We’ve all heard the groaning, whether in reviews, in books and articles, or on social media: The writer-protagonist is out of touch, navel gazing, insular, unimaginative…The critiques go on and on. These days, any book that features a writer as the main character seems to face this blanket assessment before the spine in question has even been cracked.
Sometimes the critique is valid, but I’d argue that we also need protagonists who are writers, that some stories can only be told through a writer. The writer-protagonist in a novel might be the engine of the book, its central obsession. Or they might be used as a frame that expands the world of the central story. Or they could be a single brushstroke at the end that changes what you’ve just read. To me, the possibilities seem almost endless, and each writer-protagonist offers nuance to the elements of fiction.
My debut novel, Atomic Hearts, is about a writer. The book follows Gertie at two points in her life. In the first, she’s sixteen and spending a secret-filled summer in Sioux Falls with her father, who is struggling with an opioid addiction. She finds escape in the pages of a fantasy novel she’s trying to write, about a girl transported to another world. In the second, when Gertie is thirty-one, we find her trying to find a way, through her novel-in-progress, to reconcile herself with that fateful summer. Teenage Gertie struggles with the ever-darker worlds of her life and her fantasy novel, while adult Gertie’s rejection of fantasy becomes a barrier to inspiration. But it’s through Gertie’s writing that she learns, in different ways, to define what’s real, what’s imagined, and to know when the boundary between the two should be blurred. The books on this list—and many others that fit this theme—were an inspiration to me as I wrote Atomic Hearts. They loom large in my imagination, showing why, and how, writer-protagonists can dispel common knee-jerk reactions to become a tool of versatility in a novel.
Mind of Winter by Laura Kasischke
On Christmas morning in Mind of Winter, Holly Judge wakes up with the scrap of a line of a poem in her head. She feels, for the first time in years, a physical urge to write. From there, a single snowy day unfolds in a nightmarish spiral as Holly moves from room to room preparing for the arrival of company, searching for the time to write, and wondering at her daughter’s increasingly odd behavior. The book’s ending changes everything, but it’s Holly’s internal musings about poetry and the sense that there is an invisible, physical forcefield keeping Holly from sitting down to work on a poem that make the story vibrate with an odd electricity. That Holly is a poet becomes a tool of mystery in the novel. We feel her muscles twitching toward a pen, but she never quite gets there. It’s discomfort (in a good way) from beginning to end.
All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews
As Yoli’s sister Elf tries again and again to die, Yoli is trying to write “the real book.” Yoli, best known for her Rodeo Rhonda series, is in financial straits after her latest divorce, and meanwhile Elf begs to be taken to Switzerland—a place where she’d have the right to die. As Yoli’s resistance to Elf’s idea deteriorates, she starts to wonder how she might pay for such a trip. The answer is to furiously, in a span of days, write another installment of Rodeo Rhonda. All My Puny Sorrows is of course about so much more than the economics of writing, but Yoli’s financial maneuvering—in a way, to save her sister by helping her kill herself—is a devastating, unglamorous, desperate look at the writing life as a means to make money for ourselves and our families.
Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler
The year in which Parable of the Sower begins (2024) has come and gone, but its message and predictions are increasingly true. Lauren Oya Olamina, the novel’s first-person protagonist, lives in a walled neighborhood outside of Los Angeles and imagines a philosophy that defines God as Change, which she eventually calls Earthseed: The Books of the Living. Passages from Earthseed frame each chapter, but the novel is also told through Lauren’s journal entries. Lauren also suffers from hyperempathy, a disorder where she feels the physical pain of those near her—which is fitting, for a writer of philosophy, to experience so closely the feelings of others. Following the devastation of Lauren’s neighborhood, she heads north with a group of survivors—and she brings her belief system, which reshapes not just the post-apocalyptic world she lives in but also the idea of God and faith. The blend of formal philosophy and personal writing connects us intimately to Lauren while expanding our view of what survival really means. Parable of the Sower shows how hope begins with words, and how one can transform words into change.
Red Pill by Hari Kunzru
The narrator of Red Pill leaves his family in New York for a three-month residency at the Deuter Center in Germany, ostensibly to work on a project called “The Lyric I”—but he realizes soon that he has no interest in working on this project; in his words, he just “wanted a break.” So, instead of writing, he binges a cop show called Blue Lives alone in his room—which is antithetical to the Deuter Center’s philosophy of communal work spaces. As he binges, he comes to feel his writing is meaningless, and he grows increasingly paranoid that someone is watching him. When by chance he meets the creator of Blue Lives, Anton, he’s certain that Anton is “red-pilling” his viewers. The narrator also feels he’s meant to expose Anton and save the world from Anton’s alt-right worldview. Is the narrator insane, or is what he fears true? Is it possible to know the difference in a world driven by madness? (Adding to the nightmare is the fact the Deuter Center is located across a lake from the villa where the Final Solution was planned.) But threading through Red Pill’s grim, triumphless plot is an autofictional layer: It’s not just the story of a writer; it’s a story the narrator is writing down for us, the readers. Though relentless in its study of our political danger, Red Pill still holds on to the idea that through writing we can try to tell our stories, even if the madness of the world feels both like it’s been with us forever and like it’s just getting started.
Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell
Fangirl starts on Cath’s first day of college at the University of Nebraska, but we learn that for years she’s been writing fanfiction online for a wizard series under the name Magicath. Many readers are likely drawn to this YA book for the romance between Cath and her roommate’s ex-boyfriend, Levi, but what I loved was the way storytelling, for Cath, plays crucially into her formation of self as she takes her first steps into adulthood. Cath clings to the idea she can keep writing her fanfiction, even as her college fiction class—and, more and more, her own identity as a writer—encourage her to expand into her own imagination. Fangirl is by no means a perfect novel—fears (and jokes about) sexual assault by random strangers on a dark sidewalk are so exaggerated they end up making the real everyday threats faced by women and girls, and perpetrated most often by the men they know, seem unserious. But in its approach to the development of a young writer, Fangirl is a touching journey. We see writing as a means of coming of age, and by the end we glimpse the beginning of one writer’s quest to find her own voice.
Atonement by Ian McEwan
One night in 1935, when Briony is an imaginative 13-year-old, she accuses the son of her family’s servant, Robbie, of committing a crime he’s innocent of. In general, Briony has a natural inclination toward storytelling; and in particular her mind on that night is influenced by a moment she witnessed between her sister, Cecilia, and Robbie earlier that day. In 1940, Cecilia is a nurse and estranged from her family. Robbie’s enlistment is a condition of his release from prison. And Briony, a nurse-in-training, is still a writer. (In a rejection letter from a periodical, with an appearance by Elizabeth Bowen, we read a critique of a scene recognizable as one we’ve read earlier in the book.) While writing is central to Briony throughout the novel, it’s Atonement’s extraordinary metafictional twist of an ending (which I dare not give away to readers out there who don’t know) that to me emphasizes the lengths we’ll go, the detours we’ll take, in life as in writing, to try to find the right ending. It’s a book whose metafictional elements make it so famous it feels almost unnecessary to include it on a reading list 25 years after its publication, but it was probably the first book I read, back in college, that made me realize just how important metafiction can be to a novel.
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
It’s made clear at several moments in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale that the first-person narrator known to us only as Offred is offering the reader a story. (“Because I’m telling you this story I will your existence. I tell, therefore you are.”) We know from Offred’s telling that before her capture and conscription as a handmaid to one of Gilead’s “commanders” she worked in a library. She loved books when she was still allowed to have them. While perhaps not professionally a “writer,” Offred is certainly a storyteller with a literary sensibility, one whose voice the architects of Gilead are trying their hardest to silence. In the book’s epilogue, set in 2195 at an academic conference, a Professor Pieixoto of Cambridge University delivers a keynote address on the subject of his discovery and transcription of a collection of thirty cassette tapes found in a footlocker in what used to be Maine, which his partner academic has coined “The Handmaid’s Tale,” which is an intentionally vulgar pun on tail: “That being, to some extent, the bone, as it were, of contention, in that phase of Gileadean society of which our saga treats.”
Near the end of his keynote, Professor Pieixoto scolds Offred for not describing more of the “workings” of the Gileadean empire, or better yet, printing off pages from Commander Waterford’s computer. From this epilogue we learn, for certain, that Gilead has fallen; that Offred was able to record her story, and possibly make it as far as Maine in her escape; and that the world after the fall of Gilead is just as misogynistic, that the academics have little regard for their “anonymous author,” and that Gilead’s worldview was not eradicated, just made, once again, latent.
This postscript changes one’s reading of the pages before it, but to me Pieixoto’s callous critiques enhance the feeling that Offred’s voice is her own. She tells her story as she wishes, and as she is able in her circumstances to tell it. And in Offred’s time, as in our own, telling one’s story is an act of resistance.