Joanna Biggs’s “A Life of One’s Own: Nine Women Writers Begin Again”

Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher are joined by editor and writer Joanna Biggs, whose new book is called “A Life of One’s Own: Nine Women Writers Begin Again.”

By LARB Radio HourJune 2, 2023

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Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher are joined by editor and writer Joanna Biggs, whose new book is called A Life of One’s Own: Nine Women Writers Begin Again. Joanna is an editor at Harper’s Magazine. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, the Financial Times and The Guardian. In her new book, Joanna is attempting to recalibrate her life after a divorce. She turns to literature and specifically to nine different women writers and philosophers, ranging from Mary Wollstonecraft to Sylvia Plath to Toni Morrison to Elena Ferrante. In exploring their lives and their work, Joanna finds radical ways to live and rebuild, inspired by these women who forged their own paths outside of domestic and societal expectations. With the help of their writing and their example, Joanna slowly starts to find a new sense of self. She writes “I was alone in many ways, but in my reading I had company for the big questions.”

Also, Gary Indiana, author of Do Everything in the Dark, returns to recommend The Age of Skin by Dubravka Ugresic.