Books like I Love Dick
In each of these novels, a woman turns the floodlight of her intelligence onto her own appetite—and refuses to look away when desire becomes ridiculous, humiliating, or revelatory.
If you liked I Love Dick, you’ll love these
Not lookalikes — kindred books. Each one shares something essential with I Love Dick, and we tell you exactly what.
Heti shares Kraus’s exhilarating disregard for the border between life and art. Her protagonist, also named Sheila, scavenges conversations, emails, friendship, sex, and artistic failure for an answer to the title’s impossible question. The result feels less composed than caught in the act of becoming: part novel, part play, part transcript, part self-indictment.
What makes it a defining work of contemporary autofiction is not mere confession but the pressure Heti puts on confession. Is turning life into art courageous, vain, exploitative—or all three? Like I Love Dick, it converts embarrassment into method and makes female friendship and ambition intellectually urgent. Reading it means entering one of the sharpest, funniest arguments about how a woman might make both a self and a work of art.
A wealthy woman enters her maid’s vacated room and encounters something that ruptures her orderly sense of herself. From that stark opening, Lispector builds an astonishing first-person reckoning in which disgust, ecstasy, class, identity, and the limits of language collapse into one another.
Kraus’s readers will recognize the audacity of treating an apparently degrading fixation as a route to serious thought. But Lispector’s intensity is stranger and more elemental: every sentence seems to be discovering consciousness from scratch. Long regarded as one of the Brazilian master’s central achievements, this is the rare cult classic that fully earns its aura. It does not merely describe a mind in crisis; it makes that crisis happen inside the reader.
Lucy is stalled on a dissertation about Sappho, wrecked by a breakup, and dispatched to Venice Beach, where therapy, loneliness, and erotic hunger begin eroding her claims to good judgment. Broder gives her a voice that is learned, filthy, mordantly funny, and brutally alert to the spectacle of her own need.
If I Love Dick thrilled you by letting obsession become both farce and philosophy, The Pisces pushes that bargain toward delirium. Broder refuses the flattering version of female desire: appetite here is bodily, selfish, comic, and capable of generating its own mythology. Yet beneath the outrageousness lies a piercing inquiry into why romantic longing can feel like metaphysical proof. Few novels make abjection this entertaining—or make entertainment feel so dangerously revealing.