Below, Christy shares the five books that have had the biggest impact on her life.
Virginia Woolf
Orlando
I read about This article, this is a huge milestone in my life. I’ve never read anything like it before. I love Virginia Woolf – she represents a woman exploring her sensuality, her liberal views on love, and ideas of love that transcend traditional forms. Of course, she dated Vita Sackville-West for many years and was married to and in love with Leonard Woolf at the same time. What really appealed to me was the idea of someone traveling through time and space, jumping from a male body to a female body, in and out of traditional and non-traditional male and female experiences. Traveling through time and space feels romantic, eternal, and infinite, challenging the traditional female form.
At ,then I’m six feet tall, and I’m thinking about how I fit into the world as a woman, and the conventions of femininity. The world has changed since then. I wholeheartedly celebrate this and we need more. But, at the time, it felt like an answer. It made me feel that anything is possible and that being yourself is a unique experience no matter what form it takes. It’s also a book that Kim Jones and I are obsessed with, and one we refer to each other a lot.
Venus Delta Author: Anna Ning
this is a book Short stories I read as a kid 15 As a teenager, it opened my eyes to the notion of eroticism and the female sexual experience, in a literary sense, as emotional, adventurous, and imaginative of. This inspired me to read many different things by Anaïs Nin: The Spy in the Love House and Nin’s Diary, which are sensational. Her thinking is very unique and there is an often overlooked philosophical element to her work. In this way, the idea of expressing female sexuality in these different forms was very enlightening to me. It made me think more about who I am as a woman and what I want out of life and sensual experiences.
My Year Ottessa Moshfegh
Rest and Relaxation 
My Year of Rest and Relaxation
Ottessa is one of our newest, brightest, bold, and outrageous voices in literature. My Leisurely Years is about a woman working in the New York art world, her sadomasochistic relationship with her best friend and the world. Worst psychiatrist ever. She struggles with life and its emptiness and shallowness, so she decides to escape reality by taking a year of drug-induced sleep. An incredibly engaging and hilarious read about isolation, the fear of intimacy, and the desire to disconnect. It’s about a transgressive female experience. I finished it in one go, and I finished OttessaEileen’s in one go. This put me in touch with her and we are friends now. We met before the pandemic and have stayed in touch ever since. She is one of my favorite people on earth. I love her.
9781580911863 Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches
I am reading this while attending Cymbeline world tour. I was with two of my best friends from drama school who introduced me to this book. Prior to this, I had read several feminist literature works that had a great influence on me – Germaine Greer’s The Eunuch and Simone Simone de Beauvoir’s
second sex , she came and stayed , and Mandarin . But outsider sister changed my mind about everything. This is a radical book that gave me a new way of thinking about patriarchal societies and their structures, and the intersectional nature of race, class, and gender. Audre Lorde gave me a sensual hope that poetry and emotion could give birth to new ways of being. It’s also incredibly insightful and explicit about the need for sexuality, friendship, women’s solidarity and community, as well as the nature of dehumanization in our society and how insidious it can be. This is a book I keep going back to. 9780525522133
This book was recommended to me by my friend’s mother, Janet, who is a huge read and said it was one of the best books she has ever read . It’s also one of the most surreal and bizarre books on power and power structures I’ve ever read. It’s about philosophy and the way we see good and evil. It begins with a visit from the Devil, who predicts another character’s death, which happens almost immediately when they’re run over by a tram. It also deals with midnight balls, black magic, and naked women flying around. A genuine attack on bourgeois culture and the superficiality of modern life, it is heavily inspired by Goethe Faust. I did a production of [Christopher Marlowe Doctor Faust] at the Royal Exchange in Manchester, where I played Lucifer, and now I’m lucky enough to be At
Sandman . The novel’s portrayal of demons is just insane.
