The Book That Said the Words I Couldn’t Say

Updated at 1:24 p.m. ET on May 23, 2022.

Coming of age in the early 1990s, I was part of the last cohort of teenagers to grow up without ubiquitous internet. We had pen pals and zines, but mostly we had one another. Girlhood was a time of endless phone calls with friends, though we didn’t always know how to put our feelings into words—and we couldn’t turn to Google to answer our questions. Books and mixtapes filled the gap between what we knew and what we could only intuit.

After reading Virginia Woolf’s at a teacher’s prompting, I was awash with new perspectives on creativity and loss, while Doris Lessing’s made me only painfully aware that bitterness was something I had not yet earned. Then there, Susanna Kaysen’s , the “anonymous” fictional diary