She is the author of Cognition and Girlhood in Shakespeare’s World and Midwiving Subjects in Shakespeare’s England; co-author of Shakespeare Not Stirred: Cocktails for Your Everyday Dramas; and co-host of the Everyday Shakespeare podcast. Her essays and humor pieces have appeared in the Modern Love column of the New York Times, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and the show Afterbirth. She lives in Blue Hill, Maine, with her family.
Bicks's new book is Monsters in the Archives: My Year of Fear with Stephen King.
At Electric Lit Bicks tagged "seven stories [that] feature girls who use their cognitive abilities to challenge social norms and imagine their own destinies." One title on the list:
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette WintersonRead about the other entries on the list.
“Why is the measure of love loss?” This question drives Winterson’s memoir about growing up with an abusive adoptive mother, searching for her past, and making herfuture. The elder Winterson locks Jeannette outside in the winter and forbids all books except for the Bible. When she discovers that 14-year-old Jeanette is sleeping with her girlfriend, she has a Pentecostal minister force her daughter through three brutal (and unsuccessful) days of conversion therapy. Eventually, Jeanette saves herself by escaping into fiction. She works her way through every work of literature, A-Z, in her local library; and, after Mrs. Winterson evicts her at 16, gets herself into Oxford where she becomes a fiction writer. Here, she writes about how stories give words to those who have been silenced: “We get our language back through the language of others.” Fiction “isn’t a hiding place. It’s a finding place.”
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? is among Tara Westover's four inspirational memoirs.
--Marshal Zeringue
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