BOOK

My first book, Too Much: How Victorian Constraints Still Bind Women Today, was published on February 25, 2020 by Grand Central Publishing. Read an excerpt from the introduction at Bookforum. You can order it at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, and Books-a-Million, but I strongly and enthusiastically urge you to order it from your local independent bookstore. Two of my favorites are Loyalty Bookstore and Solid State Books.

If you live outside the United States, ordering from the Book Depository is your best bet.

Please also add Too Much on Goodreads!

If you’re a member of the press interested in covering Too Much or a bookseller who would like to organize an event, you can reach my publicist at Grand Central, Kamrun Nesa, at Kamrun.Nesa@hbgusa.com or me at rachelvorona@gmail.com. You can also refer to this site’s Contact page for my representation.

In the meantime, here’s a bit about the book:

Written in the tradition of Shrill, Dead Girls, Sex Object and other frank books about the female gaze, TOO MUCH encourages women to reconsider the beauty of their excesses-emotional, physical, and spiritual. Rachel Vorona Cote braids cultural criticism, theory, and storytelling together in her exploration of how culture grinds away our bodies, souls, and sexualities, forcing us into smaller lives than we desire. An erstwhile Victorian scholar, she sees many parallels between that era's fixation on women's "hysterical" behavior and our modern policing of the same; in the space of her writing, you're as likely to encounter Jane Eyre and Lizzie Bennet as you are Britney Spears and Lana Del Rey. This book will tell the story of how women, from then and now, have learned to draw power from their reservoirs of feeling, all that makes us "Too Much."

"Too Much defies easy categorization. It is as much a memoir as a work of impressive scholarship; it is as comfortable parsing the cultural meaning surrounding Britney Spears' public disintegration as it is analyzing the feminine mores conveyed in obscure 18th-century texts aimed at improving girls and women." — Washington Independent Review of Books