Kaia Gerber: What Reading Books by Women Has Taught Me About Myself

I was 16 years old when I graduated high school and moved to New York to model. I knew I would be invited into rooms with brilliant, older people, and I was both curious and self-conscious—I wanted to be able to fully participate in the conversation. There was a bookstore two blocks from my apartment, and I thought, well, if I’m not going to college, I would still like an education. So I started to read.

At first, I picked up the books I thought I was supposed to: Camus, Rimbaud, Dostoevsky, work by the types of writers I thought “intellectuals” would read and talk about. And yes, everyone should read The Stranger or A Season in Hell or Crime and Punishment at some point, but that pressure dissipated as soon as I began to discover the pleasure and fulfillment that comes from reading books I can truly connect with.

Without setting out to do so, I became a dedicated reader of women. Over the past seven years, I’ve read hundreds of books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry by women of all facets—young, old, queer, American, translated. The women writers I admire have shared parts of themselves through their work, and reading their stories has opened my eyes. They have been my companions and advisors, the knowing figures in the back of my mind who have shaped my understanding of the world and my place in it.

I immediately saw myself in Eve Babitz’s Sex and Rage, which I read when I was 18 years old. The novel is about Jacaranda, a young woman on the precipice, who is surrounded by a complicated group of characters, a lot of whom are older than her. I related, after growing up between LA and New York, often finding myself in spaces with older, more advanced people and wanting to fit in. What I loved right away about Jacaranda was that she didn’t see herself as a victim, even though through today’s lens we might adopt a different perspective—she is complicated, dancing between the dichotomy of being simultaneously aloof and very self aware. I appreciate a lack of perspective in a protagonist, because that’s what most accurately reflects my experience. When you’re going through something, it’s difficult to say, I’m being manipulated right now— maybe you can, but then there would be no story. I feel that way about life: if I knew the lesson before I learned it, I wouldn’t have all the experiences I’ve had. Even the ones that I perceive to be hurtful, I can still see as somehow beautiful, because those are the pages. That is the book.

Lydia Davis captures this same idea perfectly in another of my favorite books, The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis. She tells so many different kinds of stories; some are sentences long, some are a few pages. What they have in common is the way they so sharply portray feelings in these tiny, potent packages. She has one story about the end of a relationship—she writes about her character wondering if, had they known what the relationship was going to cost them, they would still pursue it. And the answer is yes. The story ends with a great sentence, essentially saying that all you might be left holding after a relationship is pain and an old t-shirt. But you’d do it again anyway. On an emotional level, I relate to that so much.

Sometimes, what I glean from a book is more direct. Lately I’ve been reading correspondences between writers: Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller, Jack Gilbert and Linda Gregg. I’m realizing how important it is to have women depicted in relationships from their own point of view, and how helpful that has been as a young woman discovering my sexuality and what it means to be in a relationship. It’s common to have a fear as a woman that you will lose yourself in relation to someone else, especially if that someone else is a man in a patriarchal world. What I’ve loved about going back through these letters is seeing both lovers’ voices on the page. It’s a testament to how a whole person can exist within a relationship; their point of view can be made clear, and there is room for all the feelings. Our culture is rife with female characters as seen through the eyes of men. Reading these letters is a reminder that there is space for me, and the story is also being told from my perspective. We are more than just what someone else perceives us to be.

If you go back through Gilbert and Gregg’s bodies of work, they’re communicating to each other through their published poetry. And even after they separated, they would still send their poems to each other and write about each other, publishing stories of their love. I find that extraordinary, that the end of their romantic collaboration didn’t mean the end of their artistic collaboration. With Gilbert, who was older and a more established poet than Gregg when they got together, seeing how much respect he had for her and her perspective on how things unfolded in their relationship is deeply meaningful—that’s the kind of love I believe in. And then you have Nin and Miller, whose letters were erotic and graphic and charged, which is valuable in its own way. Women were not expected to have the feelings or say the words Nin did to Miller. She went there, unapologetically—not to provoke, but just to authentically express who she was.

Nin, Gregg, Babitz, Ursula Parrott, Annie Ernaux, bell hooks, Joan Didion—all these writers have helped form my understanding of how I’m perceived as a woman in the world, and how to push back. These writers demand—they don’t ask—that we follow them into their complex inner lives. Their books are statements rather than questions. They each embrace their feminine voice, by which I simply mean that they embrace their unique voice. They refuse to desert any part of their identity in order to be heard. The best artists bring all of themselves to their work.

We all feel overlooked and misjudged sometimes. That’s inevitable, because it’s impossible for other people to see you in all your dimensions. Literature is a balm. When I needed it most, I found a place in books that was deep and emotional and my own. Reading helped me understand I could give myself the things I was looking for from other people. It helped me realize I don’t need other people to tell me I’m smart. I don’t need other people to tell me I’m emotionally intelligent. I don’t need other people to give me validation or define for me what I can or cannot do. I can answer those questions myself, just like the writers do on the page.

My favorite authors tell the truth about who they are because something within them compels them to be honest, and they look directly at things that scare them. There’s a Didion quote that I love: “I myself have always found that if I examine something, it’s less scary. You know, I grew up in the West, and we always had this theory that if you… kept the snake in your eye line, the snake wasn’t going to bite you. And that’s kind of the way I feel about confronting pain. I want to know where it is.”

That’s what I want for myself. Literature can show us every possibility, whether real or fantasy. And I want to see it all.

Gerber is an actor, model, and founder of Library Science. She is featured in the 2024 TIME100 Next.

–As told to Lucy Feldman

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