Fiction, To Be a Woman

One of the main objectives of V-Day is to raise awareness. Every time I look at the V-Day/V-Spot site, I feel like this feeling to get the word out there -- to educate and to irradicate -- has been boiling beneath the surface of who I am since I became a woman, or realised what womanhood was to me. I looked over the list of fictional books "about the topic" and had either read them, had them on a list to read, or am familiar with the author mentioned. So here they are, in my first installment in getting the word out there. The list has been compiled by vday.org, and is listed in the vspot for campaign organisers, like myself. But you can read them too...

The Awakening (Kate Chopin) - the story of a young woman who finds it impossible to accept that, "for women it is a holy privilege to efface themselves as individuals" and fights back in the only way she knows, and her solution is extreme

Bastard out of Carolina (Dorothy Allison) - a semi-autobiographical and controversial book about growing up as "poor, white trash" and experiencing abuse and rape from childhood

Clit Notes: A Sapphic Sampler (Holly Hughes) - 5 outrageous performance pieces

*The Color Purple (Alice Walker) - a disturbing yet realistic account into the life of Celie, a young black woman with a tragic, abusive past who learns how to survive, how to let go of the past, and most of all how to love

Dawn (Octavia E. Butler)

Laguna Women Poems (Leslie Marmon Silko)

The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold) - from heaven, a young girl who was brutally raped and murdered watches her community respond to her death

*Paradise (Toni Morrison)

*Possessing the Secret of Joy (Alice Walker) - a young girl submits to the ritual female circumcision and spends the rest of her life trying to understand its meaning and live with its consequences

Push (Sapphire) - a story about an abused girl who learns to cope after growing up poor, angry, illiterate, fat, unloved and generally unnoticed

The Red Tent (Anita Diamant) - an insider's look at the daily life of a biblical sorority of mothers and wives and their one and only daughter

*Temple of My Familiar (Alice Walker) - Transcending the conventions of time and place, Walker's novel moves from contemporary America, England, and Africa to unfamiliar primal worlds, where women, men, and animals socialize in surprising ways

Woman Hollering Creek and House on Mango Street (Sandra Cisneros) - a collection of stories, whose characters give voice to the vibrant and varied life on both sides of the Mexican border. The women in these stories offer tales of pure discovery, filled with moments of infinite and intimate wisdom.

The Woman Warrior: Memoires of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (Maxine Hong Kingston) - a pungent, bitter, but beautifully written memoir of growing up Chinese American where a young girls distills the dire lessons of her mother's mesmerizing "talk-story" tales of a China where girls are worthless, tradition is exalted and only a strong, wily woman can scratch her way upward

*books i've read