LIT LISTS: Eight titles about women with secret lives

Sunday, April 26, 2026

Eight titles about women with secret lives

Bonnie Friedman is the author of the bestselling, widely anthologized Writing Past Dark: Envy, Fear, Distraction, and Other Dilemmas in the Writer’s Life. She is also the

author of the memoirs The Thief of Happiness: The Story of an Extraordinary Psychotherapy and Surrendering Oz.

Her essays have been selected for inclusion in The Best Writing on Writing, The Best American Movie Writing, The Best Buddhist Writing, and The Best Spiritual Writing. Her new novel is Don’t Stop.

At Lit Hub Friedman tagged eight "books that reveal covert lives, truths that society forbids or shames, and an effusion of vibrant spirit." One title on the list:

Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert, translated by Lydia Davis

“You cannot understand that,” said my high school English teacher when her glance fell on this novel on my desk. I rankled. I understood it perfectly! It was about a woman having an affair. Because I knew the literal meaning of the words, I thought I understood the story they told. And I wondered at this teacher’s greedy need to own and to mystify.

But of course she was right. Since then I’ve read this book at least four times, once a decade. Even now I feel Emma Bovary’s novel has more to teach me, about the ways that fantasy can pollute one’s mind, about how appetites aroused can grow ever larger, ever more corrupt, about how ordinary, mundane life itself can seem an affront, and, beyond this, about the construction of magnificent sentences that are marvels of precise detail: “the musicians cooled the tips of their fingers on their tongues” “she put away . . . her satin shoes, whose soles had been yellowed by the slippery wax of the dance floor. Her heart was like them: contact with wealth had laid something over it that would not be wiped away.”

Every story of an affair has some point of contact with Madame Bovary, and one feels somehow the way that high school English teacher did, possessive, wishing to make special claims, as if the book itself had a tender, intimate message that the Charles Bovarys of the world—i.e. everyone else—can’t understand.