There’s a moment early in Alexis Krasilovsky’s new novel, Portrait of an Artist as a Young Woman, where Ana Fried, a film student watching Buñuel in class, scribbling in the margins of her notes, realizes she can name exactly one woman who’s made it as a filmmaker: Maya Deren. One. And she isn’t even sure the door is really open, or whether she should be trying poetry instead, or painting, or anything else that might actually let a woman in.
That’s the moment this book is built on, and it’s the reason I wanted to write about it here instead of just telling Alexis privately what I thought.
We talk a lot at The Reel Women about the women who get erased from film history, the ones whose names should be as familiar as the men’s. Krasilovsky, a documentary filmmaker herself (Women Behind the Camera, Let Them Eat Cake), writes that erasure from the inside. Ana isn’t looking back at history from a safe distance. She’s living inside the moment before the record gets written, not knowing yet whether she’ll be in it. The novel is dedicated “for my sisters in cinema,” and you feel that dedication on every page, less as sentiment and more as a debt being paid.
One thing worth saying plainly: none of this is just atmosphere. The Black Panther strike that clears out Ana’s Yale campus really happened. Martin Luther King really did lead his final march in Memphis in support of the sanitation workers’ strike, days before he was killed there. Andy Warhol’s 1971 Whitney retrospective, with Candy Darling and Ultra Violet at his side, is documented history, not novelist’s invention. Maya Deren really was one of the only women filmmakers anyone had heard of at that point. Krasilovsky is threading Ana through the actual civil rights movement, the actual women’s movement, the actual cinéfeminist movement building in Europe around Varda, Akerman, and Sontag, and the actual, contradictory sexual liberation of the era, all at the same time, because that’s how Ana would have lived through them. Nothing here is borrowed for texture. It’s the real record, with a woman’s interior life dropped into the middle of it.
What makes the book work, though, isn’t the history lesson. It’s the structure. Ana’s filmmaking career, her fever dreams of Yale and Memphis, the documentary about the Holocaust, her fights to be taken seriously, none of it happens on its own track. It’s tangled up with the men who try to manage her talent instead of respecting it, relationships that start and end without ceremony, and the grief and guilt she carries over her sister’s death, a wound the book returns to without ever fully resolving it. Krasilovsky doesn’t let Ana’s art and Ana’s life take turns. They happen at the same time, over each other, the way they actually do.
I know that feeling more than I’d like to. When I was diagnosed with cancer and went through my own chemotherapy treatments, nobody handed me a pause button. There was no version of it where the treatment happened and then, once that was finished, life resumed. I worked through it. I rested through it. I healed through it. All three were happening at once, tangled into each other exactly the way Ana’s filmmaking is tangled into her grief and her bad relationships and her fever dreams in this book. Nobody gets to finish grieving before they’re allowed to keep building something, and nobody gets to finish healing before life asks something of them again. Reading Ana’s story, where the work and the loss and the men and the fever dreams all run together with no clean breaks between them, didn’t feel like a literary device to me. It felt like an accurate account of what it’s actually like to keep making something while your life refuses to hold still and wait for you.
The novel doesn’t flinch from the era’s contradictions either. This is sexual liberation and its underside in the same breath, the freedom of the 1970s and ’80s sitting right next to the ways women’s ambition and their bodies both got treated as available for the taking. Krasilovsky’s own author bio doesn’t soften any of it, and neither does the book. It reads like a #MeToo story from a generation that didn’t have the language yet, which is exactly why it matters that it exists now.
I read an early copy and I’d recommend it to any woman in this industry who has ever had to build something real while everyone around her kept insisting it was “just a hobby,” “just a phase,” or “just” anything at all. It’s not a comfortable read in places. It isn’t supposed to be. But it’s an honest one, and it puts a name and a face on the women whose work, and whose movements, made it possible for the rest of us to even be having this conversation.
Portrait of an Artist as a Young Woman releases September 2026.
