Ivy Pochoda’s women are not here to be easy to forgive, easy to understand, or easy to root for—and that is exactly the point.

During tornado power outages, I found myself reading through These Women, Sing Her Down, and Ecstasy: three books that linger in violence, survival, rage, womanhood, and the pressure to turn pain into something palatable for everyone else. In this episode, I’m talking about what Pochoda’s work reveals about the “good victim” myth: the expectation that women must be soft, grateful, innocent, and emotionally convenient in order for their hurt to count.

We get into the women society overlooks, the difference between being harmed and being powerless, the fear of female anger, and why a survivor does not need to become sweet, forgiving, or morally uncomplicated in order to deserve belief.

Because you can be hurt and still be angry. You can be healing and still be complicated. And sometimes the most threatening thing about a woman is not her rage—it is the moment she stops asking permission to name what happened to her.

These Women centers the people most affected by violence rather than glamorizing its perpetrator, while Sing Her Down pushes into violence by, against, and within women; Ecstasy reimagines Greek tragedy through female freedom, repression, and horror.

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