I believe that some things are created specifically to be consumed post-breakup.
A prime example: Sex and The City. I credit the show for getting me through both of my major breakups, but have rarely watched an episode outside of those month-long spans.
Women also falls into this category for me.
To be clear, I didn’t actually read it post-breakup—my girlfriend lent it to me earlier this year. But she read it post-breakup, shortly after its release, and loved it so much that she missed her train stop while reading it.
(She also asked me to mention here that she “reread it recently and saw the problems with it but still enjoyed the writing a lot and related to the experience.”)
It’s angsty, melodramatic at times, and gets right to the heart of what it feels like to be obsessed with someone who is objectively terrible for you.
Enjoy!
— Becca
Women by Chloe Caldwell
Fiction, October 2014
I first heard Women described as the story of a woman’s first relationship with another woman. That’s technically true. But we learn on the first page that this relationship isn’t going to end well.
The unnamed narrator falls for a woman who’s 19 years older than her and, more importantly, already in a serious relationship with another woman who she has no intention of leaving. After their initial flirtation and hookup, they’re kind of awful to one another and can both be controlling, immature, and jealous.
Am I making this book sound unenjoyable?
I promise you it’s not. Caldwell’s writing style is so frank and the story so realistic that I had to double-check about 10 pages in that it was actually fiction. Reading it feels like a cross between reading a stranger’s diary and hearing a close friend vent about an awful (but juicy) breakup.
It’s also packed with lines that resonated with me as a semi-late bloomer queer:
I figured if I was going to be with a woman, I would have been with one by now. I would know if I was bisexual or gay. Being a writer, I assumed I was at least mildly self-aware.
And because it’s a tiny novella made up of tiny chapters (some a mere paragraph), you’ll probably end up finishing it in a sitting or two.
That said, you’ll also probably roll your eyes a handful of times while you read it.
The narrator’s love interest, with her flannels and dark beers and knuckle tattoos, feels a bit like a collection of lesbian stereotypes. At one point, she writes, I ask Finn if things are always this insane and dramatic between two women, and she says yes.
Caldwell herself has said that during the writing process, she “read articles about butch lesbians seducing straight girls and all that,” which does not feel all that surprising to me. She says in this same interview that the book was originally called Dyke Aching, so make of that what you will.
It also feels worth mentioning here that the way the narrator talks about her sole trans friend is… not great. Right on the first page, she mentions her “transgender friend Nathan”—a descriptor that feels wholly unnecessary, other than the fact that it sets her up to later write that, My closest friend is Nathan, and even he was once a woman.
Yikes.
In an Instagram post from about a year ago, Caldwell wrote that, “So much has changed politically since Women’s release; parts are already outdated and non PC.” This feels like a cop-out to me, where she could’ve instead written how her thinking has changed since the book was published. Am I expecting too much from an Instagram caption? Probably!
Still, I liked it, and I stand by it as a breakup read, if only for paragraphs like this one:
Eventually it becomes obvious to me that I have stopped living and started killing time. My participation in life is slim to none. It is fair to say that engaging in some form with Finn, even when it was silence, was my hobby. Without it, I don’t have much.
If you can’t relate to this, you have a much healthier relationship history than me.
Queer points:
+6 for a middle-aged lesbian couple that builds a home in the woods
+9 for the narrator’s introduction to The L Word, Stone Butch Blues, Annie on My Mind, Loving Annabelle, Lip Service, and These Walls Could Talk, along with Adrienne Rich, Maggie Nelson, and Ivan Coyote
+12 for a back tattoo quoting Virginia Woolf’s Orlando
Buy it from 44th & 3rd