Eight titles about young women searching for identity & purpose through work

Vanessa Lawrence is a writer, editor and native New Yorker. For almost two decades, she covered fashion, society, culture, design, art, and beauty on staff at publications including WWD and W Magazine. She has interviewed a wide range of creative personalities, such as Anna Sui, Kristen Stewart, Norma Kamali, Janelle Monae, Sandra Oh, Emma Watson, Kyle Abraham, Laura Kim, Judith Light, Sarah Sze, Timothée Chalamet, Jennifer Hudson, and Riley Keough, among many others. She graduated from Yale University with a B.A. in history and she has an MFA in Writing from Sarah Lawrence College.

Lawrence debut novel is Ellipses.

At Electric Lit she tagged "eight books ... featur[ing] women protagonists coming-of-age through and against the backdrop of their work." One title on the list:

Big Swiss by Jen Beagin

Set in Hudson, New York, Big Swiss follows Greta, a 45-year-old who works as a transcriptionist for a local sex therapist, a job that gives her access to the most intimate secrets of her town’s residents. Through her transcribing, she falls for Flavia, a younger, married gynecologist who has never had an orgasm and who was also the victim of a violent crime years ago. When Greta recognizes Flavia’s voice IRL one day in town, she introduces herself with a false identity. She and Flavia begin a torrid affair. The vulnerability and candor of the patients in Greta’s transcripts contrasts with the fraught deception in her relationship with Flavia—and with Greta’s reluctance to confront the effects of her mother’s death by suicide on her adult mindset.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue