What I have been reading.
Every book I have read in the last few years. The ones that shaped this work and the ones that did not.
2026 (so far)
The Body Keeps the Score,
I return to this every year. It says the same thing and I hear something new in it each time.
It Didn't Start With You,
The most clinical treatment of ancestral inheritance I have found.
Women Who Run With the Wolves,
I was reading this for the fourth time. The chapter on the skeleton woman is the most accurate map I know of how intimacy actually works.
My Grandmother's Hands,
About racial trauma, but also about bodies and what they hold. Indispensable.
The Drama of the Gifted Child,
Short and devastating. I gave three copies away this year.
2025
The Polyvagal Theory,
Dense and technical and completely necessary.
Trauma and Recovery,
The foundational text. Clear and humane.
Silencing the Self,
Underread. Should be on every shelf next to Lerner.
Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom,
Revisited the chapters on the mother line.
The Wounded Woman,
The book I wish existed when I was twenty-three. Wrote the father wound before "father wound" was the language.
Waking the Tiger,
For the section on the freeze response. Essential.
Emotional Currency,
The only honest book about women and money I have read.
Sister Outsider,
The essay on poetry as survival. The essay on anger. Both permanently in my mind.
The Dance of Anger,
Read for the third time. Still useful every time.
2024
A Room of One's Own,
The argument for financial independence as the precondition for women's creative life. Still true.
Of Woman Born,
The most complete treatment of the institutional dimension of motherhood.
Motherless Daughters,
For the section on the daughter who never stops grieving.
Born to Break the Cycle (research phase),
Reading everything these three wrote in preparation for the manuscript.