In The Thinking Woman, Julienne van Loon asks what philosophy might look like if it began not from abstraction, mastery or the grand male voice booming from a lectern, but from the texture of a life being lived.

She brings the work of six major contemporary thinkers into contact with ordinary but difficult human questions: how we love, play, work, fear, wonder and make friendship possible. The book draws on Rosi Braidotti, Nancy Holmstrom, Siri Hustvedt, Laura Kipnis, Julia Kristeva and Marina Warner, but it is not a simple guidebook to their ideas. Van Loon uses their work as ways of thinking through motherhood, labour, embodiment, imagination, academia, desire, violence and creativity.

Personal without collapsing into confession, theoretical without turning into concrete soup, The Thinking Woman is a generous, restless book about how ideas actually move through a life. For readers interested in feminist philosophy, contemporary thought, memoir, creative nonfiction, and the ongoing crime scene that is “serious thinking” being coded masculine.