{"id":311245,"date":"2026-05-22T07:05:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-22T11:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/electricliterature.com\/?p=311245"},"modified":"2026-07-21T13:58:06","modified_gmt":"2026-07-21T17:58:06","slug":"7-books-in-which-obsession-is-the-plot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/electricliterature.com\/7-books-in-which-obsession-is-the-plot\/","title":{"rendered":"7 Books in Which Obsession Is the Plot"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

All writing, at some level, grows out of obsession\u2014the need to get our most intense and unwieldy feelings down on paper so that we might begin to see them clearly, or persuade others that our passions matter. But sometimes the obsession is right on the surface of the plot\u2014is<\/em> the plot. An obsession makes a strong engine for a novel, engendering intense prose and risky choices.<\/p>\n\n\n

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All of the books on this list were on my desk and in my mind when I wrote Mare<\/a><\/em>, a novel based on my own experience\u2014and my own obsession. In Mare<\/em>, the protagonist takes on the casual, part-time care of a horse, in part to avoid thinking about a future in which she will not have children. When her feelings about the horse turn into affection, and, later, obsession, she struggles to explain their strength to herself or others. After all, as another character insists\u2014the mare is \u201cjust a horse.\u201d Sure, in pony books girls are obsessed with horses. But once you\u2019re past the age of about 16, you\u2019re expected to move on to more adult obsessions. I failed to find any other books about a woman obsessed with a horse. What I discovered is that the quality of obsession in literature is transferable across objects. The books on this list spoke directly to me as I swam in the dark waters of infatuation, trying to work out what kind of story I was in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

More often, the female protagonists of novels are obsessed with other people, often men. Of course, there are Tolstoy and Flaubert\u2019s famous novels of the affair, in which Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary\u2019s obsessions with their respective male objects reach tragic ends. But for this list, I was interested in female obsessives written by women. At first the list seems to be sameish, with many of the narrators fixated on an out-of-reach man. But when you look closer, it becomes evident that even apparently similar obsessions can take very different forms. What is fascinating in most<\/em> of these books (no spoilers!) is how the obsessed woman, appearing at first to be powerless, is ultimately empowered by her obsession. To be obsessed is to have a mind, a heart, and a body\u2014to actively want something\u2014to be, in other words, centered in one’s own story. In the grip of obsession, a woman’s gaze is returned to herself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n