Best Inspiring Female-Written Non-Fiction

by Catalina Bonati

Sometimes we just need a well-written, educational, inspiring, and interesting piece of non-fiction that peaks our desire to learn more about the world. The women who have written these books as well as their subjects have traversed mountains of adversities and have come out worn and torn but wiser and knowledgeable. They’ve done us the favor of sharing their experiences and their wisdom in these eloquent yet harrowing publications.

Happening by Annie Ernaux (2000)

This was published originally in French as L'Événement. In this short memoir, Nobel Prize-winning French writer Annie Ernaux remembers her experience in obtaining an abortion in 1963 France, years before oral contraception was legalized and over a decade before abortion. As a college student aged 23, she finds out she is pregnant and does not tell any of her friends or her family except strangers who might offer information about abortionists. She tries to carry out the procedure herself by inserting a knitting needle into her uterus—as she says, “all in all, plunging a knitting needle into a womb weighed little next to ruining one’s career.” But the knitting needle does not work. Finally, upon reaching out to more of her friends, she gets a tip of a woman who performed abortions in Paris. The procedure carried out by this woman was similar to the knitting needle, but carried for several days. The contractions become painful and lead to a gruesome scene in which Ernaux effectively loses the embryo and ends up in hospital.

Ernaux’s recollections of the event are shorn of embellishment and to the point. Her prose is cold and direct, and for her, the pregnancy signifies a shift away from learning; she says that she had “stopped being an intellectual” due to her concern over her body. Although her feelings might be understood as young-adult angst, it seems as though Ernaux is highly conscious of the dualisms surrounding this era: those who are cruel and those who show kindness, those who turn a blind eye to her medical needs and those who help her achieve her goal, and the French politics which kept her from proper medical care in 1963 and the legalization of abortion in this current age. She does not write with regret, but with keen observation of the circumstances which led her to the traumatizing termination.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo (2012)

In this emotional piece of reporting, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Katherine Boo chronicles the lives of some of the inhabitants of Annwadi, a Mumbai slum surrounding the Sahar International airport. We read the stories of Abdul, a young teenager who supports his family by sorting through recyclables. He becomes the object of envy of his neighbor Fatima, who is the subject of jokes and mockery for having only one leg and for her many extra-marital affairs. She takes her envy and her anger at her neighbors too far and immolates herself in order to implicate Abdul. At the same time, the book speaks of Asha and her daughter Manju. Asha is ambitious and greedy and has dreams of becoming the slumlord for a far-right political party, Shiv Sena. She takes bribery and takes advantage of government poverty programs, and also provides precarious childcare for the slum children which her well-meaning daughter Manju is in charge of. A college student, Manju aspires to become the slum’s first college graduate. She disapproves of her mother’s actions and spends her time taking care of her family, analyzing books, and setting up a small home-school for the slum children who otherwise receive no education.

Written in narrative style which sets up the subjects as characters in a novel rather than interviewees in a prose documentary, the plot of the book revolves around Abdul’s arrest and trial and its implications for his family and life in Annawadi. The title of this book comes from the plastered concrete wall which separates the slum from the road to the airport, which is covered in posters which read “Beautiful Forever.” Indeed, we learn about life behind the beautiful forevers in an emotional yet objective overview of life in the slum.

Katherine Boo is an investigative reporter from The New Yorker, formerly of The Washington Post for which she won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 and a Macarthur Fellowship in 2002. She focuses on poverty and the disenfranchised in its many shapes and forms. Behind the Beautiful Forevers is her only book.

Educated by Tara Westover (2018)

This 2018 memoir revolves around Tara Westover’s childhood in a survivalist Mormon family in the mountains of Buck’s Peak, Idaho. Her mother is a midwife and homemaker and later becomes a self-employed herbalist, and her father owns a scrapyard and considers himself a prophet of the end times. Her family stockpiled canned goods and she and her siblings kept bags filled with the necessary products to survive the end times which they called head-for-the-hills bags. Her parents are paranoid about the school system, the government and healthcare and thus Tara was born at home and was 9 years old when she received a birth certificate. She and all her siblings are “homeschooled,” which actually means that they receive no schooling at all. Tara is a teenager when she teaches herself to do math with the help of her brother Tyler. The children are the main workforce of her father’s scrapyard, yet the family is so isolated that all wounds obtained at work, even seriously grave ones, are treated at home because doctors are not to be trusted. Her older brother Shawn becomes physically abusive in her teenage years, strangling her and calling her whore because of her friendship with a local boy.

She becomes interested in formal education—her brother informs her of ways in which she can take the ACT, bypassing the fact that she never went to school. She becomes obsessed with study, passes the ACT and gains a scholarship to study at BYU university in Utah, where as a dweller of the college dorms, she realizes the many differences between herself and her roommates, such as her poor hygiene and lack of housekeeping. She comes across more serious faults in her schooling as well, such as learning about the Holocaust for the first time as a grown adult. With the help of her teachers and her supportive older brother Tyler, she applies to graduate school and is accepted at Cambridge in England for a master’s degree. Once there, she stumbles into a deep depression at having to deal with her family who will not believe her claims about her abusive older brother Shawn, and grappling with her own shortcomings when comparing her family’s encumbered life to what she has learned about life in the outside world. She returns to the US as a visiting fellow at Harvard, where she learns that her brother Shawn is being abusive towards his wife and towards her older sister Audrey. She tries to help her sister by alerting her family and they discredit her by saying that she is under Satan’s influence. She returns to England for a doctorate degree, realizing that she must cut off contact with her family for her own wellbeing. 

This book is a story of overcoming a small-minded community committed to horror and conspiracy in favor of hope and education. Tara is a strong-willed, profoundly resilient person who shares her difficulties in assimilating to the world outside of her family, and although her story is unique, it also speaks to American problems in education and homeschooling and to the failure of social services.

Shanghai Diary by Ursula Bacon (2002)

Ursula Bacon describes her childhood in 1939 Germany and how her Lutheran-Jewish family is forced to flee to Shanghai, where they integrate into East Hongkew, the International Settlement within Shanghai. Ursula and her parents live in precarious conditions in shared accommodations with other Jewish families, but they live their lives integrating European (German) custom with newly found Chinese traditions. The book showcases their individual struggles and how they overcome their hurdles through strength of will, as well as their familial problems in adjusting to their new circumstances. In Germany, they were a wealthy family on a grand estate with servants, yet now they must clutter into a small room that is often shared with other families. Ursula has fun learning Shanghainese dialect and makes friends with other European as well as Chinese kids and often recounts games she played on noxious streets. She obtains a position of English teacher to a Japanese official’s concubines, where she learns much about Japanese culture. This story is told through the eyes of a pre-teen—she can focus objectively on her surroundings and the way of life of the different people around her, and she also has a healthy and youthful wish to learn the most possible about everything new. Her narrative does not solely focus on poverty and grime, but highlights the kindness of strangers and finding the good in their situation. As she mentions in her introduction, “the city danced with bright colors, beckoned with exquisite art and teased with strange, new sounds.” The Blomberg family are in Shanghai from 1939 to 1947, after which they emigrate to the United States. Ursula Bacon recounts with wonderful memory and clearly fond prose of her time in Shanghai during WWII.

Down Below by Leonora Carrington (1944)

British surrealist artist and novelist Leonora Carrington, who was a big part of the women’s liberation movement in Mexico in the 70s, details her experience of psychotic breakdown after her lover, the painter Max Ernst, is arrested and sent to a concentration camp, and she is subsequently committed to an asylum in Santander, Spain in 1940. Her surrealist prose expresses with feeling her hallucinations perceived as reality, to the point in which both are inseparable to both the reader and Carrington. When she too is taken away, she is not told where and immediately assumes that she is headed to a concentration camp. In the asylum, she is frequently assaulted and tied up and never given a proper explanation for the things that occur to her. Carrington believes that she is being put through these tortures in order to gain right of passage to Down Below, which is a plane of existence that is idyllic and people live very happily.

Carrington’s recollections are often confusing and reveal more about her state of mind rather than the actual life within the asylum. The frequent assaults, very aggressive, are horrific and weave a very grim tapestry of Carrington’s time being committed. This book depicts a personal struggle within herself to maintain a grip on reality and to never lose it again—every day is a painful attempt to keep herself afloat. Her autobiography informs her art and vice versa, and this book presents relatable experience to those who have undergone a similar condition.

The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story About War and What Comes After by Clemantine Wamariya (2018)

Clemantine Wamariya looks back on her childhood as a refugee with her sister, relocating throughout Africa in the wake of the Rwandan Genocide. She lives with her parents and siblings in Kigali when the fighting breaks out, and with her older sister Claire she relocates to the countryside. When that home is raided, they are forced to flee and walk for weeks alongside other fleeing Rwandans into Burundi, where they settle temporarily in a precarious, dirty, and overfull refugee camp. They flee this camp as well after a time, going from camp to camp in then Zaire, Tanzania, Malawi, and Mozambique. They temporarily settle into more stable conditions in South Africa. In Tanzania, Claire picks up a husband and has children and they settle in Zaire with her husband’s family, but war breaks out here as well and once again they must flee. In South Africa, Clemantine is able to attend school, where she and her sister apply for asylum in the United States, which is granted. They settle in Chicago and Clemantine is placed with a foster family. Like many immigrants and displaced people, Clemantine has a hard time adjusting to her new life and surroundings and enters into deep self-doubt and depression. She attends Yale and eventually meets her now estranged family.

Wamariya’s narration is unique in that it is a story of war told through the eyes of a child. However, her problem-solving is precocious and adultlike. She has similar culture shock and assimilation problems once she reaches the US that can be read in other memoirs and novels of immigrants, yet her recollection of her trauma is so poignant that is seems as if war has followed her and has only taken a new shape. Her story is told in an interesting way; fragmented and blurred, just like the memory of a child.     

Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang (1991)

Jung Chang tells the story of her family through the biography of her grandmother, her mother, and herself, living in China since before the rise of Mao and after his death. In the late 1800s Chang’s grandmother Yu-Fang was raised with bound feet and was the concubine of a general, living in a gilded cage shut up in a house unable to leave. Once her daughter Bao was born, they were relocated to the general’s main house with his primary wife, who steals Bao from Yu-Fang. After living miserably in a different kind of captivity, Yu-Fang takes back Bao and flees the house, sending back word that Bao had died. As a teenager, Bao begins to work for the Communist Party as a low-level official and must succumb to back-breaking initiation rites, such as walking to a village in the deep countryside and working there in miserable conditions. She marries a Communist officer and they have several children, slowly rising through the ranks of the party. As Mao grows in popularity and Communism grows ever more fervent, the family is investigated for mild criticisms of the party, Bao and the father eventually going to jail at different moments. Jung is a child at school who also becomes involved in the party, becomes part of the Red Guards, and participates in the destruction of traditional Chinese culture during the Cultural Revolution. Jung is sometimes disheartened by the actions of the Red Guards as people that she knows, such as her family and neighbors, are targeted and sometimes tortured and imprisoned. When Mao dies, Jung eventually enters university and earns a scholarship to study in the UK.

This book is long and dense in its in-depth description of her family’s involvement in the Communist Party and the recollection of its turmoil throughout the nearly one hundred years that is spanned in Chang’s autobiography. The deep dive into the cult of Mao and the absolute destruction of history and culture throughout the revolution is truly lived and understood by Chang and communicated clearly to the reader. This autobiographical novel is recommended to those who wish to immersively understand the Communist legacy of China.

The Outrun by Amy Liptrot (2015)

Amy Liptrot is a recovering alcoholic living in London when she makes the decision to return to her childhood home in the Orkney Islands, believing that she may find peace of mind and ease with her addiction there. She describes the landscapes of Orkney as well as its birds. She obtains a volunteer position at the RSPB (the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds) as a corncrake spotter—she must slowly drive around at night, listening closely for the call of the corncrake. Liptrot learns new ways to cope with her father’s mental illness and her own by interacting with her childhood landscape through traveling and inhabiting new islands within the Orkney Islands. She exists in a space that is strangely both isolated and yet deeply inserted within a community—her arrival at Papa Westray places her in the center of a web of residents who wish to share their own experiences with her. At the same time, Liptrot explores her connection to her surroundings in experimental ways; by tracking the flights of the planes above her, the ISS, and the ships in the North Sea.

Liptrot’s ways of confronting her problems are organic and unembellished. Her reflections on alcoholism, London, clubs, Orkney, agriculture, birds, and mental health are fresh and thoughtful and truly unique.

A Piece of Cake by Cupcake Brown (2006)

This is an autobiography written by the recovering addict and attorney Cupcake Brown. As a victim of the California state foster system, Brown recalls her early teenage years being addicted to crack cocaine and alcohol and the habits which she acquired to maintain her addiction: prostitution, selling weed, selling rented furniture, and becoming a gang member. As her actions grow in seriousness and the abuse of her partners grows in scale, she deludes herself that her addiction is not real or at least not that bad because she is able to hold down a job, which doesn’t last very long. She reaches a tipping point when one day she wakes up behind a dumpster and must immediately head into work. She finds help in her work boss and colleagues—they help her attend AA meetings and find the strength to keep attending. The meetings lead her into a more stable state of mind and she is able to rent a new place on her own, hold down her job, and attend university, where she majors in Law.

This memoir is clear in the consequences of each event, something which can only come with hindsight. Cupcake does not view herself as a victim but as a survivor, and with each harrowing occurrence her will to survive becomes stronger. This memoir is not only about addiction, but about the failings of the California state to take care of children in foster care and views with compassion the ordeals of children who grow up into drugs, alcohol, and prostitution in order to deal with the lack of emotional and financial support in their lives.

I’m Afraid of Men by Vivek Shraya (2018)

Teacher and musician Vivek Shraya talks about her experience in growing up brown, queer, and trans in Canada. She speaks on her experience with bullying in school as well as within the queer community. She mentions that her brownness was an alienator in both the straight and the queer community, making her “too queer for gay men.” She reflects on misogyny everywhere, how it is something that everyone is raised with to some degree and must do active work to squash. It is also prevalent within the queer community; she writes that the act of groping a woman in a gay club is done as an act of shunning and humiliation is no more permissible to a gay man than a straight man. She speaks on the many kinds of violence experienced by a brown trans person, and how even safe spaces aren’t really safe. This book is reflective both personally and on the community, and she is quite critical of some of the sexist and racist forms in the queer community. She is also critical of women with internalized patriarchy who use transness as their punching bag.

Shraya’s experiences are tense yet thoughtful, and she speaks from a place of sadness and desire for the world to be better. Her experience of queerness in high school is relatable, as well as her experience of her body not fitting into gender molds already set out for her and therefore not recognizing her body as her own. You can read our full review of I’m Afraid of Men here. 

Special mention: The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1963). This roman á clef (fact overlaid with fiction) is based on Plath’s experiences working as an intern at a magazine in New York one summer, during which she descends into a spiral of self-loathing and depression. She sees a psychiatrist and is interned at a hospital, where she undergoes electroshock therapy as well as insulin therapy, and after many trials of this she believes that it may have helped. This is a novel rather than a proper memoir, but it is a semi-autobiographical account of Plath’s struggles with being taken seriously as a writer and her own mental health. This is a great book which greatly illustrates a young woman’s teetering mental condition as she struggles to find a stable career.