When you’re looking to get lost in a book, sometimes you need your reading material to match your mood. With Marie Claire‘s series “Buy the Book,” we do the heavy lifting for you. We’re offering curated, highly specific recommendations for whatever you’re looking for—whether you’re in your feels or hooked on a subgenre trending on #BookTok.
In this author-curated rendition, Rosebud Baker—comedian, former Saturday Night Live writer, and Fully Baked author—shares her favorite books about women behaving badly.
No topic is ever off the table for comedian Rosebud Baker—she’s been known for telling jokes about everything from her sister’s death to her own struggle with alcoholism. So when the stand-up decided to unpack her trauma by writing a memoir, she embraced the mess even more so.
In June, the former Saturday Night Live writer published her debut book, Fully Baked, which delves into subjects like her dysfunctional childhood and journey with IVF. But it goes beyond the constraints of a tight 10 by examining transformations and how she found career success and became the mother she is because of the hardships she’s lived through.
Baker tells Marie Claire that while she was writing, stories about women wrestling with “obsession, desire, rage, and making spectacularly bad decisions” were both a source of solace and inspiration. “I found myself returning to stories about women who blow up their lives, survive their mistakes, and sometimes learn absolutely nothing,” she says.
Gallery Books
‘Fully Baked’ by Rosebud Baker
“I’ve always been drawn to female characters who refuse to be likable,” the author says, adding that they informed her own ability to be vulnerable. Here, Baker shares her favorite books about women behaving badly, from recent bestsellers to feminist favorites and literary classics. “The women in these books are obsessive, selfish, reckless, grieving, horny, destructive, and completely unreasonable. They’re also some of the most honest characters I’ve ever encountered.”
Fully Baked is available now, and catch Baker on tour this summer.
Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster
‘Animal’ by Lisa Taddeo
“The narrator is furious, reckless, sexually impulsive, and often impossible to defend. I love that Taddeo never tries to soften her. The book embraces female anger in all its ugliness and power, refusing to make its heroine palatable for anyone else’s comfort.”
Harper Perennial Modern Classics
‘The Bell Jar’ by Sylvia Plath
“Esther Greenwood’s rebellion is quieter than some of the women on this list, but no less radical. I love the book’s dark humor: ‘Do you know what a poem is, Esther?’ ‘No, what?’ I would say. ‘A piece of dust.’ Then… I would say, ‘So are the cadavers you cut up… I reckon a good poem lasts a whole lot longer than a hundred of those people put together.’ I also appreciate the refusal to sentimentalize female suffering, since so much literature has such a hard-on for that. It captures the terror of realizing that the life everyone wants for you may not be one you want.”
Vintage
‘The Year of Magical Thinking’ by Joan Didion
“While grieving the loss of her husband hardly qualifies as bad behavior, I love this book because it doesn’t try to make grief noble or inspirational. Didion documents irrational bargains, obsessive thinking, and magical beliefs that followed her husband’s death with extraordinary precision. I like that she describes grief as a form of temporary insanity and allows herself to be unreasonable, repetitive, and consumed by loss. It’s a portrait of a woman behaving the way her grief demands instead of how she’s expected to. It’s one of the most honest books I’ve ever read about what happens when loss is impossible to accept.”
Ballantine Books
‘Gone Girl’ by Gillian Flynn
“Amy Dunne is one of my favorite villains because she’s smarter than everyone in the room and she uses that intelligence for pure chaos. In the book, however, she is far more deeply disturbed than (I believe) the movie reveals her to be. She’s obsessed with perfection and control and applies this obsession to enact incredible revenge. I love how Flynn weaponizes the expectations people have about wives, victims, and women. It’s dark, vicious, funny, and completely committed to bad behavior.”
Canterbury Classics
‘Wuthering Heights’ by Emily Brontë
“I saved the best for last. I am obsessed with Catherine Earnshaw and believe she is one of literature’s greatest monsters. She’s selfish, cruel, romantic, vain, unreasonably horny, and devastatingly human. Her refusal to choose between desire and security is deluded at times, believing she can use her husband’s money to raise the status of her true soulmate, and she destroys herself in the process. It’s often described as a book that understands real love not as salvation but as a force capable of ruining lives, but I think that puts the onus on the wrong thing. I think it’s a woman conforming to societal expectations over her own desire that ruins her life and the lives of everyone around her.”
