Sometimes, you want to get the fuck out, but you don’t know how. We’ve all been there: knowing you need to leave a job, a relationship, a house, or a state (or state of mind), but not knowing how to go about it. In my own experience, this is when I wish someone would hand me a blueprint, take me step-by-step through the development of an exit plan, or show me a crystal ball and reassure me I’m making the right choices.
No one can do the hard work of leaving for you, but you can arm yourself with the stories of others—the closest I’ve come to finding a blueprint. In my most recent book, The Leaving Season: A Memoir, I leave a husband, a home, a cherished bookshop, deadening jobs, cities, old versions of myself, dreams that no longer serve me, and many other things. Throughout this period, I often turned to books to help me see the possible paths forward and borrow strength from narrators both fictional and real.
The following books offer different views into types of leaving: people, places, religions, and versions of themselves. In some of these stories, people return; in others, the narrators make a break for good. What is clear through all of these books is that leaving is just the ending of one narrative arc, necessary for another to begin. This list starts with the books from authors who joined me in the recent Rumpus panel, Women Who Leave, and builds out from there:
How to Raise A Feminist Son: Motherhood, Masculinity, and the Making of My Family by Sonora Jha
Rebecca Solnit called this book, “Exhilarating and inspiring,” and I couldn’t agree more. As a single immigrant woman of color in America, Jha’s stakes for raising her son couldn’t be higher. Blending history of social justice movements, generational trauma, reportage, and the personal, Jha builds a blueprint that is political, practical, and achingly hopeful.
This American Ex-Wife by Lyz Lenz
Lenz takes aim at the patriarchy in this memoir-manifesto, starting by showing us her own basement, where her Mormon husband squirreled away any totem that carried a whiff of independent thought (i.e., her Write Like A Motherfucker mug from The Rumpus), before widening the lens to look at American history and gender politics as a whole. She weaves her personal story alongside the political, taking aim at the cultural intuition of marriage as a whole.
We Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith
Beauty emergency!, as the poet Maggie Smith would say. This memoir excavates the pain and ugliness of rejection, failure, shame, and despair in fleeting, lyric passages that feel like a cat leaving a dead bird at your feet: a gift that is brutal and gorgeous at the same time.
I Am Yours: A Shared Memoir by Reema Zaman
Born in Bangladesh and raised in Thailand, Zaman traces her own upbringing as context for her later struggles as an aspiring actress in New York. Hunger and a desire to be heard keep this narrator fighting as she pushes against a culture of quiet, until she breaks free—riotously, joyfully, loudly.
Wanting: Women Writing About Desire edited by Margot Kahn & Kelly McMasters
Leaving begins with desire: a desire for something different, for a change, or, sometimes, for a simple, elemental lust. This anthology collects personal essays from 33 women who want: “to belong and to escape, to dominate and submit, to fuck and feel and be free.” From Keyanah B. Nurse’s “Pleasure Archive: Notes on Polyamory, History, and Desire” to Amy Gall’s “My Dick, Your Dick, Our Dick” to Lisa Taddeo’s “Splitting the World Open,” these essays circle the required ache of absence that often presages a leaving.
Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason by Gina Frangello
The death of Frangello’s dear friend acts as a catalyst in her midlife, cracking her open and allowing not just a sea-change, but a reimagining of what could be. Marriage, motherhood, and misogyny collide in this fiery memoir, in which the sentences explode and pop with the intensity of her choices and the stakes—including her own survival—of her reckoning.
Splinters by Leslie Jamison
A close-to-the-bone memoir from one of our greatest essayists, Splinters traces Jamison’s break-up of her relationship in the midst of new motherhood. New obsessions, new identities, and new understandings are held against the past—her own along with her parents’—as she works to build a new life for herself and her daughter.
Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation by Rachel Cusk
The relentless backlash to this book often gets more attention than the work itself, which is difficult, honest, and riveting. Ugly truths are held along the luminous as Cusk works to hold her marriage under a microscope and understand its flaws in unflinching detail. There is nothing easy about this story, which is why it is one of my favorites.
Heartbreak: A Personal and Scientific Journey by Florence Williams
For those who want to get under the hood of heartbreak, Williams is your perfect guide. Weaving science alongside the personal, journalist Williams takes us through the dissolution of her 25-year marriage and her recovery, mixing her dating life with loneliness tests, natural beauty, and even some humor.
City of Laughter by Temim Fruchter
While Shiva, Fruchter’s main character in this multi-generational fantastical novel, does leave a relationship in this story, there are larger tectonic plates of loss and desire at work here. Fruchter beautifully holds queerness, religion, and silence against expectation and tradition in this wild exploration of belonging and love.
The Boys of My Youth by Jo Ann Beard
No list of books about leaving could be complete without this powerful collection of essays by the masterful Jo Ann Beard. Perhaps the most instrumental book in my own life—in writing, in leaving, and in moving on—Boys of My Youth takes on the entire universe of loss, including divorce, death, betrayal, and versions of the self. Each essay is exquisite, though “The Fourth State of Matter” is, arguably, the most perfect essay ever written. Each time I read this book, I find something new and it is as close to a crystal ball as I’ll ever get.
