When I was in my ear­ly twen­ties, and not any kind of writer, I was try­ing to impress a guy who loved Saul Bellow’s nov­el Her­zog. He loved the epony­mous protagonist’s voice, his enraged mis­sives to the cul­ture, the way the book was ​“all about dis­course.” Well: I went out, and I bought Her­zog. And some­where in the mid­dle of Her­zog, I real­ized that it was not just ​“all about dis­course.” It was also ​“all about hat­ing women.” The ex-wife was vicious and cas­trat­ing, the girl­friend was sex­u­al­ly avail­able yet pathet­ic, even ran­dom women on the street had ​“bitch eyes.” It was around the point in the book when Her­zog reflects, ​“Will nev­er under­stand what women want. What do they want? They eat green sal­ad and drink human blood,” that I real­ized that I didn’t want to fin­ish it.

Dayna Tortorici says that she consciously read the 'boy canon' as a teenager in order to overcome her twin afflictions of being from Los Angeles and being a woman, and will 'never forget reading Bukowski’s Post Office and feeling so horrible, the way that the narrator describes the thickness of ugly women’s legs.'

Which put me in a tight spot. If the man I was inter­est­ed in asked me about the book, I would have to say that I quit read­ing it; if he asked me why I quit, I would have to give him a rea­son. So, the next time it rained, I opened a win­dow and put Her­zog out on my win­dowsill, and I left it there until it was ruined, so that I would have an excuse. I believed it was smarter and more appro­pri­ate to destroy a book and lie about it than to admit that the book’s sex­ism had turned me off.

There are a lot of Her­zog moments in No Regrets: Three Dis­cus­sions, the new ​“small book” pub­lished by the mag­a­zine n+1. The book is built around three con­ver­sa­tions among three dif­fer­ent groups of female writ­ers about read­ing: what they read when they were younger, what they didn’t read, why it mat­tered or didn’t. Sto­ries about read­ing sup­pos­ed­ly ​“great” dudelit only to feel hurt or repulsed come up repeat­ed­ly: No Regrets edi­tor Day­na Tor­tori­ci says that she con­scious­ly read the ​“boy canon” as a teenag­er in order to over­come her twin afflic­tions of being from Los Ange­les and being a woman, and will ​“nev­er for­get read­ing Bukowski’s Post Office and feel­ing so hor­ri­ble, the way that the nar­ra­tor describes the thick­ness of ugly women’s legs.” Else­where, the con­ver­sa­tion turns to Hen­ry Miller (Elif Batu­man: ​“he com­pared women to soup” ), Portnoy’s Com­plaint (Emi­ly Witt: ​“I can­not read anoth­er pas­sage about mas­tur­ba­tion. I can’t.”) and On the Road (Sara Mar­cus: ​“I remem­ber putting [it] down the first time a woman was mentioned”).

It’s intense­ly val­i­dat­ing to get out­side con­fir­ma­tion that seem­ing ​“intel­lec­tu­al” and demon­strat­ing basic self-respect can come into direct con­flict for female read­ers: If you admit to dis­lik­ing a ​“great” book sim­ply because it seems to active­ly hate your entire gen­der, you’re per­ceived as pet­ty, ​“per­son­al,” an iden­ti­ty-pol­i­tics philis­tine who val­ues gen­der-based axe-grind­ing above aes­thet­ic or intel­lec­tu­al con­cerns. If No Regrets makes it all right for even one young woman to admit that Ker­ouac gives her a headache, it’s doing the Lord’s work.

But what struck me most about No Regrets was the sense of each woman hav­ing cre­at­ed her own alter­na­tive frame­work, her own way of read­ing. Along­side the com­plaints about the boy canon, there are poten­tial sub­ver­sive read­ings of its writ­ers: prac­ti­cal lessons that can be drawn from their work with­out requir­ing uncrit­i­cal wor­ship. For exam­ple, Emi­ly Gould is able to appro­pri­ate some of the swag­ger of the ​“mid­cen­tu­ry misog­y­nists” (Roth etal.) — the sense that she, too, might be able to write ​“a nov­el that says … ​‘This is what a nov­el is, and you can like it or you can get off the bus.’ ” Witt is able to use the boy canon to pin­point the nar­ra­tives the men in her life are emu­lat­ing and her own place as a woman with­in those sto­ries. My favorite idea in No Regrets is Car­la Blu­menkranz’ con­cept of the ​“secret canon,” the unspo­ken agree­ment to val­orize a par­tic­u­lar set of books and authors in order to belong in a giv­en social group. Blu­menkranz sees the ​“secret canon” as exclu­sion­ary, and for the most part, I agree — woe betide you if you tell a cer­tain vari­ety of pseudoin­tel­lec­tu­al man-hip­pie that you didn’t like On the Road—but No Regrets also invites a more lib­er­at­ing pos­si­bil­i­ty: Maybe every woman writer has to cre­ate her own ​“secret canon,” her own list of essen­tial books, in order to sur­vive the male-dom­i­nat­ed cul­tur­al def­i­n­i­tion of ​“great literature.”

Else­where in the book, the par­tic­i­pants share their own read­ing lists: books by women that helped them to ori­ent them­selves with­in the male­dom­i­nat­ed canon or to form their own ideas of what ​“good writ­ing” looks like. Judith But­ler comes up in more than one con­ver­sa­tion, as does Chris Kraus’ I Love Dick—a book about ​“solv­ing het­ero­sex­u­al­i­ty” and the self-enforced oppres­sion there­in — and the work of Eileen Myles, of whom Mar­cus says: ​“I was dili­gent­ly try­ing to find some bril­liant­ly writ­ten prose that didn’t respect bound­aries between fic­tion and non­fic­tion and that dealt with young queer women hang­ing around in cities and fuck­ing up.” It’s a very spe­cif­ic require­ment, but might I also sug­gest some Michelle Tea?

Once one’s own canon is formed, it no longer needs to be a secret: I got No Regrets from Emi­ly Books, an ebook sub­scrip­tion ser­vice run by Ruth Cur­ry and Emi­ly Gould (for which, full dis­clo­sure, I’ve writ­ten reviews). Its appeal is much the same as the read­ing lists in No Regrets: the sense that every book that comes down the pike is a fur­ther elab­o­ra­tion on a very spe­cif­ic, very inter­est­ing idea of what good writ­ing looks like.

Which brings me back to the Her­zog inci­dent. The pow­er of a per­son­al canon, secret or not, lies in the author­i­ty one needs to cre­ate it. Women need to trust that they know what’s good, what’s bad, and what serves them intel­lec­tu­al­ly in order to reject or reclaim the books in their lives. This was exact­ly what I lacked when I destroyed Her­zog. I wasn’t stu­pid, and I wasn’t a bad read­er. But decades of social­iza­tion had taught me oth­er­wise. There were the dis­as­trous con­ver­sa­tions with men about Eminem, the Beats, Judd Apa­tow; there were the con­de­scend­ing male class­mates in col­lege, such as the guy who made a point of sit­ting behind me and pulling faces when­ev­er I talked because I’d once com­plained too force­ful­ly about ​“whiny white guys”; there was the lit pro­fes­sor who made me rewrite a paper three times because it focused too exclu­sive­ly on sex­ism and who told me that the pur­pose of his class was ​“appre­ci­a­tion” of the assigned read­ings, not cri­tique. All of this had giv­en me the implic­it belief that I was sim­ply not qual­i­fied to decide which books were good for me, that I would be seen as anti-intel­lec­tu­al if I decid­ed that a sex­ist book was not worth my time.

What No Regrets argues for most pow­er­ful­ly is the right of women to reject that line of think­ing and to believe that they are qual­i­fied to decide what lit­er­a­ture should be. It argues for the pub­lic claim­ing of for­mer­ly secret canons: the right to cre­ate your own vision of what is best in the cul­ture and to have that vision influ­ence what books oth­er peo­ple read and value.