Essential Books In Which Women Lose Their Minds

These are the books I want on a desert island (where I actually think women with mental health issues would thrive and, if rescue didn’t come, build a new society- but that’s another convo) and it’s clear I’m not alone. These are books for readers who don’t see “insanity” (or whatever we want to call the act of temporarily misplacing the rational mind, an event that doesn’t always look how we imagine it might) as a sort of manic merry-making, a play date activity. These are books are for those of us who are interested in the mind as an endless rabbit hole, one it is possible to fall down, seemingly, quite by accident, forcing us to ask- as Alice famously did- “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”