At Lit Hub Hamilton tagged eight books "concerning women’s desire, consent, and autonomy, especially as distorted by marriage." One title on the list:
Deborah Levy, Hot MilkRead about the other entries on the list.
Hot Milk imagines what a woman discovering her ferocity early, before being damaged by marriage, might look like. In a dusty seaside town in Spain, a woman in her twenties and dislocated in all ways, Sofia, finds her desires—sexual and otherwise—and begins to enact them while protecting herself from the emotional onslaughts of her parasitic mother, narcissistic father, and a manipulative lover.
Repeated encounters with “medusa” jellyfish transform her from meek subservience into audacity, rage, and appetite, refiguring her skin as they “sting her into desire” and make her” monstrous.” By novel’s end, Sofia has no need for Mad Wife. I love that about her.
--Marshal Zeringue