Storied Women

Modeled after work by Roland Barthes, Maggie Nelson, and Marguerite Duras, among others, Storied Women pushes against the limits of auto-fiction, combining critical and theoretical writing with fictional narrative. The story follows Willow in the wake of a break-up as she processes her grief by reading books written on a to-read list her ex-girlfriend left behind. These books, coincidentally, include works like A Lover’s Discourse by Roland Barthes, The Lover by Marguerite Duras, and Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson, inviting her to begin troubling the subject-object dialectic as it relates to romantic relationships and representations of love in literature. At the heart of the novella is a desire and failure to write new philosophies of love—new poetry—free from unnecessary gendered binaries and their patriarchal cultural contexts.