I arrived in Milan too early for anything to be open—except my mind, already humming. I wasn’t here to shop, eat al dente pasta, or review a fashion show. I was here for something more rarefied: the second edition of the Miu Miu Literary Club, titled A Woman’s Education, held inside the richly paneled Circolo Filologico Milanese, a temple of language, lined with books and ghosts of thinkers past.
Curated under the direction of Miuccia Prada herself, this year’s theme interrogated the formative, fraught, and ever-evolving terrain of girlhood, love, and sex education. “With their novels The Inseparables by Simone de Beauvoir and The Waiting Years by Fumiko Enchi, both authors challenge stereotypes that are still very present in our culture nowadays,” Mrs. Prada shared. “How do we teach young girls concepts as self-determination? How do we teach them to become the independent women of the future?”
Those questions hung in the air at the two-day event. And while I’m not a woman, I am deeply aligned with Miu Miu’s project: one of intellectual glamour and radical curiosity. And the insistence that literature can still be sexy.
Day One: Womanity Under Construction
The opening panel, The Power of Girlhood, focused on de Beauvoir’s posthumously published novella The Inseparables. Translated by Lauren Elkin—the French-American writer behind Flâneuse and Scaffolding—the story traces a deep, ambiguous friendship between two young women: a kind of emotional queerness that defies easy categorization.
Elkin appeared onstage alongside Geetanjali Shree, the Booker Prize-winning Indian author of Tomb of Sand, and Veronica Raimo, the Italian novelist and essayist whose writing sparkles with intellectual mischief. Writer and curator Lou Stoppard moderated, turning the panel into a sort of live, unscripted essay.
What emerged was a portrait of womanhood as something unstable, forever under construction. Elkin remarked that even at 46, she still feels she’s “becoming” a woman—a direct echo of de Beauvoir’s own radical thinking. Shree traced her early encounters with existentialist literature, describing how books gave language to a quiet restlessness already inside her. But it was Raimo who delivered one of the day’s sharpest provocations: “When it comes to women, we’re always talking about the body. No one asks a male writer about his relationship to his body. Men get to be pure brain, pure intellect. We get asked about menstruation.” In a world that still scrutinizes female experience through physicality, Raimo’s observation landed with a thud—the kind of truth that doesn’t ask for applause.
The conversation flowed easily into the readings: prose and poetry laced with tenderness and bite, underscored by performances from Joy Crookes, Donan Leake, and Nicola Mazzetti. The crowd was an ecosystem of beauty and brains: Honor Swinton Byrne, Millie Brady, Valentina Romani, Demi Singleton, Louane. Every direction you turned, someone fabulous was quietly listening, which felt like a new kind of chic.
Day Two: Tender Sex and Hardcore Friendship
The following afternoon, we returned for About Love, Sex, and Desire, a panel devoted to Enchi’s The Waiting Years. The 1957 novel centers around Tomo, a woman forced to find a concubine for her powerful husband. It’s a story about submission and silence, yes—but also about endurance and the interior lives of women who history often forgets.
On the panel: Nicola Dinan, whose novels (Bellies, Disappoint Me) explore love through trans and queer lenses; Naoise Dolan, the dryly devastating author of Exciting Times; and Sarah Manguso, who writes like a scalpel, cutting deep into themes of illness and the limits of the body. The conversation was introduced by Cindy Bruna and moderated by poet and activist Kai Isaiah Jamal.
Dinan reflected on how friendship, not romance, forms the central arc of her novels. “For so long, romantic partnerships were survival for women. But my friendships—those are the real love stories.” Manguso, too, spoke with ferocity and tenderness: “Serious literature by women convinced me I was a fully human person. That’s why being invited to Miu Miu’s Literary Club means so much to me.” These weren’t sanitized stories. These were writers who made art out of blood and nuance, who pushed against what literature is “supposed” to do. Enchi, writing openly about desire in postwar Japan, set the blueprint. They’re remixing it.
The afternoon ended with spoken word, vinyl sets, and live music by Bluem, Enny, and Pip Miller. Even the afterglow of the event felt lit from within—soft voices, hard ideas.
A postscript from Milano
What Mrs. Prada has built with the Miu Miu Literary Club isn’t a gesture—it’s a world. A world where books are worn, where feminism is generative, where education is understood as an evolving, intimate thing. It’s not about having the answers. It’s about asking the right questions in a beautiful room with other sharp people.
Milan reminded me that style doesn’t live apart from intellect. It’s informed by it. That a quote can hit as hard as a look. That literature isn’t a retreat from the world. It’s how some of us enter it. And as someone who doesn’t identify with girlhood but who reveres it—who recognizes its cultural force and complicated brilliance—I left the Literary Club grateful for the invitation to witness. Let the girls read!
