14 Books By First-Time Women Authors To Look Out For In 2018

If you’ve read one of Ijeoma Oluo’s essays in the Establishment magazine (where she’s also an editor) you’re not likely to forget her fierce, feisty, no holds barred writing style. Her debut, So You Want to Talk About Race, dives deep into the realities of racism, oppression, cultural appropriation, and privilege in American life and explores how race has been one of the defining forces in the writer’s own experiences.

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She’s been compared to Roxane Gay, Rebecca Solnit, and Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie — so you already know you want to pick up Morgan Jenkins’ This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America as soon as it lands on bookstore shelves. A collection of linked essays, This Will Be My Undoing takes on pop culture, feminism, black history, misogyny, and racism alongside the writer’s own experiences of being a 20-something woman trying to make her way in the world.

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In the months before her wedding, Laura Smith found sudden inspiration in a most unlikely story: that of Barbara Newhall Follett, a free-spirited woman who published her first novel before she was teenager, sailed the south China seas at 15, and was one of the first women to hike the Appalachian trail — all before disappearing without a trace when she was 25, leaving behind a six-year-long marriage and her entire life. In The Art of Vanishing: A Memoir of Wanderlust, Smith — obsessed with Follett, both the free-spirit and the disappeared women — decided to find out what happened to the woman, all while answering a number of burning questions about marriage, commitment, adventure, and freedom.

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A memoir in essays, Terese Marie Mailhot’s Heart Berries tells the story of the author’s coming-of-age on the Seabird Island Indian Reservation in the Pacific Northwest — one filled with dysfunction and a dual diagnosis of PTSD and bipolar disorder. What did Mailhot do with all that? She wrote her way out of her trauma, finding forgiveness, understanding, peace, and triumph along the way.

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If you’ve ever wondered if all those Disney movies you watched as a kid really screwed up your adult life, this one is for you. Described by the author as “a self-help book for people who hate self-help books” Jen Kim’s Love And . . .: Bad Boys, "The One," and Other Fun Ways to Sabotage Your Relationship is a hilarious and eye-opening journey through your muddled past relationships as well as Kim’s own, as she looks at the science and psychology behind why we love (or, you know, don’t) in the ways that we do. Just in time for Valentine’s Day.

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Tara Westover has traversed distances few people have traversed before — from Idaho mountain survivalist to the hallowed halls of Harvard and Cambridge University. Her debut memoir, Educated, is Westover’s journey away from her upbringing and into herself, demonstrating the power of an education and asking the timeless question of whether or not any of us can ever really go home again.

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Stephanie Wittels Wachs’ life was changed in the way that many lives are: by a single phone call. In Everything Is Horrible and Wonderful: A Tragicomic Memoir of Genius, Heroin, Love, and Loss, Wachs describes the death of her brother Harris — a young, bright, comedy star — due to a heroin overdose. Unsentimental and at times even funny, Everything is Horrible and Wonderful is Wachs' journey to make sense of the senseless, to move from grief to hope, and to let humor light the way.

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A murder mystery set in small-town Japan, Rainbirds by Clarissa Goenawan introduces readers to Ren Ishida, a graduate student whose sister Keiko is suddenly stabbed to death in a crime with no suspects and no leads. In pursuit of justice and answers, Ren heads to the small Japanese town his sister disappeared into years ago — when she mysteriously left behind her family and the Tokyo of her childhood.

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A thriller that explores how much we can ever truly know about the people we love, Exhibit Alexandra by Natasha Bell is the story of Alexandra Southwood — a wife and mother being held against her will, and her husband, Mark — who is trying to pick up the pieces of his life without his wife, even as he frantically embarks upon his own search to find her.

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For readers who love unreliable narrators, Sometimes I Lie by Alice Feeney tells the story of Amber Reynolds — a woman who wakes up paralyzed in a hospital and unable to communicate, but very much awake in her mind. Amber doesn’t remember her accident, but she knows what she was doing the week before, she knows that her husband doesn’t love her anymore, and she knows he had something to do with her accident. She also knows that, sometimes, she lies.

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Writers’ and readers’ obsession with the Manson Family just won’t end. The newest title to add to your Manson Family library (should you, you know, have one of those) is Nikki Meredith’s The Manson Women and Me: Monsters, Morality, and Murder. As intrigued by the women of the Manson Family cult as many of us are, Meredith, an award-winning journalist, began visiting two of the Manson women: Leslie Van Houten and Patricia Krenwinkel, in prison, hoping to discover what led previously-normal young girls to commit brutal crimes, and if they had changed during their lives spent behind bars.

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Diving inside some of the deepest mysteries of the human mind with someone who has spent her life studying exactly that, Barbara K. Lipska’s The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind: My Tale of Madness and Recovery describes the leading neuroscientist’s own descent into madness — triggered by an aggressive cancer that spread to her brain, miraculously retreated just months later, and left Lipska not only with her memories intact, but with a whole lot more insight (and even more questions) into the human brain.

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The perfect addition to your feminist TBR pile, True Stories from an Unreliable Eyewitness: A Feminist Coming of Age by award–winning actress and director Christine Lahti is the performer's first collection of linked personal essays, in which Lahti describes her childhood, her life as an actress and activist, and what it means to be a middle-aged woman in today’s Hollywood.

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First of all: loving the phrase “renegade mothering”. When Janelle Hanchett became pregnant at 21-years-old, by a man she’d only known three months, she decided to make it work — until the alcohol and drugs she used to cope with her seemingly-directionless life began to destroy the very life she was using them to escape from. Far from your cookie-cutter story of addiction and recovery, I'm Just Happy to Be Here: A Memoir of Renegade Mothering describes Hanchett’s journey to recovery and sobriety in imperfect and unconventional ways.

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