Mistakes Were Made: Overthinking and the Contemporary Woman Writer

This essay gives a literary account of “overthinking” women in the autofictional forms of the Brexlit era. In Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This and Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk, the protagonists, both avatars for the authors, frequently find themselves having imperfect or even failed political conversations with strangers and then ruminating on their sense of their own mistakes. But rather than dismissing their sometimes cringe-inducing self-indictments, this essay suggests that overthinking, as a literary mode, is a reparative experiment in counterfactual thought.