Five titles that explore female friendship & adolescence

Maggie Nye is the author of The Curators. She is a writer and teacher whose work has been supported by MacDowell, Tin House, and the St. Albans Writer in Residence program.

The short story from which The Curators grew was published in Pleiades.

At Lit Hub Nye tagged five books

that center on women, too, on bodies that share the intimacy of aging, of heat and change, of infirmity. What is common to all of them is a propulsive and generous knowing and loving so strong and terrible that it transcends the individual and absorbs the girls and women in its orbit into shared rapture.

One title on the list:

Lauren Groff, Matrix

This novel, set in the twelfth century, follows historical poet and proto-feminist, Marie de France through an entire lifetime. In Groff’s imagining, Marie is sent away from French court by the (unrequited) love of her young life, Eleanor of Aquitaine, to become the prioress—against her will and at the age of seventeen—of an English abbey on the brink of starvation and collapse.

Initially repulsed by the austerity of the abbey and by what she perceives as the ignorance of its inhabitants, over time Marie uses her cunning and skill to turn the abbey from a place of poverty and suffering to one of abundance and community. She finds deep connection, intellectual and physical, with the women whose lives are, like hers, devoted to God and to the health of the abbey.

Unlike many of the books on this list, Matrix centers the communion of aging bodies. In one radiant passage, Groff writes of “a great sympathetic shining” which originates from Marie’s body with the sudden fever of a hot flash and “pours outward” as it “descends upon each of the other nuns one by one in a luminous rush.” It is this kind of body-sharing baptism that earns Matrix its place in girl-church.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue