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books women in their 20s need to read
10
items Your 20s are confusing, exciting, and kind of a mess — so are these books, in the best way. They’re the ones that made me laugh, cry, rethink everything, and feel a little less alone while figuring life out!
I read this while doomscrolling was at its peak for me, and it was like Jia Tolentino crawled into my brain and exposed all the ways the internet shapes how I perform as a ‘person.’ She writes about feminism, scams, and online identity with this mix ...
Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion
such a classic! I’ll be honest, I hated the narrator for at least the first half, and then I realized that was the point. This book is about checking out of the world in the most extreme way possible, and it made me think about how tempting it is to ...
My Year of Rest and Relaxation: A Novel
This isn’t a sit-down-and-read-straight-through book — it’s the kind you keep picking up whenever you need to feel defiant or magical. Waldman’s poems feel like spells, calling out patriarchy and chaos while also celebrating them as things we can dan...
Trickster Feminism (Penguin Poets)
Reading this after living through an actual pandemic was surreal. The book’s take on routine, capitalism, and how numb we can get to change made me realize how much of my life I live on autopilot, even when the world feels like it’s falling apart. Pl...
Severance: A Novel
This isn’t a book you ‘finish’ so much as one you live with for a while. Durga writes about identity, creativity, and feeling like you’re not doing life ‘right’ and she makes all the tiny, quiet moments feel huge. It’s like a friend reminding you to ...
Too Much and Not the Mood: Essays
This book cracked open my ideas about what relationships and intimacy are supposed to look like. Emily Witt explores polyamory, online dating, and sexual subcultures with this mix of curiosity and honesty that made me feel like she was bringing me al...
Future Sex
It’s rare to find a book that gets the feeling of your early 20s so right, that mix of hope, instability, and deep friendships that feel like lifelines. I loved how it explored queerness, work, and building a life from scratch when everything around ...
All This Could Be Different: A Novel
This one got me during a particularly isolating winter. Laing weaves her own loneliness with stories of artists who lived in solitude, and it somehow made me feel less alone. It’s proof that being by yourself can be both an ache and a kind of freedom...
The Lonely City: Adventures in Art of Being Alone
This is the most brutally honest portrayal of a toxic relationship I’ve ever read. It’s about obsession, self-worth, and the way love can become a cage you don’t even realize you’re in. Painful to read at times, but in that ‘I need someone to say thi...
Acts of Desperation
another classic! If my friendships had a patron saint, it would be Dolly Alderton. She writes about love, heartbreak, bad dates, and growing pains but it’s her stories about friends that made me want to text everyone I care about immediately. Warm, f...
Everything I Know About Love: A Memoir