Welcome to Reading Group

Plus a big economic anxiety sale

Hi, friends. I’ve been working on something, and I’m excited to share it with you.

Since the new year, I’ve been feeling particularly mixed up, as anyone with a heart and a moral compass has been. If you’ve been here for some time, you know that each year I get a little restless with the containers into which I am shoving my writing and work. I like to change things up. And not only because, as much as I love routine, I hate sameness, but because I think that’s what a publication like this requires. The world is changing so fast, and I think we must, too.

I have also been thinking a lot about how to manage my time in the coming years. Each week, for me, is spread across teaching, writing, and working with writers who I believe have very important things to say— but also across activism, being in local community, mothering, and literally running circles around my California town trying to figure out what it all means. I know you are also feeling spread thin.

It would be dishonest to say that I have figured out how to manage doing so many things while going through a divorce and emancipating myself financially from a man while maintaining a family and a friendship with said man, in a time when, frankly, I have very little tolerance for most men. It would be even more dishonest to say that I have learned to manage the pain of witnessing such a frank and blatant political backlash unfold on a national scale.

But I have found it hopeful and deeply clarifying in recent weeks to spend less time online and more time reading. And I have found even more solace and grounding in community and in conversation.

I’m hungry especially for classic feminist texts that seem to have already reckoned with many of the issues we face today. Texts that answer (imperfectly and incompletely, but also sometimes, much more wisely!) questions about sex, politics, misogyny, racism, gender, motherhood, marriage, work, women’s ambition, domestic life, political life, a fractured feminist movement, conservative and right-leaning women, male power, transphobia, erotics, real and mythological love, and the ongoing project of creating a world that is more just and equal than this mess in which we’re living.

We are not the first to wrestle with these questions— and we will not be the last. These are simply the questions that come with living a feminist life in a profoundly unfeminist time. We have to keep asking and answering them.

I value all the little roundups that come through my inbox from my favorite writers, especially those that help me find my way through the rushing river of news. But creating them myself lately has felt like a forced practice that is done too frequently, and in a fog. The roundup is a funny little digital genre that I have never felt was particularity well suited to me, someone who likes to think low and slow.

Many of us, too, feel overwhelmed by the current news cycle and with Discourse™ right now. I need more than a week these days to sort through everything that has come across my desk in as much time. It feels somewhat irresponsible to simply forward along a smattering of half-baked takes on half-baked takes, especially as this platform becomes not just more noisy and overcrowded, but more manic. And there is something a little too unidirectional about the weekly gathering of links and resources that have become so common on this platform. It’s not always a conversation, and I want to have more conversations with you.

So, as we all try desperately to moderate our consumption of terrible no good very bad news so we can get out of bed every morning to tend to our lives and not succumb to the intentional distractions of the moment, I want to try something different.

Enter Mad Woman’s new feminist Reading Group

Each month, we’ll read one classic feminist essay, starting on April 1st. For each essay, we’ll have two discussion threads spread across two weeks, which I’ll share on Mondays, in lieu of a weekly assortment of links and recs.

In those threads, we’ll explore some of the concepts in the essay and apply them to both the current moment and our everyday lives. Throughout each month, in the Mad Woman chat, we’ll also have more informal sharing and discussion related to the essay and/or whatever is going on (god help us) in the world, in pop culture, and in our intimate, personal lives— always keeping in mind how the political is influencing the personal.

On the third Monday of each month, we’ll have a live Zoom to further discuss the month’s essay, and we’ll unpack together whatever the reading and our virtual discussions have brought up for us.

The goal of the Reading Group will be to revisit feminisms past and present to discuss both their limits and forgotten insights. There will be no tests or masculine intellectual competitions. Instead, we will use the readings as a tool to deconstruct our own relationships with capitalism, misogyny, racism, and power— while sharing and talking out practical and sustainable strategies for everyday survival and noncompliance.

If you’re unfamiliar with my work or my long history of facilitating classes like these, you can read more here. I know from past experiences how enriching these conversations and groups can be. We will look outward, inward, there will be rage and probably tears, moments of feeling like everything is futile, and moments when we break through to find that just being together, in conversation, we are already changing the world. I mean it.

Above all, our goal will be to refuse to be immobilized by these very hard times—and to support each other in this work of everyday feminism, which is hard, imperfect, malleable, and really will look different for everyone, depending on the circumstances of our lives.

How to Join Us

This new Reading Group will be available only to paid subscribers of Mad Woman, who make it possible for me to write everything you read here, but also to support my children and pay my bills, and to set aside the time to facilitate this work for readers of this newsletter, rather than to do this as a series of paid classes at a much higher cost.

For those who want to get in on the ground floor of the Reading Group—who are also feeling the intense economic anxiety that I’m currently feeling—annual subscriptions are 30% off through the end of March.

That means you can join the Reading Group right now for a full year for just $49 instead of $70.

As a paid subscriber, you can join us for any (or every!) Reading Group thread and live discussion for a whole year.

Instead of weekly recommendations and links, paid subscribers will also get a bigger and better monthly roundup of books and culture, plus reminders about essays from the newsletter you may have missed. To help lighten up your inboxes, you can choose to only receive this monthly digest by navigating to your Mad Woman newsletter settings. To do this, go to Mad Woman’s landing page, click on your profile (the little picture of you), then click “Manage Subscription.” Make sure to toggle on “Monthly Digest” and toggle off whatever you don’t want to get in your inbox— just be sure to select “Reading Group” if you also want to get notified of those threads and events in real-time!

Paid subscribers also get access to writing prompts, paywalled essays, community features likes comments and chats, discounts on quarterly writing seminars and other classes, and access to all author salons— including past talks with

Glynnis MacNicol

,

Soraya Chemaly

, and

Priyanka Mattoo

, plus more to come, such as next week’s salon with

Amy Shearn

.

And of course, it’s because of paid subscribers that every midweek free essay and interview you read here exists.

Those who remain subscribed on a monthly basis will also be able to access all of the above, but those subscriptions are still $7/month. I understand that not everyone wants or can afford to commit to a full year of every column and community— but for writers, annual subscriptions help us plan and understand the scope of the work we can take on in the coming year.

If you are someone for whom $49 annually remains cost prohibitive, but you’d really like to join the Reading Group, you can subscribe monthly, or email me anytime for a comped subscription, no questions asked.

And if you have the means to sponsor a friend who may want to join you for the Reading Group, you can gift them a subscription this month for 30% off too.

After you join, please share in the comments any essays you hope we will cover as a group this year! I’ll also drop a few suggestions in the comments. Next week, we’ll vote on a few top choices, so that we’re ready to go with our first essay in April.

I can’t wait to read with each and every one of you.

**Oh! And if you want more still, as you may know, we already have a wonderful, vibrant Writing Group for founding subscribers, which includes weekly chats about what we’re working on and how we’re navigating the writing life, as well as two virtual retreats per year. I’m putting Writing Group subscriptions on sale through the end of the month, too. They’re now just $125 instead of $199.

Thanks as always for being here. Let’s do this (as in, survive this!) together.