"You can't fight the feeling that there is something wrong with you, that you are made badly, that you are cold in some rigid, unchangeable way. When you confess these fears to Ella, she tells you that being sick doesn't make you unlovable."
An affecting and delicate story with a hard-hitting concept and beautiful storytelling. From the first few lines, it reads like poetry - soft, descriptive, rich and lyrical but absolutely enchanting in its style and the imagery it creates invokes. Whilst at times these conceptual writing styles can be difficult to digest, especially with a lack of speech marks and running, rambling sentences almost always starting with the same word - I still found it stunning if a little testing in places.

The narration refers to our main character as ‘you’, which at first threw me but slowly became easier to find the flow. Scenes shifted fluidly from one to another instead of a structured narrative; with short chapters that melted into each other in an almost dreamlike state piecing together moments of life, of youth and that in-between state of growing up and growing old. Navigating love, sexuality, friendships, health and identity as our nameless character, us, grows up in front of our eyes - in messy, egotistic, mistake-riddled confused truth that is youth. It carefully dissects the many ways we love, the quiet and the loud, the toxic and the healing in a thoughtful way.

It felt extra personal for me as someone dealing with PCOS to see similar struggles reflected on the pages - a struggle women face every day but are continually gaslit into ignoring despite it infecting every part of their lives. It captures the way chronic illnesses and health problems can take over and how they affect your relationships with others and ourselves.

This was a powerhouse story with an important message - add it to your bookshelves!

i LOVE the style of this. The second person narrative is not something I experience much (perhaps ever) but i REALLY loved it. Perfectly executed and totally made me feel a part of the story, more so than I already did with its relatability to my personal experience.
Gender Theory explores the trials and tribulations of a messy 20 something navigating her life and relationships. At points it really felt like reading my own diary. The stream of consciousness when discussing the narrators thoughts and feelings surrounding the endo diagnosis was a gut-punch in the best way possible. It was very refreshing to see gyno issues portrayed in such a way, that i felt seen and not so much of a problem to those around me.
This is such an important book and I will be recommending to as many people as possible.

this was a tender and real read. i felt a rare closeness to the main protagonist, not only because i am close to her in age and am at a stage in my life which feels like everything is up in the air, but also because the author made her voice vulnerable, honest and cutting, writing in a way that i can only compare to stream-of-consciousness.
i highlighted so may passages in my eARC, which i know for a fact i will return to in the future.

This is one of the better depictions of bisexuality I've read recently, which is refreshing, but I still have some qualms. It would be nice in contemporary literature didn't continuously place bisexuals characters as adulterers or seducers. Doherty connects her main character's chronic illness with a sense of hopelessness that fuels her self-destruction so intelligently and with such overwhelming empathy. A fearless depiction of endometriosis that doesn't try to hide the symptoms behind fluffy language to make how painful and debilitating the condition is.
A really great best friend relationship where the bestie doesn't just blindly forgive and accept the main character's bad behaviour. Ella's anger and the resentment comes from love but also she's been isolated in their relationship as the "perfect friend", meaning she's never been able to communicate when she is suffering. I think this says a lot about how we idealise some of our loved ones and how chronic illness can turn our gaze inward, reducing our capacity to support others, even if we really want to.
I do feel like I've read this before. The sad, self-destructive 20-year-old with no clear goals who treats everyone badly because of self-loathing has been done.

Heartbreaking and realistic, this is what literary fiction is about and what makes me love about this genre. This author has a way with words and sunk its teeth into me. I won’t be forgetting this book anytime soon.

I devoured this novel – it is beautifully written and poignant. The reader is taken on a journey of friendship, failed connections, queerness, and chronic illness told through a wonderfully unique writing style. I was sad to finish it and found myself aching for just a few more chapters!

I struggled a little with the style of writing. Perhaps it was the formatting of the ARC (thank you NetGalley) but it often felt like it meandered from one event to another without pause. I also found the main character difficult to really like, which was possibly the intention of the author, but I found books where I don't particularly like the main character difficult to read. However, the lack of clearly defined chapters kept me reading to the end which was actually quite satisfying. I wish I'd read the author's notes before the book as it gave the story more context which I think would have helped me.

Absolutely incredible. I usually find it difficult to connect to characters deeply in shorter books, but this was not the case here. I am still wiping away my tears.

Gender Theory is unique from the first sentence onwards. Surprisingly, it is written with a second person narration, a style that I’m not sure I have actually ever read before. It works absolute wonders. Especially as somebody in their early twenties currently experiencing some of the things our main character does, the narration truly makes you feel like you are her. And that’s bittersweet. The non-chapter, almost stream of consciousness, style that the book is written in all adds to the content of the story itself. I really did feel like I was experiencing every sentence myself. For the writing and construction of the story alone, this book deserves the highest praise. But that’s not all. The story itself, I don’t even really want to say anything about it because I think living it by reading it is so much better, but the book manages to perfectly capture the feeling of being lost, the feelings of change and uncertainty that come with growing up, illness, and finding yourself and your own sexuality. I kept finding myself highlighting whole paragraphs that felt like they were giving voice to feelings and thoughts I have myself experienced. The friendship with Ella is bittersweet and in a lot of ways watching this friendship and all other relationships evolve throughout the book is heartbreaking and painful, you recognise the destructiveness in some of the behaviours and you want to shout no don’t do that and you want to help but you can’t and you know for certain that continuing to read is going to hurt because you can see what’s unfolding. But you also can’t stop reading because it’s beautiful in a way, it characterises human relationships and all of the feelings of not belonging and wrongness and how that can affect your own actions. And you also recognise maybe how you yourself have sometimes fallen into these patterns which inevitably makes reading about it more painful because it’s like the book is telling you look this is where you were an imperfect human acting in flawed ways. And of course at the centre of it all is also a story about Endometriosis and how the lack of research and care that we have as a society shown for health can negatively impact women and expose us to lives filled with so much physical and emotional pain.

This book is truly a work of art. I cannot wait for everyone to get to read it and I sincerely hope that it gets the attention it deserves. Thank you to Netgalley, the publisher and the author for providing me with an advanced copy of the book so I could already experience it

I have mixed feelings about this book, I did finish it but had stopped caring about the characters as started to find them a little annoying. It did highlight how medical conditions can control your life and so much around women’s health is shrugged off and women told to get on with it.

This wasn’t really my style. The writing flowed but a little too quickly.
I’m more a chapters girl and this one could have done with come context.

4.5 stars, read from beginning to bittersweet end with a knot in my throat and a pit in my stomach. Gender Theory is a raw and very real contemporary litfic novel, with unusual second-person narration that thrusts you into the bloody, beating centre of the protagonist's young adulthood.

It's a bit like every Sally Rooney and Genevieve Novak project ever, with a unique through-line of undiagnosed endometriosis and chronic pain that manages to be both incredibly specific and a shockingly effective stand-in for any and every underreported, untreated woe, particularly ones that predominantly affect women, and (characteristically) | ate it up.

One day I will have grown up enough to stop seeing myself in the complicated, messy, occasionally straight-up nasty female leads of so-called books-about-nothing, but today is not that day.

Unusual, evocative, sad, confronting. The second-person narrative is deftly handled, the things that make this more than your standard coming-of-age are confident in their subtlety. I whizzed through it.

Gender theory from the title is both the seminar where the narrator meets the boy who takes virginity, and also refers to the young woman’s struggle with her own sexuality. Does she like boys more than girls? Is she gay.?
One of the things that first struck me about this novel was that it is written in the second person It’s quite uncommon to read a book written in the second person I can’t remember the last time I did. By the end of the novel, I couldn’t really decide whether I liked it or not. It does give the reader a feeling of immediacy and an immediate ability to see yourself in the narrator which definitely helped.

As well as her love life, the story looks at her difficulties with an invisible illness in this case endometriosis a gynaecological problem I definitely can empathise with her struggle to receive a diagnosis whilst doubting herself. What if they don’t find anything ?what if I’m making it up? The fear of being found to be fraudulent when you have an invisible medical condition is described perfectly in this novel. I am both a medical professional and suffer from An invisible illness and this experience of Medical gaslighting really is described perfectly in the novel.

The author has a clear flowing prose style which is an enjoyable read was this novel could be put into the female fiction category I think the underlying illness issues broaden it’s scope making the novel rather deeper and more meaningful and it might otherwise have been
Madelaine’s characters are all fully three-dimensional, believable people and their responses to life events I’ll described perfectly.
I would recommend this novel to those who like a relationship based novel with hidden death.

I read generally copy of the novel on NetGalley UK the book is published on the 6th of June 2024 by John Murray press.

This will appear on NetGalley, UK, Goodreads and my book blog bionicsarahsbooks.wordpress.com
After publication, it will also appear on Amazon, UK.

Gender Theory, Madeline Docherty
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

You lose your virginity to a boy from your gender theory seminar, and the first person you tell is Ella.
Ella’s with you at the party when you first kiss a girl.
And Ella takes you to the hospital the first time you’re diagnosed.
Over the next few years you have a string of relationships and jobs, but you can always count on Ella to be there for you - until the drinking and the parties, the hospital visits and late night calls, blur the lines of your friendship into something unbalanced and fragile, at risk of breaking altogether.
The worst part is you can see it coming. The worst part is you don’t know how to stop.

I don't have enough words to say how much I loved and enjoyed this book. I didn't realise when I requested this book from NetGalley that it was set in Scotland, so that was a welcome surprise!

This book is an honest exploration of sexuality, friendship and illness. Gender Theory is the first book I've read that shines a light on living with endometriosis and the difficulties that follow in trying to get healthcare professionals to take you seriously.

I finished this within 48 hours of starting it. This book is so beautifully written in the second person, which could go one of two ways, but thankfully was brilliantly mastered.

I won't stop shouting about this wee gem! Thank you to John Murrays and NetGalley for the ARC.

An intimate and honest exploration of love, friendship and sexuality. Madeline Docherty's unique use of language establishes the nature of what it means to grow up and outgrow our environments. The overwhelming nature of friendship can not be overstated in this powerhouse debut novel, as it founds the central narrative for an intense and excruciatingly human read you will not want to look away from.

Thank you to John Murray Press, in partnership with NetGalley, for providing this ARC of 'Gender Theory' by Madeline Docherty.

Gender Theory follows the story of our unnamed main protagonist between Glasgow, Edinburgh, Wales and the north of England, her friendship with Ella and how she navigates her messy life, her relationships, her late-diagnosed endometriosis.

This little gem took me by surprise and I ended up reading it in one sitting. Told in the second person, which was unexpected, refreshing and surprisingly well-mastered, Gender Theory unselfconsciously poses major questions (around female friendship, navigating bisexuality, living with a physical condition that is under diagnosed and shamefully disregarded by many health professional) without imposing any obvious answer, leaving the reader free to think about them.

Gender Theory is full of love and tender, of pain, grief and self-loathing, and I found it particularly relatable on certain subjects. It had me tear up towards the end, which is always a good sign!

I do hope this book gets the attention it deserves.

4.5*

A short, undemanding read, a little reminiscent of Megan Nolan’s Acts of Desperation, but not quite as dark. Will feel very familiar to anyone with endometriosis, or even just struggled to be taken seriously by the healthcare community. Would be interested in seeing where the central figure goes next.