To make sense of and find a shape to one's life within the context of one's literary predecessors is the project of Biggs's brilliant book, which combines incisive biographies with a personal story of starting over. This book reframed my own life in the most startling and revealing ways, illuminating complicated desires and lifelong debates via the absorbing stories of nine women authors who I now consider sisters, teachers, kin. A deeply moving meditation on reading and writing, friendship, desire, the life of the mind, and the woman writer's perennial yearning to be free. -- Rachel Yoder, author of Nightbitch A meditation, by turns glorious and aching, on what it means to be a woman and to try to be free. -- Amia Srinivasan, author of The Right to Sex Joanna Biggs is an unmissable writer. She gives new scope and fresh meaning to the idea of literary empathy. -- Andrew O'Hagan, author of Mayflies Joanna Biggs is one of our sharpest critics and wisest interrogators of how to live. This is a deeply moving and invigorating book. -- Francesca Wade, author of Square Haunting