On (Not) Being a Woman Writer

What happens—to you, to your career—when the “woman” in “woman writer” no longer applies? For Catapult, Lio Min writes about a journalism career built, in part, on being an “Asian American woman” who writes about “Asian American women’s issues”—and then about no longer being one of those things. “For as long as I’ve been a writer, I’ve been a woman writer,” Min writes. “Here’s the catch: Over the course of the past few years, I have begun to feel like a stranger in my body. The more I wrote about girls and women, the more distanced I felt from the figure I saw in the mirror.”

Photo by Nayanika Mukherjee

is a staff writer for The Millions. Born and raised in New York, she now lives in the Midwest, where she is a PhD student in American literature.