Hello and welcome to this week’s Lez Liberty Lit!

At the Millions, Lio Min writes about growing up as a writer in women’s media, and then not identifying as a woman any more:

“Here’s the catch: Over the course of the past few years, I have begun to feel like a stranger in my body. The femme styles I’d always claimed as my aesthetic began to look more and more wrong on me. I found myself experiencing the same numbness I used to get from panic attacks over exclamations as innocuous as, “Hey lady!” The more I wrote about girls and women, the more distanced I felt from the figure I saw in the mirror.”

Here’s what your favorite mainstream beach read says about you.

Identity is messy.

“Perhaps this is another reason why pet death hurts so much and so disproportionately—the fact that unlike other bereavements there’s societal pressure to keep it low-key,” writes Jacky Colliss Harvey at Lit Hub.

“The book is the story I was told not to tell,” author Tracy Strauss tells the Rumpus on her book I Just Haven’t Met You Yet and writing about her childhood sexual abuse.

“It is, I think, impossible for people raised in our food-obsessed culture to understand the contempt Americans had for food and cooking when I was growing up,” writes Ruth Reichl on M.F.K. Fisher and a lifetime of joyous eating. Fair warning: this piece made me want to run out and read everything Fisher ever wrote.

It’s time to pay far greater attention to Octavia Butler’s cultural influence.

As a Virgo, I felt uncomfortably seen by this listicle and hope you are too.

This is a lot.

Here are some one-star reviews of The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Read these books this summer and these books this July and these books in the second half of this year. Read these queer graphic novels. Read these Southeast Asian ghost stories. Read these 10 books about refugees. Read these books by women. Read these 11 one-sitting novels from around the world and these 50 short books in translation. Read these 7 books about magic coming back. Read these queer romance novellas. Read these 8 memoirs about mental illness by people of color. Read these books to celebrate Pride. Read these books when you want to be inspired by what language can do.

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