Books that Celebrate Complicated Women

Natalie Baszile is the author of Queen Sugar and Friends and Family, which is out this week from Pamela Dorman Books. Below, she recommends three books celebrating complicated women. When it comes to writing female characters, authors must often negotiate the tension between making them interesting and complicated and making them “relatable”—which to my mind is code for making them likable. Female characters can be angry, but not too angry; they can be imperfect and flawed, but they can’t offend. Back in 2013, Claire Messud spoke to this tension in her Publishers Weekly interview when asked about her character Nora in her novel The Woman Upstairs: “If you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble. We read to find life, in all its possibilities. The relevant question isn’t ‘is this a potential friend for me?’ but ‘is this character alive?'” Here are three books whose authors celebrate complicated women. Readers might not care for every choice they make, but they can’t deny that they’ll come away from these books with a deeper appreciation for life’s delicious messiness. Take What You Can by Naima CosterSet in France and New York, this novel explores the lives of best friend...