I’m just going to admit to you that I have an affliction: I care what you think about me. It's true, I might not know you, but I still care. Will you like this review? Did you look at my bio? Did you Google me? Do I measure up? Do Patrick Madden and Joey Franklin roll their eyes with every deadline because I am so late with my reviews? Do they hate that I put a double space after each period and they must always search and replace because I forget before sending off my draft well at the eleventh hour?See, I told you it was affliction.A wise person once told me, however, that what other people think of me is none of my business. Ponder that one.So, I try to remember it doesn't matter what you think about me, it only matters what I think and believe about myself. But as a female born in this culture, I received messages from the very beginning that told me I should care. In fact, Gina Rippon, a cognitive neuroscientist who studies gender stereotypes, says that children as young as 24 months are “tiny social sponges absorbing social information . . . a gendered world produces a gendered brain.” Eventually, our neural circuits are actually rewired and women come to believe they should be nice and demure, and what their potential is (hint: it's not self-fulfillment).And, I'll add, we come to believe we must be likeable.Rebecca Solnit writes, “There is no good answer to how to be a woman; the art may instead lie in how we refuse the question.” How do we refuse the idea that we must be likeable? Refuse to care what untold strangers think of us? This is exactly what Melissa Faliveno, Raechel Anne Jolie, and Tarn Wilson consider in their own unique ways. How to become themselves and not buy into the culturally engrained myth of who and how a woman should be. As Melissa Faliveno writes in Tomboyland, “Maybe it's the job of those of us who live in that liminal space, who live beyond what is already defined, to determine what might exist in the unnamed places between. To be the explorers. To set out into the darkness, strike a match, and get a good look around. To seek not answers, necessarily, but to stand still for a while and listen.”Each of the three writers shows us the result of their listening—both to themselves and the culture around them. The craft of each couldn't be more different. Faliveno's Tomboyland is a classic essay collection about growing up different in working-class Wisconsin, “flyover country, the middle of nowhere, the space between the coasts . . . beyond definition, [a place] whose very boundaries are a question.” Jolie's Rust Belt Femme, set just outside Cleveland, Ohio, gives the reader a memoir about a working class bordering on real poverty kid whose world is “defined by men—their demands and their absence—[and] a life made both joyous and safe by women.” Wilson's In Praise of Inadequate Gifts delivers a memoir in essays that asks about grief and cycles, and the messages we absorb from those around us, how she wants these “to come to a neat conclusion . . . tucked into whatever it is we have loved.”I initially bought Tomboyland because I thought Faliveno's work could help me understand the Midwest where I now find myself living after a lifetime on the West Coast. It does that—but more, it asks “questions about belonging and the body, isolation and community, and what we mean when we use worlds like woman, family, and home.” Questions that must be considered when thinking about one's place in the country and also along the gender continuum.Tomboyland shows us Faliveno's Midwest, “where girls hunt and fish and fight and don't always shed their masculine characteristics as they get older . . . from the Great plains to the Great Lakes states to the Upper Midwest—I think of a place that transcends boundaries, that defies definition, a body that holds within it a multitude of identities.” Throughout this book of essays, she shows us a landscape where anyone can belong regardless of the lessons they've absorbed and asks the reader who she might be if she knew she would be received with love and acceptance.The essays deftly weave in outside research, conversations with relatives, friends, and acquaintances, and yet, never feel didactic. They juxtapose life: tornadoes and God, vegetarianism and BDSM, guns and love. Faliveno examines all the pieces of her life and constructs that life seemingly before our eyes—all without making the text feel like the script of an ABC “Afterschool Special.” Because she looks both internally and externally, Tomboyland, gives us a 360-degree view of Faliveno's world and beliefs, and supports it all with voices other than the writer's. It's a craft move that makes this book sit beyond memoir or even essay collection. Instead, it's like a permission slip to be who you are, to understand how interconnected your own life is, and to want to chronicle your own contradictions and consciousness. I started to draw and list the intersections in my own life because of Tomboyland. In the middle of reading the book, I found myself in South Minneapolis where my grandmother grew up.It had been “a good neighborhood” for my white grandmother, then white flight eviscerated it, and it has shifted now yet again, vibrant with a fusion of multiple and diverse identities—the hallmark of a good city, if you ask me. I wondered, as I walked the streets, what my grandmother's reaction would be to her neighborhood becoming, in Faliveno's words, “a place that transcends boundaries, that defies definition, a body that holds within it a multitude of identities”? I think she would.Raechel Anne Jolie sets us down right in the middle of working-class Ohio and plumbs the depth of poverty and identity in writing that is both beautifully lyric and terse in Rust Belt Femme. Although the book is billed as a coming-of-age story, I found myself thinking of it as a survival guide for queer and punk girls. In her prologue, Jolie writes, “And so my story is like this. Flashes of my early life sliding against the hindsight that helps you tell the story better . . . I think you'll be able to follow along, because whether our neurology is burdened by trauma or not, I think most of us who are drawn to memoir are burdened with an incurable case of nostalgia.”According to an interview Jolie did with Cleveland magazine, the book began in 2016, sprung out of the frustration with stereotypical depictions of “bigoted working class” people so prevalent after 45’s election. She tells the magazine, “I knew from growing up that some of those people existed, but that wasn't the full picture. It felt like a good time to create a more complex story of what working class life looks like.”Jolie pulls no punches about the difficult life she and her mother have, but she is rarely undone by it. Or maybe I mean she does not fall prey to the trap of nostalgia she references in her prologue. Because how can you be nostalgic about a father who is hit by a drunk driver and left head injured and angry? Or about sitting in the dark because the utilities were cut for lack of payment? Or moving from crappy apartment to crappier apartment because your mother has lost another job or left another boyfriend? There is no room to cut out someone who messes up when people who mess up are all you've got. You learn that bad decisions don't mean toxic people. If you're lucky, you learn the messy work of healing. And if not, you master the art of compartmentalizing. And then you move the fuck forward and figure out how to pay the gas bill that month.Jolie shows us the struggle her mother faces to find steady employment—working in cafeterias, offices, a print shop, and, for more than a decade, rising at 3:30 a.m. to deliver newspaper—and with that, a safe, solid place to live.Similar to Faliveno, Jolie works to develop a picture of people often forgotten by mainstream culture—but instead of essays, Jolie uses vignettes that are potent and short, showing us how poverty shapes her, but also creating a picture of her younger self who was hungry for knowledge and a way out. Where Faliveno delves into scenes and imbues them with expertly woven bits of writer's reflection in media res, Jolie primarily keeps us in the scenes. By juxtaposition of events—evictions, punk rock shows, the ‘zine scene, dating boys and girls, her mother's creepy boyfriend—Jolie lets the reader see the writer's mind at work as she kaleidoscopes her past together on the page to make sense of poverty, class, and sexuality—and the cultural messages she got about her worth as a poor, young woman.When Jolie does reflect on the page, she often uses future tense to telegraph what will happen and how she will feel. For instance, “I will do a lot of unpacking of that wanting. In therapy, in journals, with tarot deck.s . . . I will be OK with this desire and also the nature of it.” It's a good reminder to the reader that there will always be more to a story, that we are just seeing what the writer chooses to put on the page.What I found so heart-wrenching and amazing was that through it all, Jolie never loses sense of her core self—even as she figures out who that self is. “Ben taught me an articulation of anti-capitalist politics that opened up a world of punk music that stirred the part of my gut that knew I had found what I needed. . . . Cam, the first butch lesbian I'd know . . . would [make me] similarly privy to a world of queerness made more real because I discovered it between kissing and the feeling you get in your belly when you're falling for someone.” And finally, within a few pages of telling us her mom has to declare bankruptcy, she writes, “That I would leave Cleveland to go to college felt inevitable. Not because I hate Cleveland, not because I hated my family, but because in the early years of my life, I had so many reasons to escape it.”There's a coming out story embedded in Rust Belt Femme, but the focus really is on coming up through cycles of poverty. Jolie is careful to call out her own white privilege—in the midst of the poverty, violence, and housing insecurity—that helped give her a chance to escape her circumstances and earn a doctorate.The essays braided together in the slim volume In Praise of Inadequate Gifts by Tarn Wilson are no less potent than Faliveno's or Jolie's simply because of the quiet, lyric way they present her story. Wilson, according to Scott Russell Sanders, asks “hard questions while refusing to settle for easy answers.” Questions about grief over the end of her first marriage. About making sense of her mother's mental illness and her parents’ multiple divorces. Questions about going to bed hungry. How she fell in love with a younger man. But most importantly, exploring her disappointment that she was “not the character I thought I was. The plot was not moving toward its expected end.” And she does all this with quiet humor, kindness, and compassion.These essays, in many ways, fill in some missing pieces from Wilson's collage-style memoir, The Slow Farm, showing readers what happened when Wilson's mother took her two children and left their father in the Canadian wilderness “utopia” he had tried to build. Like Jolie's history, Wilson's is one of cyclical poverty, frequent uprootings, and a violent stepfather.Toward the end of the opening essay, “The History of My Teeth,” Wilson writes, “Here I break the unwritten rules of essay writing. I'm not supposed to show you the movie camera at the edge of the scene. But I have no other way to tell you the whole story.” Deft moves like this make the reader trust Wilson's voice, trust her questioning of the “truth.” She understands early in life that people expect women to be “worthy of love . . . interesting enough . . . [and that] a good story was more valuable than truth.”Wilson reflects on the page in a compelling and compassionate voice even in the middle of scenes that break the reader's heart. These scenes serve as a craft lesson—as the writer pulls focus and looks down on her life—as well as soul lessons in the awkward stops and starts of healing a life. In the essay, “A Narrative Break: On Reading After Crisis,” Wilson illustrates this perfectly: “So that's my theory: change is traumatic to the degree it explodes our story. Recovery depends on our ability to let that story wash away—and our willingness to examine the life left behind and to the best of our ability, see it as it really is.”And there we are back at the truth again. Seeing things as they really are. Like Favileno and Jolie, Wilson also looks at the pressure her culture—our culture—places on her as a woman. In “Why We Don't Have Children,” she uses subheads to guide the reader through what appear to read like standard excuses: “We are in denial. We had feminist mothers. We are artists. We have bad genes. We like our lives.” But under these subheads and others, she blows apart the arguments and shows us the pressure women face. “I habitually compromised too much of myself to appease and please. In my past the only place that belonged to me—where I had no demands to accommodate but my own—was my private interior world. I was afraid of a hungry baby living there.”All three of these books are about identity—but not the identity wherein the writers worry what other people think of them, but rather, what each writer thinks of herself and how she stands up to a world bent on telling women what to do.Each of these books are likely to be marketed and shelved based on a particular identity they take up. But each of them strives to make you rethink everything you may have imagined—because each of us has had our imaginations shaped and gendered, inundated with a limited set of images and stories. It's why we need books like these, in which we find writers making transparent how each has crafted a particular version of herself, standing up and speaking back to a world resolute on shaping them—and us—to its limitations. These are stories that give all of us courage.