Book recs for March: 4 portraits of complicated women

Vox

18-03-2025

is a senior correspondent on the Culture team for Vox, where since 2016 she has covered books, publishing, gender, celebrity analysis, and theater.
Sometimes it's hard to read Dream Count cleanly. It feels as though you have to scrub away the cultural silt that has accumulated over its author's image to meet the text in good faith. In places, it reads as though Adichie feels the same way. She keeps having her characters go on bitter tangents about the piety and hypocrisy of American liberals, or recite ex-tempore speeches on Feminism 101. ('Dear men, I understand that you don't like abortion, but the best way to reduce abortion is if you take responsibility for where your male bodily fluids go.')
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In other places, though, Dream Count reminds you of what made Adichie such a phenomenon in the first place: Those precise sentences; that biting satire; all those vivid, complicated women.
Dream Count is built around four Nigerian-born women, all living in or having recently departed from America, in spring 2020 as lockdown descends. Each narrates a section of the novel, the two extroverts in first person and the introverts in third person, as one by one they consider the men in their lives who have loved them and betrayed them.
They're thinking about their body counts, says one character toward the end of the novel. No, going back over one's love life is a dream count, returns another.
One craves a deep connection, another a partnership, a third stability; one flourishes on her own but worries that she is missing the chance for something more. All were betrayed by men who at their worst behaved like animals and at their best were simply not enough to build a life around. Instead, as the novel goes on, they find they've built their lives around each other.
Dream Count is not a perfect novel, but it offers you the kind of fully textured polyphonic female friendship that only Adichie can render so beautifully and precisely. As we make our way through the end of Women's History Month, here are three other recent books that offer us portraits of women in complicated, visceral detail.
On the shelf
Three Days in June by Anne Tyler
Three Days in June is a slim novel of enormous warmth and sweetness, featuring one of the prickly, closed-off women Anne Tyler writes so well. Gail, a 61-year-old assistant headmistress at a private girl's school, finds herself getting pushed out of her job with the explanation that she lacks people skills. Gail is outraged: No one, she tells us, had ever said such a thing about her before, or at least 'Not in so many words.'
But Gail's ex-boss has a point. Gail nitpicks grammar, clothes, the way other people chew their food. She cuts her own hair so she doesn't have to make small talk with the stylist. She doesn't particularly enjoy most people and isn't particularly good at dealing with them.
Never mind: Gail doesn't have the time to spend too long mourning her lost job. Her daughter is getting married the next day, and Gail's ex-husband and his cat show up on her doorstep looking for lodging for the wedding. Before long, so does the bride, who suspects the groom of infidelity. Sour, crotchety Gail has to keep things together, which she does with mingled affection and annoyance for everyone around her. The results will melt your heart.
No Fault: A Memoir of Romance and Divorce by Haley Mlotek
Haley Mlotek began dating her future husband when she was 16 years old, she tells us in this tender, shivery, shadowy memoir-cum-cultural history. They stayed together, surprised as anyone else that things seemed to keep working out for them, for 12 years, and eventually got married for immigration purposes. A year after their wedding, they divorced.
Mlotek never tells us directly what led to her divorce, or of what the end looked like. Instead, she circles around abstractions of events, while her descriptions of how it all felt land with shocking emotional intensity. 'I could tell you about our last night,' she writes of the end of the marriage, 'but mostly I think about how the night passed no matter what we did to hold still.'
Mlotek seeds details of her own divorce through a larger cultural history of the divorce plot. Feverishly, she explores memoirs, novels, movies, looking at how the divorce plot mirrors and subverts three centuries of marriage plots. The bibliography Mlotek builds can feel generic in comparison to the specificity of her own experiences, but occasionally she hits gold — as with her long analysis of The Continuing Story of Carel and Ferd, a 1970s documentary about a couple who filmed their wedding, wedding night, and subsequent divorce, and then watch and discuss the whole thing on public access television.
'I have looked for guidance everywhere but real life,' Mlotek tells us. 'I want you to ask if I've read Anna Karenina. I do not want you to ask what I would do for love.' She's nonetheless at her most compelling when she's implying the answer to the second question.
Woodworking by Emily St. James
If you've been reading Vox for a while, you might recognize Emily St. James's name. She's an institution here. She founded Vox's culture section (and hired yours truly) and, as our critic-at-large, wrote some of the most insightful cultural criticism you're likely to find anywhere. Now, she's written her first novel, Woodworking. I am obviously biased (all the more so because the book contains a character named Constance; Emily tells me there is no relation), but I think you'll love it.
In the 1980s, 'woodworking' was trans slang for going deep, deep stealth: transitioning, getting bottom surgery, and cutting off contact with anyone who ever knew you pre-transition, so that no one could ever say you were anything but cis. You simply fade into the woodwork.
In this snappy, propulsive novel, woodworking remains far, far out of reach for Erica, one of the book's two narrators. She's a 35-year-old English teacher in small-town South Dakota in 2016, and she has only recently allowed herself to realize that she is trans. Erica is also more than half convinced that it's too late for her to do anything about it. She has already gone through puberty, and already built a whole life as a man. If she transitions, Erica tells herself, she will lose her job and her life, and she will never even be able to pass, let alone woodwork, so what's the point?
Woodworking remains an aspiration for teenage Abigail, our second narrator and the only other trans person Erica knows of in Mitchell, South Dakota. Having already fled her anti-trans parents, Abigail is biding her time until she can afford to pay for bottom surgery, cut off her beloved sister, move to a city, and woodwork.
When Abigail realizes that her dorky English teacher is trans and closeted, she is disgusted to find that she's the only one in a position to guide said teacher through those early, fumbling days of transitioning. She buys Erica nail polish, shows her how to put it on, and convinces her to wear the polish to school. Erica wonders if she is a lesbian because she's still attracted to her ex-wife; Abigail assures her that she is the most lesbian.
Emily writes with a breezy charm, especially in dialogue, but the playfulness of her voice belies the darkness running under this novel. Abigail tells her story in a defensive first person that occasionally lifts right out of her body; Erica, meanwhile, has dissociated into the third person as she tells her story, redacting her dead name with a hazy gray bar. These characters are living during the election of 2016, and they can tell that right-wing animus against them is mounting. They don't know just how dark things will get eight years later.
Off the shelf
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