The best books of coming of age stories with intrepid heroines who want to be writers

I found I Capture the Castle when I was sixteen, and fell deeply in love with the heroine, Cassandra Mortmain, on the first page.

Here was a girl who wrote in her journal about her weird family, while sitting with her feet in the kitchen sink in a crumbling castle. I was hooked.

It didn’t matter that she lived in rural England in the 1930s, she was Me! Quirky, funny, insecure, wondering, thoughtful, and a great observer. She helped me grow up. 

I’ve returned to the book over the decades, to re-read or listen to, and the familiarity of Cassandra’s life, and her wise young woman’s voice are both comforting when I’m recovering from a cold, or want an old friend of a book to listen to on a road trip.

I imagine she’ll still be a great comfort to me when I’m an old woman! This was one of my grandmother’s favorite books too.

In writing classes, they chastised us!

You aren’t supposed to write about wanting to grow up to be a writer! They told us, That’s not interesting to your readers. You have to write about something else, write about something that actually happens.

But for those of us who’ve wanted to write since we were young, that is our idea of an exciting story. 

And in Writers & Lovers, the heroine Casey at age 30, is still working so hard to grow up, and anguishing over if she can really become a writer, and find her place in the world. I bonded to this heroine in the first page, she was my 30-year-old self just living a different life.

I didn’t want to put down the book, I loved being in her brain, all the things she thought and talked about, I wanted to know how she figured everything out in her life, because even decades older I still sometimes feel like Casey at 30!  

I’ve read the book and listened to it, multiple times, and loved the narrator’s voice so much, I asked her to read the audiobook version of my memoir because she sounded so much like my younger self.

When I set out to write a memoir about a complex family story, Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir was my inspiration.

She investigated the mysteries of her father-daughter story in the midst of a family and a community, a relationship that shared an intense love and identification with literature despite their battles. Her story tells how she came out in the 1970s as she came to understand her father’s living in the closet in the 1950s.

She was witty and honest and deeply insightful, as she wrote and drew her way through the story of her life. I was so moved.  

Perhaps Jo March was the first girl many of us encountered in literature who grew up intent on the work of becoming a writer.

I loved her sisters, her mother, and their adventures in New England during their father’s absence in the Civil War, but my eyes were mostly on Jo. Not only was she smart, lively, bold, and adventurous, she just didn’t stop writing.

She wrote her way through loneliness and rejection. She persevered, and showed me what it would take.

Atonement is a heartbreaking portrait of the dark side of an impassioned girl determined to be a writer, who is certain she understands what is going on in the lives of the adults around her, but who makes a terrible mistake.

This novel is constructed for her to tell her story as a way to atone for her naivete and her brutal lie. Devastating and a masterpiece.