10 best essay collections written by women to be inspired by

In this volume Korean-American writer and poet Park Hong presents Asian stereotypes as she sees them with a directness that lands like a sucker punch to the gut: “Asians lack presence. Asians take up apologetic space. We don’t even have enough presence to be considered real minorities.”

As a reader you feel totally panicked by the words – how can she write this? – but this is Park Hong’s shame as she sees herself as white America sees her.

Park Hong believes a sense of obedience is at the heart of white manipulation and oppression of Asians. But Park Hong is not obedient. She is candid, opinionated and emotional – all qualities she believes are not part of the Asian stereotype.

Park Hong manages to be very funny when talking about something so personally heart-breaking and systemically appalling. She describes her voice as “a kazoo” and speaks of audiences rushing for the door when her poetry reading is over. She recalls how she begged a Korean therapist to take her on as a patient (“‘Eunice!’ I shouted into the phone.”) because she felt she would be better understood – and doesn’t scrimp on the details of the pain of that rejection.

But although Park Hong’s experiences are naturally at the heart of the essays, she details the racism served up to Chinese workers in America the 1900s – including the example of a 15-year-old girl who was raped until her “body was hollowed out with syphilis” and she was “dumped out on the streets to die alone”. She also explains how Asians were essentially used as pawns by white supremacists during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.

Park Hong also discusses how often Asians are lumped into one stereotype when the differences, prejudices and conflicts between the nations are complex and very real: “Most Americans… think Chinese is synecdoche for Asians the way Kleenex is for tissues. They don’t understand that we’re this tenuous alliance of many nationalities.”

A standout moment is where Park Hong explains that racism towards Asians is different than racism towards black people, especially as she does so without making any value judgements or suggestions about which is worse.

We learned so much from Minor Things, not least what a dazzling writer Cathy Park Hong is.

The first of Cusk's essays in this collection, Driving As Metaphor, focuses on the road – its users and their vehicles. It covers speeding, morality, road rage and even death. Only Cusk could make a piece about driving – not competitive or even risky driving, just bog standard quotidian driving – remotely interesting.

Later, On Rudeness beautifully examines manners, society and language while Making Home discusses women and nesting – what makes a home and how we live. Towards the end of the collection Cusk concentrates on specific writers and books. Notable is the essay on Elizabeth Gilbert’s bestselling memoir Eat, Pray, Love which Cusk describes rather brilliantly as employing “best friend language”, where secrets, embarrassments and disappointments are relayed in a humourous, knowing tone.

Towards the end of the essay Cusk rejects the idea that this sort of self-discovery memoir is anything but “a competition, at whose heart is a need to win.” Cusk points out that Gilbert is a “relentless cataloguer” of personal successes and questions how that makes her audiences feel given that they are cast as the admirers and not the admired.

But it is in the essay from which the volume takes its name that is the standout. Coventry dissects what it means to be given the silent treatment – with Cusk revealing that her own parents have periodically subjected her to this wordless purgatory. The authour's interest in and visiting of Coventry Cathedral, once grand and proud, decimated to nothing but shattered ruins in 1940 before being rebuilt, serves as the perfect motif here – and is further proof of her cleverness.

We loved the introduction, which explains where the volume’s title comes from – Robert Silvers, former editor of The New York Review of Books used to write the phrase at the bottom of his commissions to Moore – but it also allows us to understand more about how Moore goes about her criticism. It is somehow comforting to know that she doesn’t have any training in it and that she subscribes to no formula. She does however have a few self-imposed rules – seemingly minor things – that are likely to make you nod along in recognition or think oops – that’s me, such as avoiding internetese (informal internet speak), or “any form of the word ‘enjoy’”.

And we also love how this doesn’t need to be read in linear fashion. Instead you can dip in and out depending on your wont. That said, the opening essay is a banger if you’re a fan of Nora Ephron’s novel Heartburn. Moore’s 1983 review sums up the enduringly popular novel perfectly by discussing it as both a piece of art and a symbol of revenge.

As well as critical pieces with TV, film and literature as the focal point, the authour tackles huge topics such as memoir and writing itself, giving insight into Moore herself and her trajectory as a writer – “I preferred hearing about parties to actually going to them. I liked to phone the next day and get the news from a friend. I wanted gossip, third-handedness, narrative.”

Moore’s writing is accessible, clever and soothingly unpretentious.

This collection of essays include long form reportage, as in the case of Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream where Didion lays bare the case of Lucille Miller – a woman jailed for the murder of her own husband against a backdrop of marital disappointment, intense religion and upward mobility in small town California.

These pieces are gripping stories of specific people in extraordinary circumstances, brilliantly told.

In other essays Didion is more introspective, using herself as subject matter and writing in the first person. In an essay on note taking, her sense of narrative is acute as she points out that “how it felt to me: that is getting closer to the truth about keeping a notebook”. Being able to see how this literary titan took notes is, without wishing to sound too hammy, a total privilege.

Although all of this writing is from before 1968, Didion’s prose feels relevant, sharp and timeless. There is little to nothing that feels dated about it. In fact, some of her sentences are nothing short of a joy – made to be read and reread repeatedly with an effortlessness that speaks to Didion’s talent.

Solnit’s essays have won plenty of praise in the past for their insight and relatability – and how cleverly she crystallises complex, messy or multifaceted ideas. This latest collection is no different.

It’s essentially a polemic on narrative control – and will likely have you performing the both-hands-raised-in-celebration emoji as finally someone says it, and says it well.

For example, Solnit is brilliant and incising on the difference between wokeness and goodness: “If you’re woke it’s because someone woke you up… It’s easy now to assume that one’s perspectives on race, gender, orientation and the rest are signs of inherent virtue but a lot of ideas currently in circulation are gifts that arrived recently through the labours of others.”

She takes no prisoners in her commentary on Weinstein and #MeToo, setting out a context in which “all the world is not a stage: backstage and beyond are important territories too”. It is horrifying when she describes male witnesses as somebodies, while women are nobodies – but it is horrifying because it is true. Women’s opinions don’t count. Their narratives are meaningless. Or were.

She gets right to the heart of who matters. She takes narrative and picks it up, examining it from all angles to decipher who gets to be heard, and who gets muted, erased.

The entire volume is relentlessly quotable – but it is harsh and brutal and sad too, like how she describes a hotel chain which has panic buttons for the female domestic staff who are assaulted by the rich male guests: “Supply and demand”.

Solnit is hopeful and addresses those who are afraid of a new world where white men won’t be the default controllers: “Some people are being left behind, not because the future is intolerant of them but because they are intolerant of this future”.