Reading List for the New "Ecriture Feminine"

The French theorist Helene Cixous coined the term "ecriture feminine" in her essay "The Laugh of the Medusa." For her, the term was mainly aspirational, describing a type of women's writing about a woman's inner experience of the mind and the sensations of her physical body, writing that didn't exist in the still fairly prudish and masculine popular mainstream.

Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies. The Laugh of the Medusa, Helene Cixous

The vague descriptors that she used to categorize ecriture feminine left it open to interpretation. What we do know for sure is that she thought the Brazillian author Clarice Lispector perfectly fit the bill.

Since her essay was first published, nearly half a century has passed. First-person narratives by women which accurately describe particular sensations and experiences are uncountable, but not all of them pass for literature or ecriture feminine. The genre has also expanded outside of its French roots, becoming an international literary form. I've compiled a list of authors that I believe fit into the tradition of ecriture feminine, each of which varies greatly in style.

Nawal El Saadawi, Woman at Point Zero

Egyptian medical doctor and feminist author of the 1970s who has a very take no prisoners radical style of calling out everything she thinks is unfair about how women were treated when she was growing up. Woman at Point Zero is a book she wrote from the perspective of an inmate on death row for killing a man. If the subject matter of this book seems too dark (the inmate has faced mainly abuse her whole life before fighting back), her other works that draw on her upbringing and youth may be somewhat more sunny. Memoirs of a Woman Doctor draws on her experience of medical school, a bad marriage and then a good one, and opening up her own clinic.

Colette, The Vagabond

Colette was an It Girl of the Belle Epoque, an author, performer, and vamp. The Vagabond is a diary-novel of the main character's time touring around France in a Vaudeville show. She lives on her own in a small apartment (with a day servant), ends up getting entangled with one of her fans, and then has to decide between marriage and a world tour with the show. The Vagabond is fun and frivolous yet sophisticated. Colette's novels all have a very good balance between light and heavy elements. They have drama, but they are never melodramatic, tending more to stay on the surface and take life as fun. I haven't met a book by Colette that I didn't enjoy.

Marie Vieux-Chauvet, Love, Anger, Madness

Three novellas by a Haitian author who comes from a long line of writers and politicians in a style best described as Caribbean Gothic. Love focuses on an aristocratic family in decline, as told by the family's eldest daughter, a bitter yet talented 40-year-old virgin. High drama throughout with both romantic and political intrigue. Anger and Madness have their moments as well, but Love is the best of the three due to the revelation of the secret thoughts of its narrator.

San Mao, Stories of the Sahara

This is a classic Taiwanese book that all women above the age of 45 universally love. It was recently translated into English by Mike Fu in 2019 so this extremely influential work is now available for the English reading audience. San Mao came from an influential Chinese family, moved to Taiwan after the fall of the Republic of China, and started traveling abroad when she was young. This book is about her time in the Spanish Sahara, a colonial possession of Spain until the 1970s, when it was taken over by Morocco. This is about the time that San Mao lived there with her Spanish husband, Jose. This book is really a lot of fun, with some extremely hilarious anecdotes mixed in with some more serious ones about the Spanish Sahara's attempts at a revolution to establish an independent nation.

Marguerite Duras, Blue Eyes, Black Hair & The Slut of the Normandy Coast

Duras constitutes the mold of ecriture feminine, as it refers to French women's writings about their body and interior states. I assume that she is who Cixous had in mind when she defined this form of literature. Duras studied law and political economy in school, but she ended up a poet. Blue Eyes, Black Hair is about an affair that she had with a much younger fan when she was already seventy or eighty (something she shares with Colette). The Slut of the Normandy Coast, to put it succinctly, is about a bad breakup. Both are written in Duras' claustrophobic, poetic, interior style. Her works can't be described well in terms of plot, but they are rich in atmosphere.

Amelie Nothomb, Loving Sabotage

A Francophone Belgian author who, as the daughter of diplomats, grew up abroad. This book is supposedly autobiographical, in which the author states that she remembers her whole life starting from her birth, after which she didn't speak or move for two years because she just didn't feel like it. Nothomb's writing can be both cute and compelling. This book is mostly about her childhood in Beijing. Her interior monologue couples well with a stronger plot focus than other Francophone ecriture feminine, so it's a good light read.

Ayu Utami, Saman

I read a part of this book in translation, so it's the only recommendation I made where I haven't actually finished reading the whole thing. Utami is an Indonesian author who got into trouble for writing honestly about what she thinks of the political regime there in the past and present. The segment that I read was a fairy tale about a girl and an ogre, written in the first-person.

Clarice Lispector, Soul Storm

I have to admit that I do not like Lispector's work at this point in my life, but I probably would have loved it as an adolescent. Soul Storm is her most accessible, a collection of a few short stories which ranges through plots and subjects. Lispector is archetypal feminine - yes, there is a story in here that's all about loving horses, she's that girl. She has both heavy and light stories, and her descriptions of interior psychological states and thought processes are extremely detailed.