In 2013, the phrase “Black girls are magic” was introduced to subvert the dehumanizing narrative attached to Black girls and women. The phrase, originally credited to feminist writer Cashawn Thompson, became the viral hashtag #BlackGirlMagic. Embraced by celebrities and public figures, such as Hunger Games actress Amandla Stenberg, singer-songwriter Solange Knowles and singer-songwriter and actress Janelle Monáe, the mantra is intended to uplift Black femmes in a society that maintains systemic racism and violence to oppress marginalized people.

Yet Shayla Lawson, the director of creative writing at Amherst College and author of three poetry collections, seeks to look beyond the notion that Black girls are magic. This Is Major: Notes on Diana Ross, Dark Girls, and Being Dope not only spotlights the nuances of Black womanhood but also rejects the claim that their power is rooted in an inherently superhuman or supernatural disposition.

Navigating the world as a Black girl means being simultaneously seen and not seen. Lawson examines how the private inner lives of Black girls are routinely misconstrued, misunderstood and vilified by the institution of whiteness. The work’s dedication page shares this Toni Morrison quote: “Racists always try to make you think they are the majority, but they never are.” Morrison was not afraid of speaking her truth, even if it meant losing the favor of white literary critics and readers. As witnessed in her famous interview with Charlie Rose, Morrison had no interest in writing for a white audience. Lawson, like Morrison, is not attempting to explain Blackness or Black girlhood to white people. Consequently, her self-reflection is not a means to make Blackness more palpable for the white gaze.

In the collection’s opening essay, “You Are Here,” Lawson invokes a wide range of creative ingenuity: Grace Jones, Diana Ross, Josephine Baker, SZA, Simone Biles, Janet Jackson and more. Lawson calls upon these influential women to highlight their brilliance, resilience and ability to thrive in a world determined to cut them down. These women are very different, but they all prove one monumental truth: There is no one “right” way to be a Black girl. We are able to take on many forms; we can resurrect ourselves.

Yet, despite a Black girl’s ability to transform, this does not mean we are otherworldly. In “Black Girl Magic,” Lawson notes, “Black Girl Magic relies upon a white conception of supernatural blackness in order to make girls special.” Thompson’s movement “focused on Black Girl Magic as a state of being” and is significant, but its social media-friendly version “makes black girlhood a commodiity, a list of attributes you don’t have to be us to reproduce.” Black girls are magic, but Black Girl Magic “doesn’t set us free.”

Notably, freedom is a topic that is explored repeatedly throughout Lawson’s essays: What does it mean to be free? What does freedom cost? How do Black girls get free? And once you get free, how do you stay free? Whether she’s discussing the politics of Twitter popularity, the pitfalls of interracial dating, the ever-shifting cultural definition of “black” or the reality of gentrification, Lawson is a master of her craft. Her keen poetic sensibilities sharpen topics that may seem amorphous or expansive. She doesn’t present herself as the representative of all Black girls, but she seamlessly blends deeply personal memories with overarching moments in history and pop culture. The result is a sense of familiarity between the writer and the Black women who pick up this book.

Near the end of the book, the essay “Diana Ross Is Major” dissects the musical and cultural legacy of the Supremes frontwoman. Lawson uses the black-and-white image of Diana Ross enjoying a rib in her hometown of Bessemer, Alabama, as a structural bookend. The photo, taken in 1997 by Ruven Afanador, captures the singer in a silky slip dress and fur-accented shawl, hair done in a voluminous Afro, the rib stripped to the bone. Lawson contemplates how Ross not only broke barriers but also offered an unprecedented and radical vision of Black femininity. Racial caricatures of Black women have always relied on the assumption that Black women cannot be soft. These tropes portray a Black woman’s strength as brute aggression: the Angry Black Woman, the Strong Black Woman, the Sapphire. Additionally, a Black woman’s sexuality is seen as deviant or immoral, as evidenced by the hypersexuality of the Jezebel stereotype. The Mammy, another trope that can be traced back to Hattie McDaniel’s character in Gone With the Wind, is subservient, a devalued matriarch whose selflessness is born out of fierce loyalty to everyone but herself. None of these roles cast Black girls as worthy of protection or tenderness. Lawson argues, “Ross made black women visible in a time when we weren’t seen at all, and definitely not in our entirety.” When we think of “major” Black women changemakers, you can’t include someone like Nina Simone without someone like Diana Ross.

In This Is Major, Lawson doesn’t aim to provide all the answers, but the journey is certainly commendable, real and undeniably striking. Lawson’s voice can be smooth like honey or cut to the quick. This essay collection is a necessary study of self-enlightenment and the unique power of Black girls: We contain multitudes. And while it’s forever imitated but never duplicated, our influence reaches beyond expectations, moving like water.

Travel. Sex. Work. Living alone. They’re universal topics, but for women, they’re often accompanied by societal expectations and restrictions. And for Molly McCully Brown, these realities are even further restrained.

From birth, Brown has been without complete control of her physical self. She and her twin were born early—too early. Her twin, Frances, died. Brown went too long without oxygen in the birth canal and was born with cerebral palsy.

In the essay collection Places I’ve Taken My Body, Brown reflects frequently on her connection to Frances and the ways her own body influences her movement through the world. While visiting Europe for a writing fellowship, for example, Brown writes, “A few weeks in, I’m discovering that being abroad in a wheelchair requires an intense kind of myopia that feels both necessary and dangerous. . . . I worry that, because my body goes with me everywhere, it won’t matter how far I travel, that I’ll still just be telling its same small story over and over again. That this is all wasted on me.”

But it isn’t. Whether she’s writing about traveling Italy in a wheelchair or managing a classroom of adolescents in Texas, Brown offers poetic, contemplative insight about her experiences. Yes, these moments are all, necessarily, observed from the vantage point of her particular body. But even when she revisits an idea or a location, the ideas are always fresh.

Brown has won awards and acclaim for her poetry collection The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, and her prose is equally lyrical. This affinity for poetry comes naturally for Brown because of the way poetry complements her corporeal experience. She writes, “In my daily life, I was desperate to wrench away from my body and I hated how stumblingly and ploddingly it moved, but in poetry, I found a form that not only mirrored my own slowness, but rewarded the careful attention with which I had to move through the world.” That careful attention shines in this essay collection, which opens a window into Brown’s graceful interior life. 

The best personal essays allow a momentary glimpse of the writer’s vulnerability and reveal facets of the writer’s personality that they otherwise shroud in secrecy. Yet, for these essays to work, their words and phrases must dance with a lithesome rhythm that carries readers along to a climactic revelatory moment. The essays collected in Evan James’ I’ve Been Wrong Before dazzle with such moments and language.

The ragged ways we fall in and out of relationships are at the center of these mostly already published essays, as James ponders the complexities of love, lust, sexuality and the permanence of longing against the backdrop of his world travels. Along the way, he often acts indecisively as he moves into a one-night stand or tentatively as he enters relationships that might last a little longer. Standing outside a bar in Chicago and looking for the Texan he has just met but who seems to have vanished into the night, James declares, “My mind was a church window through which someone had thrown a jagged rock, a broken scene of worship,” after being shattered by the possibility of love. In Barcelona, James meets Sergio, falling into a passionate relationship with him. Entranced by the possibilities of a future with Sergio and a life in Spain, he decides to drop out of college and remain; his resolve wavers, however, and on the flight home he “calls himself names all the way back.”

As he’s raking the soil in the family garden, he thinks about everything he’s missing out on while making a life for himself mopping up tiles in a bathhouse. James describes his coming out to his mother in a reflection on the movie Class Act in the essay “One Hell of a Homie” and realizes gleefully, “I felt giddy and villainous; now that I knew I could make people cry by coming out, I couldn’t wait to do it again.”

With spellbinding radiance, I’ve Been Wrong Before illumines the corners of James’ life and loves and captures a man in search of, and discovering, words that describe the jagged, sometimes ineffable paths he’s traversed in his life.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Evan James and seven other new and emerging memoirists.

“My parents taught me that the universe is enormous and we humans are tiny beings who get to live on an out-of-the-way planet for the blink of an eye,” writes author Sasha Sagan in the introduction of For Small Creatures Such as We, a gorgeous collection of essays that reads like a memoir. 

The daughter of two of the 20th century’s most important contributors—astronomer Carl Sagan and producer Ann Druyan—Sagan began thinking deeply about the traditions and passages that shape life on earth after becoming a mother herself. Birth, anniversaries, fasting, atonement: She approaches these subjects with wonderment and a generous window into her extraordinary family history. A secular Jew who was raised by her famous parents to be an independent and deep thinker, Sagan demonstrates that rituals aren’t reserved purely for the religious.

“There is so much change in this world,” she writes. “So many entrances and exits and ways to mark them, each one astonishing in its own way. Even if we don’t see birth or life as a miracle in the theological sense, it’s still breathtakingly worthy of celebration.”

Sagan writes with stunning clarity and absolute joy. In the chapter on coming of age, Sagan connects puberty with the myth of the werewolf, before galloping through the rites of passage observed by the Amish, Mormons, Apaches, Japanese and her own family. When Sagan got her first period at age 13, her mother “took me in her arms and made me feel this was cause for celebration.” Contrast this with her mother’s experience as a Jew: Druyan’s mother slapped her across the face, as was the inexplicable custom in that time. 

For Small Creatures Such as We is a marvel. It dazzles and comforts while making us consider our own place in the vast universe. As Sagan writes, “We are, after all, someone’s distant future and someone else’s ancient past.”

Women’s anger is having a moment in publishing. Make room on your shelf next to Eloquent Rage, Good and Mad and Rage Becomes Her for another book on the subject: Burn It Down: Women Writing About Anger, an anthology edited by Lilly Dancyger.

Twenty-two women writers contributed essays about their anger. That number seemed excessive at first; how original could each piece really be? But there is so much to be angry about. Burn It Down features essays about sexual abuse, chronic pain, transphobia, disability, religious persecution, gun violence, racism, sizeism, rape. The list goes on.

Leslie Jamison’s standout essay, “Lungs Full of Burning,” addresses her inclination toward sadness in a society that’s inhospitable to women’s anger. “In what I had always understood as self-awareness—I don’t get angry. I get sad—I came to see my own complicity in the same logic that has trained women to bury their anger or perform its absence,” she writes.

Another memorable piece is “Homegrown Anger” by Lisa Factora-Borchers. Being a woman of color in a Trump-voting area of Ohio led her to “befriend” anger, she writes, and to rely on it as a source of strength.

Like Jamison, I am a woman inclined toward sadness over anger—or perhaps I should say, was inclined. The essays in Burn It Down illustrate how patriarchal society benefits from women stifling their anger, even if suppression feels like our best chance at survival. To that end, the angry authors in this anthology are inspirational. In fact, why are all of us women not furious all the time? Burn It Down asserts that there is no panacea for women’s anger, save for widespread political and social change.

Whether you are coming into your own anger, or anger is your daily fuel, there is something for everyone to draw from in this anthology. It is time to light a match.

A tattoo that runs up the arm of acclaimed essayist Leslie Jamison reads Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto, or “I am human. Nothing human is alien to me.” Her new collection, Make It Scream, Make It Burn, puts her tattoo to the test. Jamison investigates outsiders: people who obsessively identify with a whale known as 52 Blue, people who believe their children have been reincarnated, people who linger in the online world of Second Life. She takes her subjects seriously, but she also finds herself at a loss to relate. Sometimes connection is impossible. Of her interaction with someone who doesn’t speak English, she writes, “Nothing that is human is alien to me, I would have told him, except I couldn’t, because some things are alien to me, like the Sinhalese language.”

Beyond the limits of relatability, she also explores the weightiness of one person trying to document the life of another. In my favorite essay, she traces the unraveling of Walker Evans and James Agee’s trip to the South, which they completed on Fortune magazine’s dime in 1936 and which resulted in the widely acclaimed Let Us Now Praise Famous Men in 1941. Her astute analysis of the differences between the draft of the magazine article and the published book blew me away.

She deepens her exploration of this theme in subsequent essays, detailing her own journalistic romp to a foreign land and the difficulties of trying to write about what she saw there, and also the way that feminists such as photographer Annie Appel have obsessively returned to their subjects to try and resist the limits of witnessing. Appel has documented herself alongside her Mexican subjects and has, over time, allowed her story to become intertwined with theirs. 

The perils of representation weigh on many people, certainly, but perhaps especially on artists. Jamison’s title Make It Scream comes from a review of Agee’s famous book by poet William Carlos Williams. For Williams, it is the duty of the artist to make life scream and smolder—to show the urgency that underlies and interconnects our lives. Nothing human is alien to me. For her readers’ sakes, I hope Jamison will keep pursuing this ideal.

As Jennine Capó Crucet makes clear in her thought-provoking collection of essays, My Time Among the Whites, whether you are or are not white isn’t just the point—it’s everything. If you are white, the culture that absorbs you so easily may well be taken for granted. In this country, you’ve known little else. If you are not white, it’s the depth and breadth of that white culture that either pushes you to the side or inspires you to push back. For Crucet, there’s no question about which way to go, and in her exquisitely fierce way, she does. 

Born to Cuban American parents who were little help when it came to navigating the whiter world outside Miami, Crucet became her family’s cautious, always mindful pioneer. She learned fast—first at Cornell as an undergrad, later when she married (and then divorced) a middle-class white “dude” and finally as a tenured professor at the University of Nebraska. 

Like Crucet’s debut novel, Make Your Home Among Strangers, the first essay in this book could serve as a primer for first-generation college freshmen. Crucet and her family drove from Florida to Ithaca, New York, to begin her first year at Cornell, a school she chose because she liked the fall foliage pictured on a brochure her high school guidance counselor was about to throw away. After orientation, her parents and grandmother didn’t know it was time for them to leave. There was only one Latinx professor (who became her mentor) in her time there. Her classmates struggled to comprehend the culture she wrote about in class. She became “the official Latinx ambassador . . . an unintentional act of bigotry [that] has a name: it’s called spotlighting.”

In the hilarious “Say I Do,” Crucet battles with Freddy, her mother’s choice for wedding DJ. His playlist catered only to her Cuban family, because “all those Americans . . . don’t dance. They don’t nothing.” In “Imagine Me Here,” as a guest speaker at a predominantly white Southern college, Crucet compelled the students to address the lack of color in their faculty. It did not go well.

“Is it uncomfortable reading all this?” Crucet asks in this timely, vital collection. “Does your answer depend on your race, on whether or not you consider yourself white?” Or “are you not yet uncomfortable . . . because, as a white person, you’ve gotten to be just you your whole life?”

The past decade witnessed a publishing boom of essay collections by a certain type of woman: a coastal 20- or 30-something, witty and “famous”—on Twitter as well as for her actual career as an actress, comedian or writer.

Jia Tolentino, a New Yorker staff writer with more than 100K Twitter followers, fits this profile exactly. She is likely the most popular millennial writer working today—so one could be forgiven for anticipating that, like other books in this genre, her debut essay collection would contain mainly forgettable buffers to one or two standouts.

Instead, every single essay in Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion is a standout; in fact, “The I in the Internet” and “We Come From Old Virginia” should be taught in journalism schools. Tolentino’s overarching project is to cast aside comforting illusions and gain the necessary clarity to construct a moral life. And as each essay finds Tolentino interrogating her beliefs about society, American womanhood and online feminism, it’s refreshing to see subjects so often reduced to 280-character sloganeering receive 30 pages of thoughtful analysis in her hands.

The subjects are wide-ranging, and nothing is too frivolous to unpack and examine. She writes about her stint as an evangelical Christian 16-year-old on a hormonally charged reality show (“Girls v. Boys: Puerto Rico”) with the same seriousness she brings to rape culture, pop-feminist celebrity and virtue signaling on social media.

Tolentino sets the bar higher for every other essay writer. Social media may be part of the reason she is so well-known, but Trick Mirror is a strong case for less tweeting and more long-form writing—for everyone.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our interview with Jia Tolentino, author of Trick Mirror.