Reading List · Lisanne Swart
Books by Female Authors
These are the books by female authors that have stayed with me. Not a list made to be comprehensive or correct — a list made from genuine experience. What they have in common is not genre or subject or style. What they have in common is that the woman writing refused to be anything less than completely honest. That quality — the refusal to soften, to reassure, to perform — is what makes books last. These six do.
By Lisanne Swart · 6 books · Memoir, Fiction & Journalism · Updated May 2026
Educated
Tara Westover grew up in rural Idaho in a survivalist family that did not believe in school, doctors, or the government. She had no birth certificate until she was nine. She did not set foot in a classroom until she was seventeen. By thirty she had a PhD from Cambridge. Educated is the memoir of that journey — but it is not a triumph story in the way that sounds. It is about what you lose when you build a life your family cannot follow you into, and whether that trade is worth it. The writing is precise and devastating and does not ask for your pity.
The reason this book has sold millions of copies is not the extraordinary circumstances — it is the ordinary feeling underneath them. The tension between who your family needs you to be and who you actually are is not survivalist-family specific. Westover writes about that tension with more clarity than almost anyone. By the end you are not thinking about Idaho. You are thinking about yourself.
I Am Malala
Malala Yousafzai was fifteen when the Taliban shot her on her school bus in Pakistan’s Swat Valley for the act of going to school and writing publicly about it. She survived. I Am Malala is the account of her childhood, her father’s school, the Taliban’s rise in Swat, the shooting, and the strange aftermath of becoming a global symbol while still being a teenage girl. It was written with journalist Christina Lamb and is more specific, more political, and more complicated than the simplified version of her story that tends to circulate.
What is remarkable about this book is not the courage — though the courage is extraordinary — but the ordinariness of what she was fighting for. She wanted to go to school. She wanted to read. The simplicity of that desire, and the violence it provoked, is the argument the book is making. It does not need to be more complicated than it is. Read it alongside the news and it stays relevant in ways it shouldn’t have to.
The Lottery
Shirley Jackson published The Lottery in The New Yorker in June 1948 and received more reader mail than any story in the magazine’s history up to that point — almost all of it angry. The story is about a small American village conducting its annual lottery on a warm summer morning. It is less than four thousand words. It is one of the most effective pieces of short fiction ever written in English, and it has never been out of print.
The reason The Lottery still works is the same reason it enraged readers in 1948: it does not explain itself. Jackson does not tell you what the lottery means, what it represents, or what you are supposed to feel about it. She trusts you to sit with the discomfort. Most writers do not trust their readers that much. The ending lands with the force of something you already knew but had not yet admitted to yourself — which is the only way horror actually works.
Our Women on the Ground
An anthology of essays by nineteen Arab female journalists reporting from across the Middle East and North Africa — from Syria and Iraq to Egypt, Libya, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia. The writers include reporters from the BBC, Al Jazeera, and major international outlets. The essays are not primarily about war, though war is everywhere in them. They are about what it means to do this work as a woman, as an Arab, as someone with family on the ground, as someone who belongs to the place she is reporting on and is therefore never quite seen as objective.
What this anthology does that no single-author book could is show the range of what “Arab female journalist” actually means — the differences in class, country, religion, and political context that get flattened whenever the category is invoked. These are not women writing about the Middle East from the outside. They are writing from inside the specific place where professional obligation, personal history, and physical danger intersect. That combination produces a kind of journalism that most readers have no other access to.
What Happened to You?
A conversation between Oprah Winfrey and trauma specialist Bruce Perry about how early childhood experiences shape behaviour, relationships, and the nervous system — often in ways we cannot consciously access. The book asks one central question: instead of “what is wrong with you?” — what happened to you? It is structured as a genuine dialogue rather than a ghostwritten monologue, which means Oprah’s personal experiences with trauma are woven through Perry’s clinical framework throughout. The result is both more rigorous and more readable than either author could have produced alone.
The shift from “what is wrong with you?” to “what happened to you?” sounds small. It is not small. That question changes how you understand yourself, how you understand the people around you, and how you respond to behaviour that would otherwise just make you angry. This is one of those books that gives you a framework you keep using — not because it tells you something you didn’t know, but because it gives language to something you felt but couldn’t articulate.
Je ziet mij nooit meer terug
For decades Sonja Barend was one of the most recognised faces on Dutch television — the interviewer who could get anyone to say what they had never said before. This memoir is her turning that same precision on herself: on her father, a Jewish man deported in 1942 whose fate she spent her life trying to understand; on her career; on the relationships that defined and complicated her. Written with the same directness she brought to her interviews — no false comfort, no resolution where there is none. It sold over 75,000 copies in the Netherlands.
What makes this book worth reading beyond its Dutch context is the quality of the self-examination. Barend does not write to settle scores or to present herself well. She writes to understand — and she is honest about the places where understanding does not fully arrive. That combination of rigour and humility is rare in memoirs by public figures, most of whom write to control the narrative. Barend is trying to find it.
Not sure where to start?
If you want the book that will stay with you longest
→ Start with Educated. It is the one that readers come back to — not because the story is unique, but because the emotional territory is universal. The writing is exceptional.
If you want something short that proves what fiction can do in four thousand words
→ Read The Lottery. Shirley Jackson understood something about collective cruelty and social compliance that takes most writers three hundred pages to approach. She does it in an afternoon.
If you want journalism that reads like literature
→ Our Women on the Ground. It will change how you read news from the Middle East — not by giving you a political position, but by giving you nineteen specific human ones.
If you want to understand yourself better — particularly the patterns you can’t quite explain
→ What Happened to You? The trauma framework Perry and Winfrey lay out is one of the most useful lenses I have found for understanding why people — including yourself — behave the way they do.
Want more books by women or books centred on women’s experiences?
→ My best books for women list, books every woman should read, and best celebrity memoirs all have more in this direction.
Frequently asked questions about books by female authors
From the bookshelf
“You can love someone and still choose to say goodbye to them.” — Tara Westover, Educated
If this list resonated, you will find more books like these on my personal bookshelf — hand-picked for readers who want books that stay with them long after the last page.
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