The Four Books That Became My Lighthouses
Four books from different eras of my life have stayed with me long after I closed the final page. Each arrived at a pivotal moment, when I felt a change in the wind. Something in them intrigued me, and they became a kind of lighthouse guiding me back to shore when I felt unmoored.
On the surface, they couldn’t be more different — genres, authors, publication dates. But each one held me through my becoming era. These aren’t how-to books. They’re vignettes, fragments of other people’s lives that showed me how you can live your own life differently.
I’ve always known I would live a little untethered — not wayward, but not following the same scripts as those around me. At nineteen, I knew I didn’t want kids. At twenty-one, I sensed corporate climbing wasn’t for me (I wish I had listened more closely to that voice at twenty-seven). At thirty, I knew marriage, if it came, would come later in life. And so I gravitated toward stories that felt like lifebuoys.
If you feel that same tug — if the waves of expectation feel too loud, too heavy — these four books might just be your lighthouse too.
Unconventional Paths & Messy Middles
I read The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing and Olive at two different points in my life. Girls’ Guide came to me in my late teens to early twenties. Olive was in my late twenties when I began to sit more seriously with my choices to be childfree.
The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing was my first glimpse into a woman navigating life on her own terms, even when it didn’t look neat or linear. Through interlinked short stories, we follow Jane Rosenal from adolescence to adulthood—watching her observe love, chase it, get burned by it, and ultimately realize she is more than her relationship status. By the end, she’s the “single friend” in her group, content with her editing career, and no longer desperate to prove herself through a partner.
What Jane taught me was twofold: you’re not defined by your relationship status, and you should build a full life that doesn’t hinge on a partner. If love comes, it should add to what you’ve already created.
Years later, Olive met me in a very different season. By my late twenties, I knew I needed to sit with the decision I had carried since girlhood: that I didn’t want kids. It’s something I’ve always known in my bones, but I wanted to see how others had navigated the choice.
At 33, Olive is making her own decision not to have children while her three closest friends are raising kids or trying to conceive. She’s flawed—selfish, quick to judge, too in her head—but that’s what made her real. The book captured what it feels like to be the “other” friend, the one choosing a path that doesn’t fit neatly with everyone else’s. Olive fears being left behind, losing her friendships, and ending up alone. And those are real fears.
Olive taught me that walking an unconventional path also means learning to hold space for your own choices and for your friends’. Friendships naturally change, but they don’t have to end. Sometimes, I’ll be the buoy for them. Other times, they’ll be the buoy for me. Olive showed me that both can be true.
Together, Jane and Olive gave me permission to embrace the messy middle: to reject the idea that womanhood is defined by relationship or motherhood, and to instead root myself in building a full, honest, unconventional life.
There isn’t one script for womanhood. These books show how to embrace the in-between and let your path be messy, nonlinear, and valid.
Pursuing Dreams & Moving Past the Shoulds
The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing showed me that a woman’s worth isn’t defined by her relationship status. Jane ends the story still single, but content with the career and life she’s built on her own terms. That was radical to me when I first read it — the idea that your life could feel full even without checking the usual boxes.
But what struck me more, rereading it later, was that Jane’s independence wasn’t just about saying no to expectations. It was also about saying yes to something else — her work, her creativity, her voice. And that’s the part that leads into the next lesson these books taught me: the courage to move past the “shoulds” and build a dream life that feels like your own.
Which brings me to Lucy. This Summer Will Be Different is technically a romance, but I think it is a coming-of-age story. It reminded me that friendship and love aren’t just destinations — they’re spaces of discovery. Connection roots us when everything else feels uncertain.
Set in the idyllic Prince Edward Island, we follow Lucy as she navigates her friendship with Bridget and her budding feelings for Bridget’s brother, Felix. But at its core, the story isn’t just about Lucy and Felix — it’s about Lucy’s growth. We watch her realize she’s different from her parents’ more “practical” ways, confront the “shoulds” that have shaped her choices, and begin to carve out a life that reflects her own desires. By the end, Lucy takes a leap toward her dream of owning a cut-flower shop on PEI.
I’ve carried my own list of shoulds — about career, money, or even how adulthood was supposed to look — and like Lucy, I had to start asking if any of them were truly mine.
What Lucy taught me was how to move past the shoulds. Her journey is one of introspection, of learning to trust her own wants instead of the expectations handed to her. As a workaholic, her drive masked a deep need for control and validation — but slowly, she discovers that self-discovery, creativity, and joy matter as much as achievement.
I know what it feels like to equate work with worth — to chase the next milestone thinking it will make me feel enough.
Lucy’s story reminded me that pursuing your dreams doesn’t always mean chasing the biggest, flashiest vision. Sometimes it’s as simple as listening to that quiet pull — starting a flower shop, embracing creativity, or choosing a slower rhythm. What mattered wasn’t that Lucy’s dream was “practical” or impressive, but hers.
Everyday Meaning & Rewriting Success
And that’s where the next book deepened this lesson for me. Tiny Beautiful Things reminded me that a dream life isn’t always built in leaps and career changes — often, it’s made of small moments, daily rituals, and the wisdom tucked into ordinary days.
I first read Tiny Beautiful Things when I was leaving for Scotland. This book was given to me by a professor turned mentor turned friend. Cheryl Strayed’s letters became a lifeline when I felt my most untethered. She never offered a step-by-step way out of the fog, but instead wrote with a kind of radical honesty — answering letters about love, loss, mistakes, creativity, and fear with compassion and clarity.
One letter about choices still lingers with me. The closing lines:
I’ll never know and neither will you of the life you don’t choose. We’ll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn’t carry us. There’s nothing to do but salute it from the shore.
I carry that thought with me often. I think of the summer I didn’t take the internship in DC, the season I almost moved to Orcas Island to photograph a YMCA camp, the month I could have traveled but chose the Edinburgh Fringe Festival instead. Each was a fork in the road, a ship I could have boarded but didn’t.
I imagine those sister lives sometimes, wonder about the adventures each of those Renées might have had. They are beautiful lives, but they’re not mine. They remind me that choosing one path means letting go of another, and that’s not failure. It’s just the shape of a life. But I’ll salute them from my current life.
These books were my lighthouses, each one steadying me in a season when the waves felt too strong. They didn’t give me a step-by-step map to shore, but they reminded me I could keep steering — that there are many ways to chart a life.
Maybe that’s the point: we don’t need certainty or calm seas to begin. We only need to trust the small lights that guide us home, one choice, one page, one season at a time.
