Books that Celebrate Complicated Women

Set in France and New York, this novel explores the lives of best friends Milly and Val, two young Black women whose bond is forged during their year abroad and stretches into their thirties. What they share is the pain of having lost their mothers and a shared history with a woman from their past. Now, young mothers themselves, both living in Brooklyn, Milly and Val soon discover that love for each other might not be enough to bridge the divide that’s growing between them. Differences in their economic and familial circumstances, marital tensions, plus divergent responses to the demands of raising a child soon breed resentment and jealousy, misunderstandings. Take What You Can is a meditation on motherhood, class, and the deep satisfaction that comes from being complicated women.

This trilogy of novels-in-stories is a masterclass in writing complicated women. Landis explores the lives of girls and young women in 1970’s lower west side, New York. This was the era before helicopter parents and mommy play groups, when adults checked out to pursue their own desires, leaving their girls to raise themselves. Landis’s characters are wild and defiant. They are lovers and thieves, artists and thrill seekers. But beneath their tough exteriors, each is desperate for love and connection and will do almost anything to get it. Their search often finds them along the razor’s edge—physically, sexually, emotionally. Over the course of three books, readers will find themselves holding their breath as they watch Landis’s characters grow from fragile, rebellious girls into clear-eyed, truth seeking women.

This historical novel, co-authored by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray, is based on the true story of Belle da Costa Green, a Black woman who, in 1905, passed for white and helped robber baron J. P. Morgan build his world-class Pierpont Morgan Library. Da Costa Green, whose real name was Belle Marion Greener, claimed to be of Portuguese descent. The truth was that she hailed from a prominent DC family. Her father was the first Black graduate in his class at Harvard in 1870. But in the wake of her parents separation, Green, her mother and siblings changed their last name to Greener and passed for white. The novel begins as da Costa Green first meets Morgan, and chronicles her quest to acquire some of the most treasured manuscripts and artifacts of the day. A brilliant negotiator and dazzling conversationalist, De Costa Green moved in rarified circles, but her true identity was always at risk of being exposed. Readers might not agree with De Costa Greene’s choice to hide her identity, but they have to admire her gumption.