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Left-Handed Woman
WINNER OF THE 2023 PEN/DIAMONSTEIN-SPIELVOGEL AWARD FOR THE ART OF THE ESSAY
A collection of essays from Judith Thurman, the National Book Award–winning biographer and New Yorker staff writer.
Judith Thurman, a prolific staff writer at The New Yorker for more than two decades, has gathered a selection of her essays and profiles in A Left-Handed Woman . They consider our culture in all its literature, history, politics, gender, fashion, and art, though their paramount subject is the human condition.
Thurman is one of the preeminent essayists of our time―“a master of vivisection,” as Kathryn Harrison wrote in The New York Times . “When she’s done with a subject, it’s still living, mystery intact.”
A collection of essays from Judith Thurman, the National Book Award–winning biographer and New Yorker staff writer.
Judith Thurman, a prolific staff writer at The New Yorker for more than two decades, has gathered a selection of her essays and profiles in A Left-Handed Woman . They consider our culture in all its literature, history, politics, gender, fashion, and art, though their paramount subject is the human condition.
Thurman is one of the preeminent essayists of our time―“a master of vivisection,” as Kathryn Harrison wrote in The New York Times . “When she’s done with a subject, it’s still living, mystery intact.”
432 pages, Paperback
First published December 6, 2022
43 people are currently reading
2738 people want to read
About the author
Judith Thurman
39 books90 followersJudith Thurman began contributing to The New Yorker in 1987, and became a staff writer in 2000. She writes about fashion, books, and culture. Her subjects have included André Malraux, Elsa Schiaparelli, and Cristóbal Balenciaga.
Thurman is the author of “Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller,” which won the 1983 National Book Award for Non-Fiction, and “Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette,” (1999), winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Biography, and the Salon Book Award for biography. The Dinesen biography served as the basis for Sydney Pollack’s movie “Out of Africa.” A collection of her New Yorker essays, “Cleopatra’s Nose,” was published in 2007.
Thurman lives in New York.
Source: www.newyorker.com/magazine/contributo...
Thurman is the author of “Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller,” which won the 1983 National Book Award for Non-Fiction, and “Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette,” (1999), winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Biography, and the Salon Book Award for biography. The Dinesen biography served as the basis for Sydney Pollack’s movie “Out of Africa.” A collection of her New Yorker essays, “Cleopatra’s Nose,” was published in 2007.
Thurman lives in New York.
Source: www.newyorker.com/magazine/contributo...
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Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews
January 18, 2024
The first physical book I purchased in 2024 from Book Culture, and the first book I was guilt tripped into buying because the store had 20% off and everyone was stocking up on their new year’s reading. It was the first time I saw readers buying entire PILES of books and I felt lame just checking out a greeting card. Was also inspired by Kylie to just spend an afternoon reading a physical book in a bookstore — something I hadn’t done since the romantic days of being 22.
Pretty good selection of essays profiling women, arts, culture, history, fashion. I found the essay on Amelia Earhart very eye-opening as I’d never reflected critically on her myth. The first 2 sections also focus heavily on mother-daughter relationships which made me think of Siaonimar and ex best friends. I felt like I went on a journey around the world from my couch and bed.
Excerpts
Nearly all of them had achieved distinction at a price their male counterparts didn’t have to pay.
The price of self-possession used to be spinsterhood.
She despaired of being what she enviously called a “real woman” (the “real” women were her husband’s mistresses). It wasn’t obvious to my generation how or if one could become oneself without performing what the psychoanalyst Louise Kaplan memorably called a “female-female” impersonation.
“You are so young and beautiful and free, and I hate myself for trying to cramp that in you which I admire most.”
One of Rome's eternal stories is that of the bookish spinster from a cold clime, whose life has its late spring in Italy, and who loses her inhibitions, amid the ruins, with a man like Giovanni Ossoli.
The daughters of depressive women often feel a propitiatory impulse to make some sacrifice of their own aggression and desire, perhaps because they are afraid to overwhelm an unstable figure on whom they depend; because they feel guilty about their own vitality; or to disguise rage-as much from themselves as from their parent.
For some women, however —creative spirits like Helen —who have been suffocated by domesticity and crushed by the weight of their own disappointments, a child's obvious helplessness may stir the instinct to give succor, but if the child dares to assert her will, or to manifest her vitality—which is to say, her otherness-the mother, who feels deprived precisely of those freedoms, can't abide the affront.
“Nothing in life has an expiration date. You are free to change at any age.”
D. H. Lawrence: "Some people have a lot farther to go from where they begin to get where they want to be —a long way up the mountain, and that is how it has been for me. I don't feel I am getting older; I feel I am getting closer."
Desolation is an eloquent howl at the grotesque fatuity of a tame life, and a work of exceptional virtuosity. In a novella-length monologue delivered with a murderous glee, Samuel Perlman, a retired clothier, addresses his absent son, a thirty-eight-year-old beachcomber whom, his wife tells him, he has "crushed." When his daughter reports that her brother is, finally, "happy," Perlman unleashes a diatribe about all the therapeutic clichés with which people who aspire to be civilized console themselves for having compromised their vital obsessions. Mellowness, tolerance, self-acceptance —they are, in his view, "the peace of dead souls." As Perlman takes stock of his losses — of the few friends who nobly "embraced frivolity"; of the mistress who, despite being a "complete nothing," had a genius for abandon; of the wife who charmed him until she began "neglecting futility"; of the children whose laughter had once been free and defiant he recognizes that he, too, has been "tragically humanized."
The central character in Dans la Luge d'Arthur Schopenhauer (2005), Ariel Chipman, is a suicidally depressed academic who has sacrificed real living to an idea of what his life should be. (The three other characters are his long-suffering wife, Nadine; an ex-colleague whom he despises; and a psychiatrist.) Luge was staged in 2006, with Reza playing Nadine. She tells the psychiatrist, "You're going to say, but I don't care, that I'm arrogant to think I've done well by keeping my distance from these so-called brainiacs who have ruled my husband's life, for his whole life my husband has been crazy about these so-called brainiacs who desert him at the crucial moment ... to a terrible solitude."
Lowe's mantra might have been an adage attributed to Winston Churchill: "Success is not final. Failure is not fatal. It is the courage to continue that counts." But Churchill wasn't a self-employed Black octogenarian with an eighth-grade education and no savings.
In the quartet, [Elena Ferrante] gives that premise a vivid embodiment in the hostile love — empowering and subversive, jealous and reverent, steadfast and treacherous — between two friends whom we meet as girls of eight, in the slum where they were born, and follow for six decades, through the upheavals of postwar Italian society. Elena Greco and Raffaella Cerullo (Lenù and Lila) seem fated from the outset to become their mothers—weary drudges brutalized by their men, who wreak that violence on their daughters, if not by blows then by disparagement. In that respect, each of them has been invisible to herself until her friend gives her the gift of being seen.
Every question asked about Sartre concerned his work, while all those asked about Beauvoir concerned her personal life.
The ephemeral elation of achieving what Dante calls “significando”:
I am one who pays close heed
When love inspires me, then as bidden
I proceed inwardly making meaning.
A. E. Stallings finesses Canto III in terza rima:
And just as, from the fold, come sheep—
first one, then two, then three; the flock
stand meek, and faces earthward keep,
and if one walks, the rest will walk;
and when he stops, huddle in place,
meek, mild, not knowing why they balk
That passage reminded me of the Sardinian shepherd, coaxing a ewe and her suckling from the flock. He chose a lamb with a fleece of pure white and was careful not to bloody it. (He could sell the fleece later, he explained, to line a cradle.) The mother followed mutely and trustingly until he slit the lamb’s throat. Then, with heart-piercing bleats, she charged us.
Pretty good selection of essays profiling women, arts, culture, history, fashion. I found the essay on Amelia Earhart very eye-opening as I’d never reflected critically on her myth. The first 2 sections also focus heavily on mother-daughter relationships which made me think of Siaonimar and ex best friends. I felt like I went on a journey around the world from my couch and bed.
Excerpts
Nearly all of them had achieved distinction at a price their male counterparts didn’t have to pay.
The price of self-possession used to be spinsterhood.
She despaired of being what she enviously called a “real woman” (the “real” women were her husband’s mistresses). It wasn’t obvious to my generation how or if one could become oneself without performing what the psychoanalyst Louise Kaplan memorably called a “female-female” impersonation.
“You are so young and beautiful and free, and I hate myself for trying to cramp that in you which I admire most.”
One of Rome's eternal stories is that of the bookish spinster from a cold clime, whose life has its late spring in Italy, and who loses her inhibitions, amid the ruins, with a man like Giovanni Ossoli.
The daughters of depressive women often feel a propitiatory impulse to make some sacrifice of their own aggression and desire, perhaps because they are afraid to overwhelm an unstable figure on whom they depend; because they feel guilty about their own vitality; or to disguise rage-as much from themselves as from their parent.
For some women, however —creative spirits like Helen —who have been suffocated by domesticity and crushed by the weight of their own disappointments, a child's obvious helplessness may stir the instinct to give succor, but if the child dares to assert her will, or to manifest her vitality—which is to say, her otherness-the mother, who feels deprived precisely of those freedoms, can't abide the affront.
“Nothing in life has an expiration date. You are free to change at any age.”
D. H. Lawrence: "Some people have a lot farther to go from where they begin to get where they want to be —a long way up the mountain, and that is how it has been for me. I don't feel I am getting older; I feel I am getting closer."
Desolation is an eloquent howl at the grotesque fatuity of a tame life, and a work of exceptional virtuosity. In a novella-length monologue delivered with a murderous glee, Samuel Perlman, a retired clothier, addresses his absent son, a thirty-eight-year-old beachcomber whom, his wife tells him, he has "crushed." When his daughter reports that her brother is, finally, "happy," Perlman unleashes a diatribe about all the therapeutic clichés with which people who aspire to be civilized console themselves for having compromised their vital obsessions. Mellowness, tolerance, self-acceptance —they are, in his view, "the peace of dead souls." As Perlman takes stock of his losses — of the few friends who nobly "embraced frivolity"; of the mistress who, despite being a "complete nothing," had a genius for abandon; of the wife who charmed him until she began "neglecting futility"; of the children whose laughter had once been free and defiant he recognizes that he, too, has been "tragically humanized."
The central character in Dans la Luge d'Arthur Schopenhauer (2005), Ariel Chipman, is a suicidally depressed academic who has sacrificed real living to an idea of what his life should be. (The three other characters are his long-suffering wife, Nadine; an ex-colleague whom he despises; and a psychiatrist.) Luge was staged in 2006, with Reza playing Nadine. She tells the psychiatrist, "You're going to say, but I don't care, that I'm arrogant to think I've done well by keeping my distance from these so-called brainiacs who have ruled my husband's life, for his whole life my husband has been crazy about these so-called brainiacs who desert him at the crucial moment ... to a terrible solitude."
Lowe's mantra might have been an adage attributed to Winston Churchill: "Success is not final. Failure is not fatal. It is the courage to continue that counts." But Churchill wasn't a self-employed Black octogenarian with an eighth-grade education and no savings.
In the quartet, [Elena Ferrante] gives that premise a vivid embodiment in the hostile love — empowering and subversive, jealous and reverent, steadfast and treacherous — between two friends whom we meet as girls of eight, in the slum where they were born, and follow for six decades, through the upheavals of postwar Italian society. Elena Greco and Raffaella Cerullo (Lenù and Lila) seem fated from the outset to become their mothers—weary drudges brutalized by their men, who wreak that violence on their daughters, if not by blows then by disparagement. In that respect, each of them has been invisible to herself until her friend gives her the gift of being seen.
Every question asked about Sartre concerned his work, while all those asked about Beauvoir concerned her personal life.
The ephemeral elation of achieving what Dante calls “significando”:
I am one who pays close heed
When love inspires me, then as bidden
I proceed inwardly making meaning.
A. E. Stallings finesses Canto III in terza rima:
And just as, from the fold, come sheep—
first one, then two, then three; the flock
stand meek, and faces earthward keep,
and if one walks, the rest will walk;
and when he stops, huddle in place,
meek, mild, not knowing why they balk
That passage reminded me of the Sardinian shepherd, coaxing a ewe and her suckling from the flock. He chose a lamb with a fleece of pure white and was careful not to bloody it. (He could sell the fleece later, he explained, to line a cradle.) The mother followed mutely and trustingly until he slit the lamb’s throat. Then, with heart-piercing bleats, she charged us.
November 28, 2022
This title caught my eye because I am left-handed too. I love history and this collections spans the writers time at The New Yorker. The topics ranged from fashion to ancient history and covered so many different people I have never heard of (except for the legendary Alexander McQueen, of course I knew him!) Collections of essays like these always re-spark my love of reading and learning. This is incredibly well written, albeit a little word heavy, but the writing is beautiful, the subjects are intriguing and I was always looking forward to the next time I could pick it up. Thank you NetGalley and Farrar, Straus & Giroux for the free read in exchange for an unbiased review!
April 11, 2023
Brilliant writing! This collection of previously published essays (in The New Yorker) is what good writing is all about. Thurman, an acclaimed biographer as well, covers a gamut of topics, and the essays are both informative and entertaining.
January 20, 2024
Some of the actual stories didn't hold my attention very well but I've never been so mesmerized by writing before. She is actually a genius and i need to be best friends with her
July 11, 2024
Shoutout Sydney for getting me this book for my bday. Finally finished! Had a long break from it for finals/other business and am so happy to have finished it now. It's a series of Thurman's essays from The New Yorker—many of which focus on history, fashion (learned a lot about couture lol), linguistics, etc. I'd definitely recommend not reading this one as a regular book/in one go and instead picking it up whenever because I found it much harder to get through the first way. Thurman has an impressive writing style and there are some gems in here but it's not the easiest read when you're not in the headspace for it
July 28, 2024
When I purchased it, seemed as though it'd be an interesting series of mini-biographies, which was largely true. However, at times it took a more ... political tone than I'd have liked. The vast majority of the subjects were women, although a few men included as well (designer Karl Lagerfeld, for example).
Speaking of him, what did not work for me was the focus on the world of fashion for so many features. I get it that, traditionally, it was an area of opportunities for women to have a business career; but, the subject itself is one I find uninteresting. Still, the essay I found most compelling was that of Ann Lowe, the African-American designer for celebrities such as Jackie Kennedy. Really sorry I missed the fashion museum in Harlem while I lived in the New York area (materials were transferred to the Smithsonian I understand).
Otherwise, as a generalization, I appreciated several of the subjects' career stories to some extent. However, in terms of how much of an impression the book made on me, three stars is fair. One of those collections that has to be read essay-by-essay over time, not a couple of weeks with a library loan deadline.
Speaking of him, what did not work for me was the focus on the world of fashion for so many features. I get it that, traditionally, it was an area of opportunities for women to have a business career; but, the subject itself is one I find uninteresting. Still, the essay I found most compelling was that of Ann Lowe, the African-American designer for celebrities such as Jackie Kennedy. Really sorry I missed the fashion museum in Harlem while I lived in the New York area (materials were transferred to the Smithsonian I understand).
Otherwise, as a generalization, I appreciated several of the subjects' career stories to some extent. However, in terms of how much of an impression the book made on me, three stars is fair. One of those collections that has to be read essay-by-essay over time, not a couple of weeks with a library loan deadline.
November 19, 2024
I'm not sure I should read a long book of essays by the same person all at one go, unless it's someone tried and true through other reading (e.g. Oliver Sacks, Guy Davenport). Judith Thurman is relentlessly curious about many topics that I'm also interested in, and she writes insightful profiles of individuals, mostly women artists, writers or somehow connected with creative fields. She's also very interested in fashion and art generally, and she has had the platform to explore a variety of topics over the years in the New Yorker, in reviews and profiles. I especially enjoyed her pieces on Betty Halbreich, the notable personal shopper of Bergdorf Goodman; some extraordinary polyglots and how they got that way; and the poet Alice Oswald and her approach to the Iliad. But I think her writing is dull. Or grew to be dull after several hundred pages. She remarks in an essay about Simone de Beauvoir, "But no one would accuse her of being a lapidary stylist," and I think the same can be said about Thurman.
September 13, 2025
I'm honestly so grateful to have read this. So many amazing essays about writers, poets, artists that I've either never heard of, heard in passing, or just didn't know enough to know how great they are. The writing was, for the majority, impeccable. I'm looking forward to reading more from Thurman, especially her full introduction in The Second Sex. I love being introduced to the greats this way because it provides a level of depth I would have never thought to mine before tackling them - like Emerson, Dickinson, Dante, de Beauvoir. The essays all make me excited for more learning, more reading, more expanding of my personal canon.
The only two caveats I have about the collection are 1) I'm not opposed to reading about fashion but the sheer quantity was overdone and interspersed into too many of the sections throughout, and 2) the sections Speaking in Tongues and FAQs did not flow with the rest of the compilation.
The only two caveats I have about the collection are 1) I'm not opposed to reading about fashion but the sheer quantity was overdone and interspersed into too many of the sections throughout, and 2) the sections Speaking in Tongues and FAQs did not flow with the rest of the compilation.
February 18, 2023
It's easy to love this collection of essays by Judith Thurman. Each one is an in depth adventure by an engaging, authoritative guide. Important figures in culture pop out from the pages and spark curiosity. I spent a lot of time searching the internet for images of the fashion ("the tear dress"!), art, poetry, and literature to complement the written journey that I was on while reading this collection. These essays are exemplars for how to engage a reader - fascinating subjects, exhaustive research, never a dull sentence. As I closed the book on the last article a silent plea - just one more!
March 12, 2024
Complete title is A Left-Handed Woman: Essays
A collection of 39 essays, previously published from 2006 to 2021, all but two in The New Yorker. Many are profiles of historic figures, often prompted by an exhibit or production; some I knew of (Amelia Earhart, Emily Dickinson, Laura Ingalls Wilder), but many I did not. A surprising number are from the fashion industry, a topic on which I have little knowledge or interest. I did not know Thurman's work before; the title drew me in, because I'm also left-handed. Thurman's more personal essay in her Introduction was actually the most appealing part of the book for me.
A collection of 39 essays, previously published from 2006 to 2021, all but two in The New Yorker. Many are profiles of historic figures, often prompted by an exhibit or production; some I knew of (Amelia Earhart, Emily Dickinson, Laura Ingalls Wilder), but many I did not. A surprising number are from the fashion industry, a topic on which I have little knowledge or interest. I did not know Thurman's work before; the title drew me in, because I'm also left-handed. Thurman's more personal essay in her Introduction was actually the most appealing part of the book for me.
January 22, 2023
I give it ten ⭐️. I haven’t savored a book in quite a while like I did “Left Handed Woman.” I didn’t know anything about the author and slightly about it’s content. Ms Thurman gives us a delightful and insightful glimpse into the lives of Lee Miller, Ingmar, Guo, the world of polyglots and prehistoric cave art, Bergman, Simone de Beauvoir, Dante, Amelia Erhardt, with a masterly command of her material and her prose.
December 15, 2023
This is one of those books that offers so much to the reader in terms of cultural references and writers to read, and does so in the lively, wonderful prose of a cultural maven dedicated to the aspects of society that make life interesting. Though sophisticated, brilliant, erudite, Thurman is never annoying. She writes as though in conversation with a friend.
November 24, 2025
This would be better to dip in and out of one essay at a time (perhaps over a number of years as articles in the New Yorker...?) rather than read cover to cover. Each chapter was individually good but by god there were too many. Also the audiobook narrator didn't bother looking up pronunciations of words she wasn't familiar with.
December 28, 2022
This book with a collection of essays is pretty good. Each essay truly has so many stories and other things about them. There are people in these essays I've heard and others not. Thanks to publishers Farrar, Straus and Giroux and NetGalley for letting me read this book for a review.
February 7, 2024
I love how they write. It matches with my brain.
Also since it’s a collection of mini-biographies, it’s really easy to start and stop as one pleases.
It’s also a very neat autobiography in a way.
I really loved.
Also since it’s a collection of mini-biographies, it’s really easy to start and stop as one pleases.
It’s also a very neat autobiography in a way.
I really loved.
January 24, 2025
So so good!! The wide variety of topics works really well because there is a feeling of continuity throughout the collection, although Thurman’s subject shifts from poet to artist to hyperpolyglot. I especially enjoyed the essay on Miuccia Prada, but it was hard to choose my favorite!
July 28, 2023
Great collection of essays. Beautifully written, and I learned about some interesting people I'd not known about previously.
November 30, 2023
DNF. A couple of pieces were interesting but there were a lot of essays that I couldn’t get into.
February 25, 2025
I know more things than I did before I read it
April 25, 2024
Of two minds on this collection. I give the first half of this book 3 stars- essays about women artists or adventurers that were so predictable that I forgot the names the minute I turned the page. The second half dealt with personalities that felt closer to home- including reviews of multiple books I've already read- that I enjoyed immensely. This is potentially an indictment on my own pedestrian tastes, but also because I felt Judith Thurman was unreliable in her interpretations. I didn't buy into her train of thought, and its more entertaining to be distrustful from a place of knowledge/opinion.
January 27, 2023
I thoroughly enjoy Judith Thurman' writing. Having missed all of her fashion columns, it was fun to read about people in the industry I'd never heard of. While she always selected creative celebrities, I was surprised at how many included in this compendium of essays were men, despite title (?) I feel like I missed the reference completely. A worthy read for the prose alone.
April 7, 2023
I had never read an essay by Thurman before and I feel really deprived because of it. I will seek out more of her work now. These essays were very well written and very interesting. I learned about people and topics that I had never heard of before.
Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews