Lady Sings the Blues
Billie Holiday, William Dufty
1984, Penguin Books
The film Lady Sings the Blues was my introduction to Billie Holiday. I watched it with my mom, a big Diana Ross fan. She used the lyrics to “God Bless the Child” as life advice:

Money, you’ve got lots of friends
Crowding round the door
When you’re gone, spending ends
They don’t come no more

The film featured a glamorous Diana Ross replicating the turmoil and melancholy of Lady Day. While I love the film, there was something off in its representation to me. The Hollywood version of Billie Holiday’s life had its truths, but they didn’t seem to line up with the image of Holiday I’d often seen. And with that, I had to hear the words from the woman herself. This book’s tone conjures up images of an elder Billie, formally known as Eleanora Fagan, sitting in an easy chair putting it all on the record. I imagine her heavyset frame partially at rest, her thin eyebrows pointed upward, as she begins to recount the tales of growing up in Baltimore, cleaning the whore houses where she first encountered jazz.

In the book, Holiday recounts being sent to a Catholic school for out of hand young women, where as punishment she was forced to sleep in a room with the body of a girl who’d died at the home. She talks about being a sex worker in Harlem, before realizing she could make money from her singing ability. And that she did, indulging in silk dresses while also taking care of her sickly mother. She also indulged in drugs, having a terrible heroin addiction. It is out of this addiction the book was written with William Duffy, as a way to make money at the time.

My pull to read the book comes from wanting “sad girl” narratives I could relate to. The internet is full with different iterations of what a sad girl is, whether an identity or Instagram caption. However, here’s the woman who is “sad,” simply put. She describes the great depression she feels when singing songs like “Strange Fruit,” while knowing it is her duty to do so. She discusses the abuse, sexual and otherwise, with matter-of-fact language.

There’s a will to survive without being crushed by the need to be strong. There’s no victim narratives at play. She drank plenty, took no shit, and lived a fast life. Which has its trappings and its sad parts, but I’m sure there was joy as well. She somewhat lived in the gray area of the world. That someone with such a tough, imposing presence could exude longing in her music perplexes me. If only I could articulate it better. As many others try to do with the various biographies and documentaries, but maybe some things simply aren’t meant to be explained. They just are. —Tayler Montague

Unwind
Neal Shusterman
2009, Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
The United States is always split between pro-choice and anti-choice (aka “pro-life”) when it comes to reproductive rights, but what if those two groups came to a compromise? Unwind tells the story of three teens in a dystopian future where the two sides of the debate have arrived at a stalemate and are forced to come together to make an “ethical” decision. Abortion is banned, but when a child is between the ages of 13 and 18, parents can opt to have them “unwounded”—a grisly technique that requires doctors to cut kids’ bodies into pieces so the parts can be given to people who “need” them. The catch is that the child is technically still alive—all their qualities and traits are still present in the recipients’ bodies. I still have a pro-choice stance, but when I finished this book I had a whole new perspective on reproductive rights and how they intersect with everything else going on in our society. —Thahabu

Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman
Nicole Loraux
1991, Harvard University Press
Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman was the first book that found me during my initial revelations about the places of women in the world, but especially in literary history. I have always been interested in what is considered “feminine death,” and how written characters are represented and memorialized by their last acts or last moments, as well as the methods of their destructions. This book elaborates on this theme in the setting of ancient Greece, where all of my favorite leading ladies lay. I read this as my class was finishing Oedipus Rex and Antigone, which was a perfect and probably fated intersection; it helps bring women to the forefront in situations where they initially or on the surface appear to have lost power or been robbed of their redeeming characteristics. I’m very in love with the concept of using a mixture of classical and modern interpretations to restore meaning to a woman’s body (especially the parts prominently involved in her fictional death) and to credit her with more than irrationality or irrelevance. —Britney Franco

Ties That Bind
Sarah Schulman
2009, The New Press
When I picked up Sarah Schulman’s Ties That Bind from the library, I chose it mostly for its Barbara Kruger-esque cover design. The book details the interconnected nature of familial homophobia and lack of representation of queer people in the media. Schulman’s willingness to openly describe the homophobia she has experienced, whether from the mouth of a theatre director or her sister, shows how vast and unending the issue of homophobia is, makes a discussion of queer issues accessible in a way that queer theory is sometimes not. —Rachel Davies