grief, rage, resentment, and despair. It just does it in a way that lets us recognize those feelings in ourselves in a way that’s relatable and often cathartic.

To be clear, I’m less interested in whether a book qualifies as a beach read than in what we’re trying to imply when we use the label. Because I don’t think readability is the enemy of seriousness. I don’t think pleasure is the opposite of depth. And I think it’s about time we took books about women’s lives seriously.

My favorite feminist beach reads

For fun, I’m sharing a list of what I consider to be beach reads—books that take women’s interior lives seriously, let women be messy, selfish, ambitious, strange, or unlikeable, and still know how to entertain.

Mrs. Everything by Jennifer Weiner

Set in the 1950s and 60s, this book follows the lives of two sisters; Jo, the tomboyish, rebellious sister, and Bethie, the popular, seemingly perfect one, as they navigate their family relationships, their emerging sexualities, and the changing role of women.

Girl Dinner by Olivie Blake

I stayed up way too late finishing this addictive book about a freshman and a professor who are drawn into a prestigious sorority's sinister wellness trend. It’s about female rage, motherhood, power dynamics, privilege, traditional roles, and the pressure to achieve perfection. Warning: it does have a horror edge to it, which isn’t normally my thing, but I still enjoyed it.

L.A. Women by Ella Berman

This one centers on the complex, rivalrous friendship between two ambitious female writers in 1960s and 70s Los Angeles, culminating in a life-changing betrayal. It’s about artistic ambition, the challenges of being a woman in a male-dominated world, ambivalent motherhood, and the ebbs and flows of long-enduring female friendships.

Park Avenue by Renée Ahdieh

Think Crazy Rich Asians meets Succession, where a junior lawyer and daughter of Korean immigrant bodega owners is tasked with navigating a high-profile crisis for a wealthy, dysfunctional Korean-American family. I couldn’t put it down, and loved how it made me think about ambition, family loyalty, cultural identity, the immigrant experience, and the contrast between wealth and personal values.

What book would you add to this list?

Quote of the Week

“Instead of hoping that some day the boys' club will open its doors, we can form our own clubs, define 'worthy' our own way, and celebrate the books and voices that we decide deserve celebration.”
― Jennifer Weiner

As always, I’m so grateful you here, helping me dismantle the patriarchy—one chapter at a time.

xo,

Caitlin

Order my newest book and win my undying gratitude!

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Earlier in my life, I spent years striving to be low maintenance. To be the kind of “cool girl” that Gillian Flynn famously describes in Amy Dunne’s Gone Girl monologue: she’s fun, game for anything, and never gets angry. She’s relatable. Low drama.

She’s Serena Woodson from Gossip Girl. Carolyn Kennedy from Love Story. Diana Barry from Anne of Green Gables. Jessica Beal in real life.

She’s also the perfect example of how to embody the patriarchy. Because one of the greatest scams ever pulled was convincing women that being “low maintenance” is a personality goal.

See, “low maintenance” isn’t a neutral descriptor. It’s a social expectation, one that teaches women to take up less space, ask for less, and need less. It’s also a standard that benefits everyone except the person trying to live up to it.

(Also, have you ever heard of a “low-maintenance man”? Exactly. The entire spectrum is reserved for women, as if our emotions, needs, and preferences are the ones that require constant calibration.)

The other side of the coin, of course, is the “high-maintenance” woman. You know the one: emotional, demanding, needy. Or—more accurately—unwilling to pretend she doesn’t have needs.

The label is almost always used as a warning: this woman will require something from you. Because the term isn’t really descriptive, it’s disciplinary. It’s what we call women who take up space.

And (speaking from personal experience) the cost of avoiding that label is steep. When you train yourself to be “low maintenance,” your needs don’t disappear, they just go unmet. As one of my Substack commentors put it, “The myth that the girl who asks for nothing gets everything has done real damage.” Because in reality, asking for nothing usually gets you exactly that.

When I think about the women who inspire me, both in books and in real life, none of them could ever be considered low maintenance–and I don’t think I’m alone. I think we’re drawn to stories about women who refuse to play this game because it’s our fantasy to do the same.

So, if you’re ready to embrace your own “high-maintenance” era, here are some books to look to for inspiration:

All Fours by Miranda July

In the ultimate midlife crisis, a woman blows up her life to follow desire and reinvention. She’s an unapologetic hot mess with a singular focus on her own needs.

The Book Club for Troublesome Women by Marie Bostwick

A group of suburban women in the 1960s begin reading The Feminine Mystique, and promptly realize their “perfect” lives aren’t enough.

Hazel Says No by Jessica Berger Gross

When Hazel is propositioned by her high school principal on her first day at a new school, her refusal sets off a chain reaction that upends life in her new town, and her family’s ability to belong there at all.

The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich

A mother and daughter each find themselves going to great lengths to avoid settling for what life offers them, and slowly learn to demand more.

Sunshine Nails by Mai Nguyen

The prodigal daughter of Vietnamese refugees sets out to do whatever it takes to keep her family’s nail salon open when an ultra-glam chain salon opens across the street,

I’ve shown great restraint here by only listing five books! Because once you start paying attention, you realize that the most interesting women in literature (and in life) are almost never low maintenance.

Who are your favorite high maintenance characters?

Attention Book Clubs!

One of my absolute favorite things is dropping in to chat with book clubs about my books. If you’d like me to join yours (virtually), I’d love to! Just let me know.

You can also find discussion guides for all my books on my website to help get the conversation started.

Quote of the Week

“There is no such thing as low maintenance or high maintenance, just a bunch of women hoping for a capable mechanic.”
― Liz Vassey

As always, I’m so grateful you here, helping me dismantle the patriarchy—one chapter at a time.

xo,

Caitlin

Order my newest book and win my undying gratitude!

Order The Good Mothers

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There are a lot of new subscribers here, so first, welcome! I’m so glad you’re here to help us dismantle the patriarchy—one chapter at a time.

Next: this past Sunday was International Women’s Day1. And March is Women’s History Month. But candidly, I’ve been hard-pressed to feel inspired by either of these things. Read on for a different take on how I’m feeling “empowered” these days.

Participation Trophy Feminism

As women, every March we’re handed a bouquet of symbolic appreciation: Women’s History Month, International Women’s Day, panels about female leadership, a slew of “empowering” social media posts. All while our basic human rights are slowly being eroded.

In this way, March feels a whole lot like participation trophy feminism.

And yet, this isn’t going to be another newsletter about how awful things are. God knows there’s already enough doom flooding our daily feeds.

But it’s also not going to be another list of inspirational books about women who changed our lives and challenged the patriarchy—because I suspect many of those women would be appalled by the current state of affairs.

Instead, I want to talk about books that are giving me hope right now. I know this might sound trite, but stay with me.

Lately, as an antidote to the real-life headlines, I’ve been craving stories that imagine a more equitable society. A world were women are powerful and men are held accountable. Where we’re not expected to do it all while simultaneously fending off the patriarchy at every turn.

Luckily I’ve stumbled across some books that have reminded me—no matter how far-fetched the plot—that systems can change, power can shift, and the world we live in today is not the only possible version of reality.

Sure, maybe reading books about alternative realities where women are thriving counts as escapism, but don’t we all deserve a little of that right now?2

Here are a few books that have been giving me that kind of hope lately:

The Power by Naomi Alderman

Imagine a world where teenage girls suddenly develop the ability to generate electric shocks—and instead of making TikToks about it, they upend the global balance of power between men and women and reshape society. (This is also a TV show, apparently, but I haven’t watched it. Let me know if I should!)

The Change by Kirsten Miller

A group of women discover that the symptoms of menopause have gifted them extraordinary powers—and they decide to use them to hunt down men who harm women. Who needs hormone replacement therapy when you can have revenge??

VenCo by Cherie Dimaline

A woman discovers she’s part of a secret network of witches searching for the final member needed to restore their coven’s power and reclaim female independence solidarity. A truly magical tale about collective resistance. (See what I did there?)

Matrix by Lauren Groff

The story of Marie de France, who takes over a failing abbey and transforms it into a self-sustaining female community. The women farm, govern, protect, and support one another—without relying on men or traditional power structures.

The Husbands by Holly Gramazio

A woman discovers her attic mysteriously produces an endless stream of replacement husbands, each slightly different from the last. Why not keep going until you’ve had a chance to explore all the paths your life might have taken until you find the perfect one?

Libertie by Kaitlyn Greenidge

A young Black woman in Reconstruction-era Brooklyn struggles to define herself outside the limited choices for women—despite having an ambitious, successful doctor mother. It explores the question of what true freedom might look like for a woman determined to claim her own path.

From the speculative to the historical, stories like these remind me why the fight is still worth having. Because every better future begins the same way: with someone imagining it first. And sometimes the most radical thing we can do is refuse to believe that the current state of things is inevitable.

So tell me: what books give you hope for the future?

Book News

Last week I wrote “THE END” on my sixth novel. I can’t say much about it yet, but think The Last Thing He Told You meets Apples Never Fall. More soon!

Also, I recently wrote on Substack about how female revenge stories are having a moment. So I felt very validated to see the smart and funny Karin Gillespie reach the same conclusion in her February roundup of debut novels that sold. She called out the trend of “mad-as-hell women who aren’t afraid to get violent”. I think we might be onto something…

Quote of the Week

“Justice may be slow, but she’s also relentless.”
― Kirsten Miller, The Change

As always, I’m so grateful you here, helping me dismantle the patriarchy—one chapter at a time.

xo,

Caitlin

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Today we’re talking about something that feels very of the moment: women demanding payback—on the page, and increasingly, in real life. And of course, I’ve got a list of my favorite books where women finally serve themselves the justice the world refuses to.

I recently read an advance copy of Ashley Winstead’s new thriller, Hot Girls Murder Club. It’s a buzzy (and bloody!) novel about success, sisterhood, and demanding justice by any means necessary.

I loved the book, and it got me thinking that this idea of women demanding justice by any means necessary feels like it’s having a moment, both in literature and the world around us.

As the title suggestions, there’s a lot of murder in Hot Girls Murder Club. Some of it is committed by bad men harming women. Some of it is committed by women responding in kind.

Many readers (like me) will applaud this plot twist. And many will not. Because despite the growing “women delivering the justice the world refuses to” zeitgeist1, people are still largely uncomfortable with women who seek payback.

“That’s what the system is for,” they say. “Why can’t you just trust the system?”

This despite the fact that the “normal” channels of justice often don’t work for women. (Ahem, still zero arrests in the U.S. tied to the Epstein files.)

And so women going outside the “system” are viewed as unhinged vigilantes, not righteous avengers, as men are. (See: every episode of Yellowstone, ever.2)

Bottom line: when women seek payback, they’ve gone too far.

But have they, really?

Winstead nails this tension in one perfect line:

“It was a Shakespearean tragedy, the way our lives kept returning to the same dark fork in the road, the same decision: a man who needed to be dealt with, a world that wouldn’t do it, a debt we needed to collect on our own.”

Exactly. What are we supposed to do when the systems that claim to protect us don’t? When we have Christine Blasey Ford, Virginia Giuffre, and countless other unnamed and unheard women to hold up as evidence?

Are we supposed to say, “Oh well, that’s the patriarchy for you,” and go back to doomscrolling?

If so, then it’s no wonder so many recent novels reflect the rage of this new breed of women who refuse to simply absorb the harm done to them and move on.

Hot Girls Murder Club is only the latest.

Here are just a few others in the growing canon of women delivering the justice the world refuses to:

The Obsession by Jesse Q. Sutanto
A teenage girl goes to extraordinary lengths to escape her stalker when every adult around her fails to intervene.

Killers of a Certain Age by Deanna Raybourn
Four sixty-something female assassins discover their own organization has marked them for elimination. Instead of going quietly, they fight back with decades of honed skill.

Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty
A group of mothers band together after one of them has endured years of domestic violence.

Circe by Madeline Miller
An ancient tale reframed as a woman reclaiming her power—and occasionally turning men into literal pigs when necessary.

I’d also add my own book, The Good Mothers, to this list. It’s about a single mom in desperate circumstances who decides she’ll do whatever it takes to build a safe life for herself and her son after leaving an emotionally abusive husband.

Most readers have cheered her on. But I’ve also gotten reviews like this one:

“I’m really getting tired of these supposedly empowering, feminist stories where the only way women can prevail is by violence towards men. It makes women come off even worse because they think they have to resort to terrible deeds in order to live a decent life.”

What struck me in this review wasn’t the criticism of of my book, it was that the reader focused entirely on the “terrible deeds,” with zero acknowledgment that the morally sanctioned options offered by the “system” had failed my protagonist long before she decided to take things into her own hands.

In other words, even when a woman is at the end of her rope, we still expect her to be nice.

My suspicion is that the women depicted in these books reflect the growing contingent of actual women out there who have tired of waiting for the system to work for them. They are angry, and they are ready for action.

What’s your favorite book about women taking justice into their own hands?

Book News

The Good Mothers has officially been out just over a month, and I’m so grateful to everyone who has read it, reviewed it, and recommended it. Truly—you’re the reason this book has found its people.

I’ve also been hard at work finishing a draft of my next novel, tentatively slated for publication this fall. I can’t say too much yet, but if you loved The Last Thing He Told Me or Apples Never Fall, this book is for you!

Quote of the Week

“They broke the wrong parts of me. They broke my wings and forgot I had claws.”

– Beth Dutton, Yellowstone

As always, I’m so grateful you here, helping me dismantle the patriarchy—one chapter at a time.

xo,

Caitlin

Order my newest book and win my undying gratitude!

Order The Good Mothers

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So what do we do with the books we love that aren’t great for women? The classics that formed our reading DNA but are riddled with misogyny? The prize-winning novels by “genius” male authors who turned out to be, frankly, not great humans? The cringey, guilty-pleasure reads where the female characters have all the depth of a cocktail napkin?

Can we call ourselves feminists if some of the books we love are not?

Abso-freaking-lutely.

Books are a mirror of the world, and most of the world is still shaped by the patriarchy. Eschewing any book with a whiff of patriarchy would mean a very tiny bookshelf. For me, it would mean getting rid of the following books I love:

The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton
An emotional classic that shaped generations, where the two central female characters exist mostly as symbols.

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
A certified literary treasure where Daisy and Myrtle exist largely as symbols for male longing and despair.

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides
A genuinely great novel with female interiority that often feels like it’s written through a dense fog.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
Sexual violence against women as a spectacle, even if there is a vague feminist intent.

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Yes, the subject matter is deeply disturbing, but as a writer I’ve learned a lot from this book about crafting an unreliable narrator and pulling off the impossible: making readers empathize with a character who is essentially a monster.

Loving these books (and others like them) doesn’t make us bad feminists. It makes us readers who grew up in a world where patriarchy has shaped most of the stories handed to us—and who are smart enough to notice what these books got wrong, and why they still landed anyway.

Also, why would we censor our own bookshelves when Moms For Liberty is already working overtime to do it for us?

So tell me: what “non-feminist” book shaped you in a big way?

Books News

I was delighted to see The Good Mothers included in this round-up of books that celebrate female friendship. It’s not every day you make the same list as Elena Ferrante, Elizabeth Gilbert, and Jojo Moyes!

Also, if you’ve read The Good Mothers and could take a minute to leave an Amazon review I’d be so grateful. Reviews go a long way toward helping new readers discover the book.

Giveaway

As a thank-you to my subscribers, I’m giving away a free audiobook copy of The Good Mothers. To enter, just make sure you’re subscribed and comment “MOTHERS” on this post.

Quote of the Week

“This is Dr. Michael Rabinavitch. I am the chief of emergency medicine at PTMC. If you fire her, she will sue you, and I will testify on her behalf.”

– Noah Wylie, The Pitt (iykyk)

As always, I’m so grateful you here, helping me dismantle the patriarchy—one chapter at a time.

xo,

Caitlin

Order my newest book and win my undying gratitude!

Order The Good Mothers

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If you believe the administration’s spin on all this, this is the fault of the protestors for being in their way, and of the kids for…well…existing.

And in one particularly unhinged Fox News column, the true masterminds behind all this “chaos” were revealed to be “organized gangs of wine moms” — allegedly “harassing” and “impeding” ICE agents.

You had me at “wine” and “impeding ICE agents.”

While this may be breaking news for cable pundits, gangs of formidable women are nothing new in literature. (See also: Big Little Lies, Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang, and Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood.)

I was the kind of bookish kid who fantasized about a lifetime of hijinks with a pack of fiercely loyal girlfriends. (Though I didn’t realize “hijinks” would one day mean “protecting your neighbors from being disappeared by a militarized government agency.”)

So lately I’ve been thinking about a twist on the classic icebreaker: not “Who would you invite to your dream dinner party?” but—

Who would be part of your dream organized gang of wine moms?

Here’s my fantasy lineup:

Lindo Jong from The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan

In The Joy Luck Club, Lindo Jong is a masterclass in quiet, strategic rebellion. I mean, the woman escaped a disastrous arranged marriage by tricking her MIL into dissolving the marriage!

Every good girl gang needs someone quietly unstoppable and little bit petty, which is Lindo all the way. She’d be the one who understands how systems work, and how to bend them without anyone realizing what’s happening until it’s too late. She’d also coordinate the the Signal chat and bring the snacks.

Marie de France from Matrix by Lauren Groff

Marie would bring a needed dose of righteous anger to the gang, and then immediately channel it into pragmatic planning. In Matrix, she spends an entire lifetime being dismissed and underestimated by men in power, and her response is never to beg for inclusion. It’s to reject male authority altogether and build something better.

She understands that real power isn’t just protest, it’s resources, loyalty, and time. And she has zero interest in being likable, which, frankly, is exactly why you want her on your side.

The Owens Sisters from Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman

Don’t make me choose between them! Gillian and Sally are the perfect yin-yang for my gang. Gillian would bring a fun, chaotic energy—you never know what’s going to come out of her mouth. She’d be the first to agree that yes, of course we should open another bottle, and also to plot revenge on anyone who’s crossed a member of the crew.

Sally, on the other hand, would bring a steadying energy to the gang (we can’t all by loose canons!). She’d make sure the plan is actually realistic and that everyone hydrates regularly.

Regina Cho from The Good Mothers by… me!

In The Good Mothers, Regina, the founder of a community of single moms rewriting the rules of motherhood, is a master of the long game—and the long grudge. Like Lindo, she shifts pieces on the chessboard so quietly you don’t realize what’s happening until you’re already in checkmate.

She’d be the one to deliver a perfectly timed, expletive-laden inspirational speech to make everyone believe they can pull off the impossible—and then immediately suggest celebratory tequila shots.

Miss Dawn from Memphis by Tara Stringfellow

Every gang needs an elder stateswoman, and that would be Miss Dawn. She would know everyone’s business, keep the group running and and always have a pot of something warm on the stove. She’s equal parts gossip hotline and neighborhood security system, gentle when she needs to be and steel-spined when she needs to be. She doesn’t raise her voice often, but when she does, everyone listens. And if anyone tries to mess with her community, she’s not having one bit of it.

Mia Warren from Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

Mia Warren is the patron saint of women who refuse to play by rules. In Little Fires Everywhere, she blows into the buttoned-up Shaker Heights suburb and with a a car on its last legs and a DGAF attitude. She’d bring an artist’s passion to the group, and is a revolutionary to her core. She’s going to call out hypocrisy a mile away and not be afraid torch the whole system to get rid of it.

So that’s my dream gang—loyal, strategic, a little bit witchy, and unafraid to stand up to power. Now I want to know yours! Who’d be in?

Finally, speaking of standing up to power, here is a full directory of ways you can help support Minnesota’s resistance.

Book News

My newest book, The Good Mothers, has been out just over a week, and I’m so thrilled to see it finding its readers. If you’ve read it and have a spare minute to leave a quick review, I would be endlessly grateful. Whatever your feelings about Amazon (a topic for another day), the number of reviews there really does make a huge difference in helping new readers discover the book.

Order now

Quote of the Week

“Wherever women gather together, failure is impossible.”

– Susan B. Anthony

As always, I’m so grateful you here, helping me dismantle the patriarchy—one chapter at a time.

xo,

Caitlin

Order my newest book and win my undying gratitude!

Order The Good Mothers

Follow me on Instagram - I promise I’m fun and won’t try to sell you essential oils!

Join me on Instagram

When Lacey moves into a house of other single mothers, she finds the supportive community she’s been seeking. But as things unravel, she must decide how far she’s willing to go to protect her son– and the family she’s found.

Order now!

Giveaway!

To celebrate publication day, I’m giving away a signed copy of The Good Mothers to one lucky reader (U.S. only, sorry!) Comment MOTHERS to be entered and I’ll pick a random winner next week.

In other fun news, the ebook of my bestselling novel, Such a Good Family, is on sale on Amazon for only 99 cents until January 20th. Even if you think affordability is a hoax, that’s still a pretty good deal.

Read Such a Good Family

A preview for your eyes only

As a thank you for hanging out with me here on Substack, I’m sharing an exclusive look at the first chapter of The Good Mothers. Please enjoy!

Chapter One

The car came out of nowhere—at least, that’s what Lacey told herself after she hit it. She’d been squinting at her phone in her lap, trying to make out the next turn on her GPS app when the crunch metal of caused her to whip her head around. It was a residential street and she wasn’t even going that fast, so at first the impact didn’t register. She hit the brakes, trying to determine where the noise had come from.

“No, no, no,” she breathed, as she saw, in her passenger side mirror, a cherry red, Chevy pickup truck with a long scrape down the side of it, ending near the bumper where there was a yellow bumper stick that read, “The more people I meet, the more I like my dog.”

“Please, no,” Lacey muttered, reversing for a better look at the damage. The scrape started as a faint line near the rear bumper and ran the length of the truck bed before spreading out and deepening into a gouge at the driver’s door.

“Did you just hit that car?” came a voice from the backseat. Her eight-year-old, Elliott, sat up straight out of his usual slump and rolled down his window for a better look. His hair, dark blond like hers, begged for a haircut, shaggy around his ears and on the back of his neck.

“I didn’t see it, OK?” she defended herself. In fairness, the truck was parked more than a foot away from the curb. Still. She clenched her jaw. The clock on the dashboard blinked forward. Eight thirty-seven a.m. They were late. Late to the one appointment where she absolutely had to make a good impression.

“How could you not see it, Mommy? It’s the only car parked right here.” Elliott widened his eyes, pale blue like his father’s, and gestured to the empty street. Despite her growing panic, Lacey’s heart momentarily snagged on the sweetness of the word “mommy.” At eight, Elliott was still mostly a little boy; only rarely did she see flashes of the older boy he could become, the one who rolled his eyes and called her “Mom.”

“I was looking at the map,” Lacey cried, her voice pitching higher. “It’s not like I meant to—” She stopped, squeezed the steering wheel with both hands and took a deep breath. Stay calm, she reminded herself. If you stay calm, Elliott will stay calm. Emotional co-regulation, the therapist had called it. The therapist she could no longer afford.

She took another breath and glanced around. No one was on the street. She should leave a note, or knock on the door of the house the truck was parked in front of. The truck was shiny and new looking, nothing like her rust-spotted 2005 Ford Fiesta. Her stomach lurched, thinking of the expense to repair it. Her car insurance would go up—wait, had she even paid her last insurance bill? She could picture it, sitting on top of a stack of papers on the counter at their old house, but that was months ago. Had she even packed those papers when she and Elliott moved to her sister’s? Or had she just swept the whole stack into the recycling bin in her frenzy to get out? She’d always prided herself on being organized, but ever since she and Judd had separated, her life felt like a ball of yarn unraveling from both ends.

She pushed her long, sideswept bangs out of her eyes—Elliott wasn’t the only one who needed a haircut—and pinched the bridge of her nose. Then she sat up and squared her shoulders. “Roll up your window, please,” she said to Elliott as she put her car in drive and eased forward again.

“Whoa, Mommy, shouldn’t we, like, call someone? Or try to find the owner of the truck? I mean, we can’t just, like, leave, can we?” In the rearview mirror Elliott’s forehead was scrunched as his anxiety rose.

“I’ll call them,” Lacey promised in a soothing voice, accelerating now, and taking the first right turn that would get her off that street and away from the red truck.

“But how?” Elliott demanded. “We don’t even know who the truck belongs to.”

“I’ll find them,” Lacey lied, looking in the rearview mirror and giving her son her best there’s-nothing-to-worry-about smile, even as her stomach churned in response to her moral failing. “It’s just that we’re really late right now, buddy. But I’ll come back later, I promise.” There was a twinge deep in the middle of her chest. What kind of person had she become? The kind who lied to her child, that’s who. And now, the perpetrator of a hit and run.

She gritted her teeth and swallowed down the guilt rising in her throat. She would do better, she would. She just needed to catch a break. Slipping her hand into her pocket, she fingered the scrap of paper she’d ripped from the flyer in the coffee shop, where’d she jotted down the address they were headed to.

This had to work out. She was out of options.

Five minutes and a short drive later, Lacey peered up at the house she’d parked in front of. It was larger than she’d expected, but not as new as many of the homes on the street. Unlike the houses on either side, it did not have a fresh coat of paint or a front yard with tidy landscaping that looked straight out of HGTV. Still, with its wraparound front porch and bright yellow door there was something warm and inviting about it. Out the front was a towering oak tree that shrouded the second-floor windows, and on the lawn a Frozen-themed bike with training wheels lay discarded.

Lacey looked down at the paper in her hand where she’d jotted the address, then back up to the wrought-iron numbers attached to the house. 811 Wildwood Lane. This was it.

“Can’t I just wait here?” Elliott asked. After the excitement of the accident (minor accident, Lacey told herself) he had wilted back into his usual slouch, looking like he wanted nothing more than to melt into whatever piece of furniture was supporting him.

Lacey shook her head. “They want to meet you, too, buddy. And there’ll be some other kids to play with.” Her heart beat a drumroll in her chest.

“Why do we have to do this, anyway?” he mumbled, shoving his hands into the pockets of the hoodie he’d insisted on wearing despite the sticky late-August heat. “This place looks stupid. Why can’t we just stay at Aunt Sarah’s?”

The muscles in Lacey’s neck tensed at the mention of her sister. She also wished they could continue living in Sarah’s expansive Tudor Revival home with its rainfall shower heads and refrigerator that remained magically full of fresh produce, prime cuts of meat, and the expensive Greek yogurt Lacey loved but almost never splurged on.

Growing up, Lacey never would have guessed her younger sister would be the one living the picture-perfect life—happily married with two kids in a big house in an affluent New Jersey commuter town only a forty-minute train ride from New York City. Sarah’s front yard even had a literal white picket fence. That life was supposed to be Lacey’s. Sarah had always been the wild one, cutting class, sneaking out to parties, and washing out of college her first year before finally limping across the graduation stage five years later.

Lacey, on the other hand, had done everything right. She followed the rules, made responsible choices, checked all the boxes. And yet here she was, facing divorce and effectively homeless.

A flicker of envy rose in her chest as she pictured Sarah’s life: shuttling kids to soccer practice, filling a Costco cart without once calculating how much was left on her credit card or worrying if the tank of her giant SUV was too expensive to top off.

“Does this place have a pool?” Elliott craned his neck toward 811 Wildwood. “Aunt Sarah’s house has a pool.”

“We can’t stay at Aunt Sarah’s anymore, OK?” Lacey’s voice was sharper than she intended. And that’s your fault, she wanted to add, a pang of guilt reverberating in her chest as soon as the words formed in her mind. Elliott couldn’t help who he was.

“Your brain works differently than other kids,” she’d told him when she and Judd had gotten his ADHD diagnosis a year ago. “And there’s nothing wrong with that. You just need different strategies for managing your emotions and your impulses.” Different strategies, along with occupational therapy and medication, both of which his father was firmly opposed to.

“Is it because of what happened with Cole?” Elliott asked in a small voice. “Is that why we have to leave?”

Lacey could taste the banana she’d had for breakfast in her throat as she flashed back to the horror on Sarah’s face when, during one of his outbursts, Elliott had pushed seven-year-old Cole, toppling him over onto Sarah’s stupid, expensive coffee table with its glass top and heavy metal edges. Who had furniture that unforgiving with small children around? People whose children didn’t suffer from severe emotional dysregulation and lack of impulse control, that’s who.

Cole had hit his head. There had been a lot of blood and a visit to the ER that resulted in stitches. The worst part was that Elliott hadn’t even been mad at Cole; he’d been upset with Lacey for taking away his screen time. Cole had just been the closest target.

Lacey turned to face her son in the back seat of the car. “What happened with Cole was not great,” she said.

“I said I was sorry.” Elliott’s small face rearranged itself into a look of such acute remorse it made Lacey’s chest ache.

“I know, sweetie.” She reached back and squeezed his hand. “I know. And that’s not why we’re moving.” It was, though. Sarah had asked them to move out the next day.

“Brett doesn’t think it’s a good idea to have Elliott here anymore,” Sarah had said, biting her artificially plumped lip in a way that suggested her husband—a finance guy who’d swooped in with his country club membership and family money and finally tamed Lacey’s sister—wasn’t the only one who thought it was time for them to go.

“Of course, I understand. We’ll be out of your hair as soon as possible,” Lacey had replied, unable to tell her sister the truth: that she had nowhere else to go. In that moment, instead of meeting Sarah’s eyes she’d focused on a spot in the middle of her sister’s forehead, which was smooth and wrinkle-free, just like everything in Sarah’s life.

Shaking the memory from her head, Lacey released Elliott’s hand and unbuckled her seatbelt. “Let’s go,” she said.

Up on the porch she rang the doorbell and surveyed her surroundings as she lifted her thick, shoulder-length hair away from her sweaty neck. Next to the front door was a long row of shoes in varying sizes. A pair of boys’ Nike high tops sat next to a pair of women’s Birkenstocks in an expensive-looking, buttery yellow color, followed by two tiny rainbow-colored Crocs. Lacey tried to remember when Elliott’s feet had been that size. When he was two, maybe? Three? He’d been deliciously chunky back then, his chin disappearing into his neck when he smiled. Now he was bony and angular, a side effect of his medication, which suppressed his appetite. Medication Judd didn’t want him to be on.

There was a sturdy-looking rocking chair and a patio couch further down the porch and around them stood tall, lush potted plants that looked well-cared for. The couch was piled with plump pillows and a quilt, and a book was splayed open on the coffee table. Lacey felt the pull of the comfortable setting. She could imagine sipping her morning coffee in the rocking chair, or stretching out on the couch under the pleasant breeze coming from the ceiling fan. She closed her eyes for a second as she pictured it. What she wouldn’t give for a nap. She was so tired lately her bones felt heavy, like it was an effort just to carry them through the world.

There was a scraping sound as the front door unlocked and opened. A small girl stared up at Lacey, her brown eyes wide with excitement. She wore a flouncy teal-colored dress that Lacey recognized from a Disney movie, over a yellow bathing suit, and her hair was pulled back tightly from her face and then exploded in a small black poof on the top of her head.

“Mommy, they’re here!” she called in a trumpet-like voice. Then she slammed the door and Lacey heard the pounding of feet receding.

Lacey shifted on her feet, her heart rate accelerating. This house had to work out. Back at Sarah’s their bags were packed. She’d promised they’d be gone by the weekend, but where? Once upon a time, Lacey had friends—a lot of them. She’d been Homecoming Queen in high school, for God’s sake. But when Judd came along, she’d fallen so hard for him she’d let herself become consumed by the relationship, despite her mother’s warning that he was “a wild card, best-case scenario.”

The few friendships she’d managed to hold on to had quietly dissolved during the pandemic, lost in the chaos of Judd’s transformation from the freewheeling, funny guy with a thousand interests—the man she’d fallen in love with—into an internet conspiracy theory-obsessed recluse and self-proclaimed Bitcoin expert.

Tears pricked her eyes as she leaned forward to press the doorbell again. Maybe they could sleep in her car. She could tell Elliott they were camping.

Before Lacey’s finger reached the doorbell, the door swung open, revealing a woman with a petite, athletic frame, dressed in a shapeless beige shift. On Lacey, the dress would have looked like a potato sack, but on this woman, it draped perfectly, as if she’d just stepped off a runway. Her face was angular yet soft, with high cheekbones, full lips, and deep-set brown eyes that flickered with a hint of suspicion. Upon seeing Lacey, though, they crinkled as she gave a warm smile.

“You must be Lacey,” the woman said. “Come in.” Her voice was breathy and as Lacey stepped past her into the house she caught a whiff of her perfume, something with hints of cedar and citrus. “And sorry about Linden.” She glanced at the little girl who’d answered the door, now peeking out at them from down the hall. “She gets excited about visitors.”

Inside, Lacey found herself standing beside a built-in row of hooks, each holding a brightly colored kids’ backpack. She gazed down a long hallway that opened into a sun-drenched living room. A colorful rug lay scattered with Hot Wheels cars and half-dressed dolls, while an inviting L-shaped couch sat nearby, a small stack of children’s books resting on one corner. By the window, a table crowded with houseplants caught the light. The air smelled like lemon cleaner and freshly baked cookies. A thought rose to Lacey’s mind unbidden.

This is what home is supposed to feel like.

Elliott stayed close to Lacey, and the woman turned her dazzling smile on him, revealing a small gap between her two straight, white front teeth. “And who is this handsome young man?” she asked.

Elliott stared mutely up at her as if mesmerized.

“This is Elliott,” Lacey supplied.

The woman nodded and reached out to ruffle Elliott’s hair. It was the kind of uninvited touch that, from anyone else, would have triggered a surge of mama-bear protectiveness in Lacey. But with this woman, it felt natural. Lacey found herself half wishing she’d reach out and smooth Lacey’s hair, too.

“I’m Regina Cho,” the woman said. “And it’s wonderful to meet you.” She turned to sweep a graceful arm out toward the interior of the house. “Welcome to the mommune.”

As always, I’m so grateful you here, helping me dismantle the patriarchy—one chapter at a time!

xo,

Caitlin

Order my newest book and win my undying gratitude!

Order The Good Mothers

Follow me on Instagram - I promise I’m fun and won’t try to sell you essential oils!

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I have a new book coming out this week! Its protagonist is deeply flawed and makes some morally questionable choices, and in writing her, I spent a lot of time with my editor debating how to make sure readers would still like her—despite the fact that they might not like her behavior.

It bears noting that we generally have no problem rooting for male characters who are selfish, reckless, cruel, or morally compromised. We call them complex. Compelling. Brilliantly written.

[Standard disclaimer: None of the books I’m about to mention are bad books—I genuinely admire many of them. I’m simply using them as examples of how differently we tolerate and interpret emotional complexity in male versus female protagonists.]

Take Jay Gatsby: a liar, a criminal, and an obsessive romantic who builds his entire life around an illusion—yet he’s framed as tragic, noble, and endlessly fascinating. Or Jackson Lamb from Mick Herron’s Slough House series, who is rude, abrasive, and openly contemptuous of everyone around him, but still positioned as the smartest person in the room—his DGAF attitude part of his charm.

But when women on the page make similarly questionable choices—when they act out of self-interest, desire, rage, or simple survival—the reaction is swift and familiar: they’re unlikable. Unhinged. Irredeemable.

I know this because I write about these women. And while my books have largely found their readers—the ones who love stories about messy, complicated women just trying to get by—I still regularly receive reviews like this:

“ARE YOU KIDDING ME!? I have never been so infuriated with a fictional woman in a hot minute! She behaved like a teenager who frankly had no morals.”

Or this:

“The main character was so unlikeable! Poor decision-making is abundant in this book!”

My takeaway from comments like these is that many readers still struggle to root for female characters who make bad choices. Which raises the obvious question: why is moral complexity read as depth in men, but as a flaw in women?

Or, put more bluntly—why do we expect women to be so damn perfect all the time? And how can we shift this expectation?

Big Feelings

I’m the mom of two boys, and we talk a lot about feelings, because I worry the world is constantly sending them the message that big emotions aren’t acceptable for boys. And yet, in literature, men are largely allowed their feelings. Their anger, shame, jealousy, and grief are permitted to sprawl, to dominate the narrative, to excuse—or at least contextualize—their worst behavior.

Raskolnikov’s moral turmoil in Crime and Punishment is granted philosophical weight; his emotional anguish becomes the point of the book. More recently, the deeply flawed narrator of The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits, was described by one reviewer as “a likeable man who many readers will root for—not in spite of his flaws, but because they recognise them as their own.”

Female characters rarely get the same pass. Emma Bovary’s longing in Madame Bovary is treated as pathology. In Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch, maternal rage is framed as horrific and over-the-top.

Bottom line: Men’s big feelings are allowed to drive the story. Women’s big feelings are treated as a problem to be fixed, punished, or explained away.

Justice vs. Revenge

The justice-versus-revenge divide is another place this double standard becomes glaring. When male characters seek to right wrongs done to them, their actions are often framed as justice—righteous, inevitable, even morally clarifying. (I’m looking at you, Jack Reacher.)

But when women refuse to absorb harm quietly, the language shifts. Women don’t seek justice, they seek revenge. It’s not righteous, it’s unhinged. In Stephen King’s Carrie, Carrie White is almost never discussed as a girl responding to years of sustained cruelty. She’s remembered as a monster.

Men who retaliate are restoring order; women who do are accused of going too far. After all, nothing makes us more uncomfortable than a woman who insists on getting what she’s due—and isn’t polite about it.

Life Imitates Art

Stories don’t just entertain us, they shape what we tolerate, excuse, and condemn in the real world. When we repeatedly see men granted complexity and women punished for it, those expectations don’t stay on the page. They follow us into workplaces, relationships, courtrooms, and comment sections. And as long as female literary antiheroes are treated like warnings, nothing really changes.

So maybe the shift doesn’t start on the page. Maybe it starts with us. With choosing desire and ambition over likability, saying no without explaining, refusing to swallow anger just to keep the peace. Being “difficult.” Uncompromising. Unapologetically complicated.

If that makes us the antiheroes of our own lives, so be it.

📚Female Antihero Reading List:

The Good Mothers by Caitlin Weaver (it’s me!)

Circe by Madeline Miller

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

Women Are the Fiercest Creatures by Andrea Dunlop

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson

Power & Light by Will Weaver

Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman

Book News

My new book, The Good Mothers, comes out on January 15th! Stay tuned for a special peak at the first chapter and some giveaways on launch day.

When Lacey moves into a house of other single mothers, she finds the supportive community she’s been seeking. But as things unravel, she must decide how far she’s willing to go to protect her son– and the family she’s found.

Pre-order now!

Quote of the Week

“Above all, be the heroine of your life.”

– Nora Ephron

As always, I’m so grateful you here, helping me dismantle the patriarchy—one chapter at a time!

xo,

Caitlin

Order my newest book and win my undying gratitude!

Order Who We Used to Be

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If you’re looking for some ideas for what to focus on in 2026 that doesn’t involve giving up gluten or joining the gym, read on:

Shoring Up Your Financial Freedom

When I left my corporate job to write full-time, my income took a very real hit. Three years later, it’s slowly climbing back, and it feels damn good. Because I like having money—specifically, my own.

Women are often socialized to believe ambitious financial goals are greedy or unseemly. But wanting money isn’t about excess, it’s about freedom and having options.

So this year, whether you’re building a side hustle or trying to level up in an established career, remember this: there is nothing tacky, shallow, or unfeminine about wanting more zeros in your bank account.

Inspired by: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

At its core Jane Eyre, is as much about money as it is about love. Jane understands that without financial independence, she will always be vulnerable—to authority figures like Brocklehurst or even to men she loves, like Rochester—so she insists on earning her own living as a governess. She knows dependence often masquerades as romance or protection, and she would rather live modestly than owe her survival to anyone else.

Taking Your Work Seriously

I feel incredibly fortunate to have a flexible job—and I’ve learned that that flexibility is also a risk. It’s dangerously easy to let my actual work get swallowed by everyone else’s needs.

This year, I got much better at saying no. I guarded my writing time more fiercely, and the results speak for themselves: I published my fourth novel and wrote another one that comes out January 15th. None of that would have happened if I hadn’t treated my work as non-negotiable.

So, in 2026, let’s remind ourselves that our work—whatever it is—matters. And if we don’t treat it that way, no one else will.

Inspired by: Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

Elizabeth Zott’s radical move is insisting that her work matters, even when men, institutions, and systems tell her it doesn’t. She doesn’t soften her goals to be palatable. She doesn’t pretend she’s “lucky to be there.” She treats her career with seriousness long before anyone else does, and ultimately gets the recognition she deserves.

Trusting Your Body—and Advocating for It Relentlessly

Over the past few months I’ve talked to so many friends who are fighting to have their medical concerns taken seriously—only to be told (mostly by male doctors) that their symptoms are “just part of getting older.”

WTF?

Let 2026 be the year you stop accepting dismissal as care and start advocating (loudly!) for your health and well-being. If your doctor isn’t listening, find a new one! If your questions aren’t being answered, keep asking them! You deserve real care, not condescension.

Inspired by: The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

This short story is a chilling reminder of what happens when women are denied authority over their own bodies and minds. The narrator knows she is unwell, and she also knows the “treatment” being imposed on her is making things worse. But her voice is ignored, her instincts dismissed, and her suffering minimized by a medical system (and a husband) that assumes it knows best.

Creating a Chosen Family

One of the biggest themes for me this past year has been deepening my relationships with the communities I belong to. As my kids get older, I’m really learning how essential it is to have a “village” you can depend on. For many people I know, 2025 was also a deeply divisive year for families, with political tensions turning holidays and gatherings into minefields.

All of which has made me think a lot about how narrowly we define “family.” But family isn’t just who you’re born to—it’s who shows up for you.

In 2026, my wish for all of us is this: let’s invest more intentionally in chosen family.

Inspired by: Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid
This novel beautifully contrasts biological family with chosen family. While Joan—one of the first women in NASA’s astronaut program—watches her sister Barbara cling to a traditional, image-focused marriage that leaves her daughter Frances emotionally abandoned, Joan builds something different. She creates a family with her niece Frances and her partner, Vanessa that offers Frances what biology did not: stability, belonging, and love.

I’d love to see a world in which the point of resolutions isn’t self-improvement, but self-alignment—building a life that actually works for you.

What are you focused on for 2026?

Early Readers Love The Good Mothers

This is the part of the newsletter where I remind you that I have a new book coming out January 15th—and that early reviewers are loving it.

Here’s what they have to say:

“Full of suspense…it will hit you right in the heart!” ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

“A gripping and thought-provoking read about the intricate lives of women navigating motherhood, relationships, and identity.” ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

“This book leans hard into the uncomfortable truth of exactly what a mother will do for her child, even when that choice sits squarely in the moral danger zone.” ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Pre-order now!

When Lacey moves into a house of other single mothers, she finds the supportive community she’s been seeking. But as things unravel, she must decide how far she’s willing to go to protect her son– and the family she’s found.

Quote of the Week

“The year is done. I spread the past three hundred sixty-five days before me on the living room carpet… I fold the good days up and place them in my back pocket for safekeeping. Draw the match. Cremate the unnecessary. The light of the fire warms my toes. I pour myself a glass of warm water to cleanse myself for January. Here I go. Stronger and wiser into the new.”

– Rupi Kaur, The Sun And Her Flowers

As always, I’m so grateful you here, helping me dismantle the patriarchy—one chapter at a time!

xo,

Caitlin

Order my newest book and win my undying gratitude!

Order Who We Used to Be

Follow me on Instagram - I promise I’m fun and won’t try to sell you essential oils!

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And at the end, there’s a first look at the cover of my upcoming novel, The Good Mothers!

Happy reading!

🧦☕Comfort Reads That Are Quietly Radical

This time of year always feels like a lot. Calendars are full, to-do lists never end, and–let’s face it–as we close out the year, many of us are struggling. 2025 has delivered a steady stream of bad news, and some days it’s all I can do to keep going while dealing with low-grade anxiety of living in a world that feels… wobbly.

So, lately, I’ve found myself craving comfort in my reading. Not escapism exactly, but books that soothe without being shallow.

Which is how I ended up here.

This list is for anyone looking for books that feel like a soft place to land right now—comfort reads that are cozy, absorbing, and (because that’s why we’re here! ) quietly radical.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

Tender, readable, and radical for its time in how it centers on a young girl’s interior life, ambition, and resilience. Francie Nolan’s hunger—for books, knowledge, and something more than what she’s been handed—feels timeless. This is a novel that insists a girl’s inner world is worthy of attention, which still feels like a rebellious act.

The Blue Castle by L.M. Montgomery

One of Montgomery’s few “adult” novels, this 1926 gem follows 29-year-old Valancy Stirling, who escapes her suffocating, judgmental family after receiving a shocking terminal diagnosis. What follows is a gentle but profound rebellion: Valancy chooses freedom, love, and self-respect for the first time in her life. It’s a deeply comforting reminder that it’s never too late to choose yourself, and that obedience is not a virtue.

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

A classic that wrestles with the ideas of women’s independence, ambition, and compromise, Jo March remains one of literature’s most enduring examples of a woman trying to reconcile who she is with who the world wants her to be. Bonus points because it’s a Christmas novel (I will not be taking questions on this point).

Act Your Age, Eve Brown by Talia Hibbert

A delightful, funny, (and steamy!) romance. Eve, a Black, curvy, woman, is fully embraced as a desirable, capable romantic lead—without being asked to fundamentally change who she is. The book rejects the idea that there’s a single “correct” way to be an adult or a woman and celebrates choosing joy on your own terms.

Killers of a Certain Age by Deanna Raybourn

Four sixty-something female assassins discover their elite organization plans to eliminate them as they near retirement. (If that’s not a metaphor for aging as a woman, I don’t know what is.) Part thriller, part cozy mystery, and unexpectedly comforting, this book celebrates experience, female friendship, and refusing to go quietly when the system decides you’re obsolete.

Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman

A comfort classic about women, family, love, and surviving male violence without losing your softness. This novel honors female bonds across generations and insists that tenderness and power can coexist. Also required reading as we collectively prepare for Practical Magic 2 in 2026!

The Only Woman in the Room by Marie Benedict

A novelized portrait of actress and inventor Hedy Lamarr, focusing on her hidden life as a brilliant scientist who helped develop frequency-hopping technology during WWII. Benedict explores what it means to be seen only for beauty while brilliance is sidelined, minimized, or attributed to men. A deeply satisfying read.

Johanna Porter Is Not Sorry by Sara Read

A former art prodigy turned soccer mom steals a portrait of her younger self from an elite gallery, painted by her former mentor and lover–who destroyed her art career. As Johanna hides out and begins painting again, the novel explores artistic ambition, impostor syndrome, addiction, and the heavy weight of mom guilt. This is a great read about second chances and reclaiming the parts of yourself you were taught to abandon.

Now accepting all cozy read recommendations! Let me know in the comments.

✨ Cover Reveal Time! ✨

I’m so excited to share the cover of my new book, The Good Mothers, with all of you!

When single mother Lacey moves into a communal house of women who have rewritten the rules of survival and motherhood, she finds the community and support she’s been seeking. But as she battles her ex-husband for custody, one of her housemates suggests a risky plan that could secure her son’s future. Lacey must decide how far she’s willing to go to protect her son–and the family she’s found.

Coming January 15th!

Pre order now!

Quote of the Week

“She writes like a man,” a fellow poet said of me in the early 1970s, intending a compliment. “You forgot the punctuation,” I told him. “What you meant was, ‘She writes. Like a man.”
― Margaret Atwood, Book of Lives

As always, I’m so grateful you here, helping me dismantle the patriarchy—one chapter at a time!

xo,

Caitlin

Order my newest book and win my undying gratitude!

Order Who We Used to Be

Follow me on Instagram - I promise I’m fun and won’t try to sell you essential oils!

Join me on Instagram