You were too sane to teach a child about craziness and cruelty. I had to learn about those from people who were crazy and cruel themselves.

Reading Poor Things felt like falling into a fever dream—where you’re half-aware, slightly dizzy, and constantly wondering if what you’re reading is real or just a distorted trick of the mind. The book is often described as a feminist twist on Frankenstein, but as I sat with it, I kept circling back to the same question: Is this actually a feminist novel, or just a man’s interpretation of what feminism should feel like? The uneasiness isn’t accidental. It’s built into its bones.

This feeling resurfaced for me recently when I watched a new Frankenstein adaptation on Netflix—one that stays true to the original book and has been receiving so much praise. It was eerie how strongly it reminded me of Poor Things. Though the two stories aren’t similar in plot, they share the same core dilemma: What does it mean to create life, and what responsibility does the creator owe the created? And more specifically, what changes when the “monster” exists in a woman’s body? Watching the movie last night almost reopened something inside me—it dragged all my thoughts about Bella Baxter back to the surface, almost too vividly.

In Gray’s story, Bella is resurrected with a child’s brain inside an adult woman’s body, making her existence inherently unsettling. Baxter, the doctor who revives her, treats her more like a curiosity—an experiment to shape, control, and observe. Because Bella’s mind hasn’t been shaped by society, she approaches the world with unfiltered boldness. She questions norms unintentionally, simply because she doesn’t know they exist. She challenges every expectation of womanhood without even trying to.

This, on the surface, looks like empowerment. But when you look a little closer, the cracks begin to show. How empowering is a woman’s independence when it exists only because the man who created her erased her original identity? How feminist is a story where the woman’s “freedom” is engineered by men and narrated almost entirely through their perspectives?

Bella’s journey becomes even more chaotic when she runs away with a lawyer—after promising marriage to McCandless the very day she meets him. This leads to one of the most interesting moments in the book: the two letters. One from the lawyer. One from Bella. Both describing the same events. Both completely different.

The lawyer rushes to blame Bella—painting himself noble and rational while turning Bella into something reckless or manipulative. Then you read Bella’s version, and suddenly the entire narrative shifts. Her letter is clumsy, curious, naïve, and painfully honest. Those conflicting letters feel like a metaphor for every time a woman’s story has been twisted to protect a man's ego.

This split narrative also echoes the questions raised in Frankenstein—who gets to tell the truth? The creator? The creation? Or the one with the loudest voice?

And then the ending comes, disrupting everything you thought you understood. The twist forces you to look back at the entire book and ask: Did Bella ever truly own her story? Or were we always reading someone else’s version of her? It’s disorienting in the best and worst ways—because once again, it highlights how fragile a woman’s narrative becomes when surrounded by men who insist on defining her.

These layers are why it’s so hard for me to call Poor Things a feminist novel without hesitation. Bella is unforgettable, but she is also shaped, controlled, interpreted, and rewritten by men—within the story and outside it. Even her rebellion exists inside a framework drawn by male imagination.

So when you ask yourself if this book empowers women… the answer doesn’t come easily. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe the discomfort, the uncertainty, the shifting truths are all part of what the book wants us to feel—that unease of watching a woman fight for agency in a world where every voice around her thinks they know better.

But what I do know is this: Bella Baxter lingers. She rattles something inside you. She makes you question every narrator, every version of “truth,” and every attempt to package feminism into something neat and easily digestible. Watching Frankenstein last night only sharpened that feeling—two creations, two bodies stitched back to life, two stories about power and autonomy—and one haunting question:

Who gets to decide what a woman becomes?

How do I read about yesterday’s horrors when today’s look exactly the same?

I’ve always been someone who loved historical fiction — especially books set around World War II. Those stories shaped so much of my reading life. I used to read at least ten of them a year. There was something about understanding the past, the wars, the cruelty humans inflicted on one another, that made me feel more grounded. As if learning those stories helped me make sense of the world.

But these days… I can’t.
Not because I don’t care anymore, but because every time I try, it physically drains me.
Emotionally too.

Reading about past atrocities while watching present ones unfold on my phone screen — it’s a strange kind of heartbreak. It’s like reliving history while knowing it’s happening all over again, just with new names, new borders, new excuses.

I don’t know if others feel this, too. Maybe they do. Maybe some readers are hiding the same ache, the same exhaustion. Because for me, historical fiction used to be a way of learning empathy. Now it feels like a mirror, reflecting the same horrors I’m seeing in real time — Gaza, Ukraine, everywhere.

And I keep thinking:
How are we repeating history with so much confidence?
Did we learn nothing?

I don’t know how today’s wars will be written in tomorrow’s books. I don’t know how much will be softened, or erased, or turned into something noble or strategic or “necessary,” because that’s what history usually does. It protects the victors. It hides the uncomfortable parts. It sanitises cruelty.

But right now, in this moment, I don’t see victors anywhere.
There are no heroes in modern war.
Only people losing their homes, their families, their humanity.
Only us — losing pieces of ourselves every time we scroll through another headline.

So am I becoming pessimistic?
Maybe.
Maybe not.

I’m pessimistic because governments — all governments — seem to chase power more than peace. Because leaders speak of morality while doing the opposite. Because even in tragedies, someone somewhere is calculating gain.

But I’m also strangely optimistic.
Optimistic because people still care.
Because they still protest.
Because they still hope.
Because each new generation believes that maybe, this time, something will finally change.

Look at Nepal’s Gen Z movement. I don’t know what its long-term effects will be. Maybe it’s too early to judge. Maybe the very people who stood together will clash later — that’s how movements go. But still, that moment mattered. It meant something. And I pray, honestly, that the ones who lost their lives, their soul, their fire… that it wasn’t all for nothing.

Maybe that’s what keeps me going.
Not history.
Not politics.
Not leaders.

But people.
Just ordinary people trying their best not to repeat the same mistakes.

Maybe one day I’ll return to historical fiction.
Maybe when the world feels a little less heavy.
Maybe when my heart can hold both past and present without breaking.

Until then, I’ll just sit with this feeling — that strange mix of sadness, anger, exhaustion, and hope.
Hope that we don’t have to keep repeating history.
Hope that we can, somehow, survive it.