September Theme: The Stories We Carry
Big Question: Why do certain stories stay with us?
Week 3: The Stories We Tell Ourselves
📚 Rewriting the Victors: The Historical Fiction Books That Challenge the Stories We Tell Ourselves
In a lot of ways, history encompasses the epitome of the stories we carry, especially when it begins to bleed into our fictional worlds… or does that usually happen the other way around?
Regardless, we like to think of our history books as factual textbooks and often treat them as stagnant artifacts or pieces of writing that can’t ever change or be altered. Even though this is far from the truth. Because real history is messy, contradictory, and heavily curated by the people who ‘won’ and the stories they like to tell about themselves, what happened, and what they want others to believe happened— sometimes so much so that what they write and pass off as fact seems more like fiction than some of our most beloved novels.
Today, I want to take a few moments to explore this world between fact and fiction and the stories we tell ourselves about what happened, should have happened, or could have happened, especially once we realize we may have left a few people out of our broader narrative, or learned that we got a few things about what really happened wrong or incomplete.
As we wind down our week discussing The Stories We Tell Ourselves, I hope you will consider reading one or more of the following historical fiction masterworks listed below. They offer us a glimpse into how we can continue to dismantle the sanitized textbook narratives we tell ourselves about the past and give voices to the erased, and ask that we stop humanizing the real villains. They also force us to confront the uncomfortable truths beneath some of our grandest cultural myths, which are some of the heaviest stories we’ve been carrying.
🩸 Unseen Battlefields and Systemic Erasures
The Women by Kristin Hannah
This novel upends the male-dominated combat narrative of the Vietnam War by centering Frances ‘Frankie’ McGrath, a young nurse who volunteers for the Army Nurse Corps. It directly challenges the persistent post-war myth that there were no American women serving on the front lines in Vietnam, and provides a visceral, raw exploration of female PTSD, wartime camaraderie, and the painful isolation of returning to an angry, divided nation that completely ignores your sacrifice, as well as your general existence.
The Book of Longings by Sue Monk Kidd
This story provocatively challenges patriarchal theological history by imagining the life of Ana, a brilliant, rebellious young woman in first-century Galilee who becomes the wife of Jesus. While the book is grounded in meticulous research, it focuses heavily on Jesus’s ground-level humanity while prioritizing Ana’s fierce, independent struggle to write her own story in a world built to silence her.
The Moor’s Account by Laila Lalami
This narrative subverts standard European exploration logs by centering the 1527 Spanish expedition of Florida through America’s first Black explorer, an enslaved Moroccan man. The author crafts an impeccable structural voice that details the psychological shifts required to transform from a captive into a vital survivalist tool.
Beloved by Toni Morrison
This masterpiece replaces clinical, textbook documentations of American slavery with a devastating, visceral look at generational trauma, memory, and the extreme moral survival choices of a mother. The narrative masterfully uses a non-linear, fragmented timeline to mimic the exact way that severe trauma fractures human memory.
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
This book bypasses the neat, comforting myth of the Underground Railroad network as a simple heroic escape route by materializing the tracks underground, transforming each stop into a dark, allegorical autopsy of American racial politics and oppression. The story explores the raw, unfiltered cost of freedom without leaning into easy sentimentality or reassuring tropes sometimes used in narratives about slaves.
Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
This novel challenges standard linear multi-generational sagas by tracking the parallel descendants of two half-sisters across 300 years—one living in comfort in Ghana, the other captured into the transatlantic slave trade. It functions as a breathtaking, structural epic that illustrates exactly how systemic historical choices become inscribed into ancestral lineages over centuries.
Babel by R.F. Kuang
This work uses a dark academic historical setting to dissect the actual, brutal clockwork of the 1830s British Empire, demonstrating how global language, translation, and culture were directly weaponized to fuel colonial theft. While this book contains fantasy elements, it still delivers a furious, intellectually rigorous critique of institutional complicity and the steep psychological cost of assimilation.
👑 Challenging Empires and Institutional Truths
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
This epic confronts twentieth-century Japanese history and the annexation of Korea by focusing strictly on the marginalized, multi-generational struggles of Zainichi Koreans living disenfranchised on the edges of society. The narrative unflinchingly tracks how systemic displacement forces family loyalty to become its own sovereign nation when state protection is denied.
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
This novel repaints the heavily romanticized English Reformation by turning traditional historical villains and heroes inside out, focusing instead on the calculated internal political machinery of Thomas Cromwell. The text cleverly leverages heavy dramatic irony, letting the reader carry the burden of history while the characters navigate high-stakes political survival in real time.
Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood
This psychological tale deconstructs the mid-19th-century true crime narrative of Grace Marks, challenging the Victorian obsession with categorizing marginalized women as either pure innocents or calculated monsters. The author utilizes an intentionally unreliable, shifting psychological frame that explicitly questions who has the cultural authority to write a woman’s story.
A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles
This book reevaluates Soviet Russia’s massive, chaotic political shifts from 1922 onward by trapping the grand historical scale inside the microcosm of a single hotel where an aristocrat is placed under house arrest. It examines the art of personal preservation, showing how an individual maintains structural integrity and purpose when their entire world is systematically dismantled.
Human Acts by Han Kang
This profound novel confronts South Korea’s collective memory surrounding the 1980 Gwangju student uprising, stripping away sanitized political history to study the precise, localized ripples of state violence on ordinary citizens. The narrative is hauntingly structured through multiple points of view, including the collective, disembodied voices of the dead.
The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen
This story completely upends the Western, Hollywood-dominated narrative of the Vietnam War by centering a half-French, half-Vietnamese communist sleeper agent, exposing the absurdity and hypocrisy of both sides. Because the tone is darkly satirical and razor-sharp, it forces readers to look at the collateral damage of war through a dual, deeply conflicted lens.
🛡️ Reclaiming Sidelined Defiance and Ordinary Survival
Salt to the Sea by Ruta Sepetys
This novel drastically shifts the standard World War II lens away from massive battle strategies to look directly at the forgotten maritime tragedy of Wilhelm Gustloff and the desperate plight of fleeing refugees. The story is told in brief, fast-paced fragments that perfectly mirror the frantic, disjointed nature of survival during a crisis.
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
This book looks at the mundane, everyday normalization of Nazi Germany through the eyes of an ordinary working-class foster child, examining complicity and small acts of resistance outside grand military narratives. The novel is narrated uniquely by Death, a device which successfully strips away nationalistic sentiment and focuses entirely on human vulnerability.
The Marriage of Opposites by Alice Hoffman
This work tells the story of Rachel Pomie (the mother of painter Camille Pissarro), shifting the narrative of 19th-century artistry away from Paris galleries to the strict, hidden constraints of a Jewish community on the island of St. Thomas. It serves as a lush, sensory exploration of forbidden passion and the quiet rebellion required of women existing outside traditional societal bounds.
The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak
This book examines the trauma of the 1974 Cyprus conflict and its lingering multi-generational scars, eschewing dry political overviews to focus on love, displacement, and ecological connection. The narrative is brilliantly partially voiced by a fig tree, which offers a non-human, enduring witness to the absurdity of human borders.
⚔️ Upending Mythologies and Ancient Epics
Circe by Madeline Miller
This adaptation completely upends classical ancient epics by centering a traditionally sidelined, minor mythological villain, challenging how ancient histories and myths preserve male supremacy by silencing women. It deeply explores the isolation, maternal protection, and internal identity work required to step out of an epic hero’s shadow.
A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes
This retelling re-examines the Trojan War exclusively through the perspectives of the women (citizens, queens, and deities) who are typically treated as passive prizes or footnotes in male war epics. The book delivers a sharp, witty, and devastating collection of vignettes detailing what happens to the forgotten survivors after the grand heroes leave the battlefield.
Lavinia by Ursula K. Le Guin
This novel takes a character from Virgil’s Aeneid who didn’t get a single line of dialogue in the original text and gives her full agency, exploring early pre-Roman history through quiet domestic observation rather than battle glory. The author utilizes a brilliant meta-fictional approach where the protagonist actively communicates with the spirit of the ancient poet who omitted her.
Kaikeyi by Vaishnavi Patel
This story reimagines the foundational Indian epic, the Ramayana, by centering the traditional, reviled stepmother figure, examining how institutional and religious structures can easily typecast a woman’s political resistance as pure villainy. The author exceptionally builds an intricate look at court diplomacy and female independence within a deeply rigid world.
The Red Tent by Anita Diamant
This classic flips biblical, patriarchal lineages on their head by focusing on the brief, tragic footnote of Dinah from the Book of Genesis, reconstructing ancient womanhood, childbirth, and female solidarity. The narrative environment is deeply communal and matriarchal, providing a rich, domestic tapestry of ancient life that is usually left out of sacred texts.
🌍 Hidden Lines and Complicated Legacies
James by Percival Everett
This brilliant novel completely reimagines the events of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of the enslaved Jim. It dismantles the traditional literary portrayal of a passive, simple sidekick by revealing Jim to be deeply intellectual, strategically literate, and acutely aware of the dangerous racial politics surrounding him. The author masterfully uses a linguistic survival mechanism where Jim and his fellow enslaved characters consciously switch between a forced vernacular around white oppressors and their true, articulate voices when alone.
The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell
This atmospheric story re-evaluates the brief life of Lucrezia de’ Medici in 16th-century Florence, moving past her historical legacy as a passive subject in Robert Browning’s poem “My Last Duchess.” It challenges the tidy narrative of Renaissance courtly romance by exposing the perilous, predatory power structures that young noblewomen were forced to navigate. The narrative builds intense, claustrophobic psychological suspense by alternating between Lucrezia’s vibrant artistic inner world and her terrifyingly certain fate.
Miss Burma by Charmaine Craig
This multigenerational epic dismantles the mainstream, Western-centric understandings of mid-20th-century Asian history by exploring the formation of modern Burma strictly through the eyes of the Karen people, a heavily persecuted ethnic minority. It exposes how global political shifts and nationalistic myths actively crushed indigenous sovereignty and sparked ongoing cycles of state violence. Grounded in the real-life history of the author’s mother and grandparents, the book maintains an extraordinary level of personal intimacy while handling a massive, sprawling political canvas.
The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams
This immersive novel re-examines the compilation of the first Oxford English Dictionary during the height of the women’s suffrage movement, revealing how institutional gatekeepers systematically erased the lived experiences, standard labor, and everyday vocabulary of ordinary women. It challenges the objective authority of language by demonstrating how dictionaries were used to preserve a rigid, patriarchal worldview. The protagonist’s secret collection of discarded words creates a beautifully constructed parallel history that celebrates the unrecorded vernacular of the working class.
Tell us which one of these works of Historical Fiction you’re picking up first!
Join Our Book Club Discussions
What are your thoughts on Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu? Here are some of my thoughts and notes.
Leave a comment or join our Buddy Read on Storygraph at any time this month to discuss this book with us. We’re starting a new book next week, but discussions for this September book club pick will still be up when you want to join them in the future.
📙Our Next Book Club Read
For week four, which starts tomorrow, the Daily Drafts & Dialogues Book Club is reading our Literary Dive Pick, The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood, a novel that layers memoir, family history, romance, political history, and a story-within-a-story to explore the distance between what happened, what is remembered, and what is told.
📆 Daily Target: September 19–25 — approximately 78 pages/day to finish in one week.
🔔 Tuesday Check-In Post: September 22: This week’s post will dive into The Stories We Tell Others. We’ll examine unreliable narrators, secrets, omissions, storytelling as power, and the ways people reshape the past when they tell it to someone else.
ICYMI: See the Complete September Book Club Pick Lineup with Customizable Reading Schedules
Whether you join a chat, one of our Buddy Reads in Storygraph, or lay it all out in the comments, I look forward to hearing more about your thoughts on our book club picks this month as we continue to discuss The Stories We Carry!
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✨📚✨Thank you! 🫶
Continue Exploring September’s Theme, The Stories We Carry
This Week: The Stories We Tell Ourselves
Writing Prompts that Navigate the Stories We Tell Ourselves
Can you write great work without challenging your own beliefs?
Reading Notes: Interior Chinatown
The Story of My Flaws Sounds Like Death Metal
Rewriting Our Narratives: How to Evolve as a Writer Without Losing Yourself
Popular Posts, Week 2 : Memory and Storytelling
Writing Prompts About Memory and Storytelling
The Art of Autofiction: Memory, Markets, and the Modern Confessional
Popular Posts, Week 1: The Books That Changed Us
Writing Prompts About Books That Changed Us
Can a book genuinely change who we are?
Go Deeper with Daily Drafters Exclusives
This month: The Stories We Carry Writing Collection
This collection offers a month of guided writing exercises, mini workshops, and creative writing experiments designed to take you beyond a single prompt and into a deeper creative practice. It gives you the creative spark and space you need to explore memory, identity, inheritance, perspective, voice, and the stories we tell ourselves and others. It will also encourage you to consider how those stories shape the work we create and the creative lives we lead.
Inside this collection, you’ll find 30 original writing prompts (designed as mini writing workshops) across five sections with focused themes, craft-focused exercises, curated reading suggestions, reflective questions, and three optional month-long writing challenges designed to help you develop your ideas, explore your personal material and stories, and build a consistent writing practice.
You can follow the prompts in order, choose the exercises that speak to you, or return to a section whenever you need a new way to explore your writing craft. As a paid subscriber, you will also be able to come back to the collection throughout the month or any other time you feel like exploring The Stories We Carry in the future.
What an amazing list!! I very badly need to finish reading Han Kang's backlist and get into Toni Morrison and Ursula Le Guin