THE WOMEN I THINK ABOUT AT NIGHT

A middle-aged writer sifts through history for other women whose lives matched her wanderlust.

“I’m forty-two. I have no husband, no children, no job,” Finnish author Kankimäki writes early in this hybrid of history, memoir, and feminist essay. She feels a sense of liberation in that status but also a pang of isolation that draws her to “night women” who blazed their own paths. First and most prominent among them is Karen Blixen, author of the 1937 classic Out of Africa. As part of her research into Blixen’s life, Kankimäki chronicles her journey in her footsteps in present-day Tanzania. Both strip away the author’s sense of romanticism; the present-day country is malarial, poverty-stricken, and overrun with tourists while Blixen suffered from sexism along with the case of syphilis her husband gave her. Still, Blixen’s stubbornness is inspiring. Kankimäki also writes pocket biographies of globe-trotters like Nellie Bly and Isabella Bird, who “seems like my doppelgänger: a fortyish, depressed spinster who suffers from headaches and insomnia, but who is fed up with the narrow confines in which her society has trapped her”; Alexandra David-Neel, who infiltrated the sacred Buddhist city of Lhasa; painters like Sofonisba Anguissola and Lavinia Fontana, who navigated the masculine world of 16th-century Italian art; and avant-garde Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, who committed herself to a mental institution. Though the book has a clear organizing principle, its execution feels aimless. The livelier travelogues of Tanzania and Japan clang against the more studious essays on Bird and Bly, and the author’s explanations of her subjects’ difficulties make her concluding “night women's advice” feel thin or cloying (“be buoyant as hell”). Kankimäki’s repeated despairing that she’s unsure where she’s going with the book emphasizes the sense of disorder. However, the author engagingly maps her frustrations against those of her heroes, the “illnesses, self-doubts, weak moments…ordinary human reality” that echo her own.

An enlightening if dense and patchwork study of the many hurdles women artists faced—and still face.