Reading Barnard authors: How three alumnae write the transformations, introspections, and struggles of womanhood

Jeannette Walls, Ottessa Moshfegh, and Jhumpa Lahiri — three acclaimed Barnard alumnae — are authors whose deeply thoughtful and evocative work beautifully captures the inner lives of women. Key works from each author reveals three unforgettable portrayals of women striving to understand themselves and their place in vastly different worlds. 

Artwork by Kathy Cao/The Barnard Bulletin

By Abigail Rabbitt

October 9, 2025

Barnard is home to a flourishing English and creative writing department, cultivating writers who engage deeply with literature and questions of identity and imagination. Among its accomplished alumni are Jeannette Walls (’84), Ottessa Moshfegh (’02), and Jhumpa Lahiri (’89). Although all three authors have published multiple critically acclaimed works, each has a piece that encompasses the experience of grappling with womanhood and self amidst growth and solitude. While vastly different, these three pieces each explore the inner worlds of sharp, independent protagonists undergoing the quiet transformation of becoming a woman. In many ways, these authors echo the experience of Barnard students, who spend their college years discovering themselves through the deep introspection and liberation that often develop at women’s colleges.

“The Glass Castle,” Jeannette Walls (’84)

Jeannette Walls is a journalist and author who spent her childhood traveling the American Southwest. She settled in New York City to attend Barnard, where she also joined The Bulletin. Eventually, she would write multiple New York Times Bestselling books. 

Walls’ 2005 memoir, “The Glass Castle,” is a patchwork of vivid vignettes capturing her nomadic and radically unconventional upbringing. Written through the hopeful gaze of a child, Walls’ memoir illuminates abuse and instability alongside the beauty and awe of traveling the West. The piece displays Walls’ complicated relationships with her selfish and free-spirited mother and her brilliant but reckless father. She retells the confusing contrast of a childhood defined by hunger and uncertainty with adventurous escapades under the stars. The title of the book comes from Walls’ father’s promise to build the family a permanent house where they might finally settle down. This “glass castle” is a beacon of hope throughout the story, a promise of a better life that slowly becomes the family’s greatest source of disappointment. 

At the heart of the story lies the bond between Walls’ four siblings, forged by necessity in the absence of dependable parents. As Walls grows older, her narrating voice matures and the bright haze of childhood begins to clear. What once felt like exhilarating freedom sharpens into a damning perspective on her parents’ failures, and Walls begins to understand their romantic ideas as neglect and selfishness. 

The story ends with the Walls family convening in New York City, where the siblings work various jobs while Walls’ parents live on the streets. Walls begins working as a reporter until she can attend Barnard with the help of loans and scholarships. In the memoir, she admits that she considered dropping out of Barnard to help her family. 

“It felt unbearably selfish, just downright wrong, to be indulging myself with an education in the liberal arts at a fancy private college while Mom and Dad were on the streets,” Walls said. Ultimately, Walls’ older sister convinced her to stay in school because dropping out would “break Dad’s heart.” Walls graduated with honors with a degree in Liberal Arts in 1984. 

Walls’ memoir is an unflinching account of her survival, wrapped in a beautiful tale of growing up. Adventure and struggle become inseparable, and her longing for stability grows quietly, inevitably, into resolve. 

“Eileen,” Ottessa Moshfegh (’02) 

Ottessa Moshfegh is a novelist and essayist whose work is recognized for her dark and unsettling portraits of interior life. She was born and raised in Boston, Massachusetts by her Croatian mother and Iranian father. She graduated from Barnard with a degree in English in 2002 and went on to study literary arts at Brown University. 

“Eileen,” Moshfegh’s 2015 debut novel, follows a young woman plagued by the monotony and banality of her life, steeped in the gray winter cold of a small New England town. Eileen’s days are marked by her grim shifts at a juvenile detention center and her caretaking for her alcoholic father. Initially, the reader is compelled to feel empathetic toward Eileen. Eventually, the dark portrait of the young woman rotting in her own isolation becomes revolting. While her exterior world is quiet and painfully unremarkable, Eileen’s interior world is perverse and grotesque, consisting of sexual fantasies of teenage boys and visceral descriptions of bowel movements. Moshfegh’s narration forces the reader to witness the ugliness of Eileen’s psychological unraveling, focusing on her unsettling habits, unwashed body, and troubling thoughts. Disguised as a psychological thriller, the novel explores how growth can turn to rot in the wrong circumstances. Eileen is sustained and motivated by her own mind, daydreaming of city life and running away. Moshfegh makes space to explore what happens when a young, underprivileged woman with no support must grow up on her own. Decentering plot for detail and rumination, Moshfegh calls for empathy amidst ugliness, exploring the mind as a living, breathing world. 

“Whereabouts,” Jhumpa Lahiri (’89)

Jhumpa Lahiri is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and literary translator whose work explores themes of identity, migration, and cultural belonging. She studied English at Barnard and has since returned to the department as the director of the creative writing program, currently teaching courses on Italian women writers and Ovid’s Metamorphosis. 

In “Whereabouts,” published in 2018, an unnamed woman observes an unnamed city as if drifting through life without time or transition. The reader gets to know this woman as if they have just spent a day listening to a friend recounting their past. The unnamed woman seems to travel aimlessly, people-watching, lingering in public spaces, and recounting brief and depthless interactions with old friends and lovers. She often bumps into her friend’s husband who she believes could have been a romantic interest in another life. The two never confront this reality, dancing around the loneliness and longing between them, creating an empty space of reflection and ambiguity. In fragmented writing, Lahiri captures the feeling of urban loneliness and the tension of sitting on the edge of a transformation.

Lahiri’s writing makes this woman’s loneliness and longing seem both intimate and universal, allowing the reader to get to know her as a companion through her mundane yet somehow extraordinary wanderings. This novel is reflective and nostalgic, allowing the reader to feel each moment precisely. Each walk or encounter is sectioned into a short chapter, all coming together to display a life in motion, as full as it is empty and lonely. “Whereabouts” tracks how transformation occurs over time in unremarkable moments, showing how the mind can grow as your perspectives shift.

Together, these three works by Barnard alumnae capture the many ways in which struggle, reflection, and change allow women to eventually understand themselves. Walls writes of survival and coming-of-age, Moshfegh of isolation and the strange interiority of the mind, and Lahiri of renewal in ordinary moments. Each author, in her own way, tells the story of the fierce struggle of growth. Perhaps the next renowned Barnard author is brewing in the creative writing department, grappling with her own transformation.