Women Contain Multitudes: A Discussion on Writing Modern Womanhood with Jana Casale

By Meaghan O'Brien

Jana Casale finds beauty in the truth of life’s small moments, the everyday occurrences that make up every day. In her debut novel, The Girl Who Never Read Noam Chomsky, protagonist Leda lives her relatively ordinary life, told through vignettes of smaller moments in her life. We meet her in college in Boston, as she tries to force a meet-cute with a boy in a coffee shop who’s reading Noam Chomsky. It doesn’t go very well. And the title is all you need to know about the Noam Chomsky.

The germ of the idea came from a conversation between one of her professors and a classmate, who was telling the professor all about the project she was doing about Noam Chomsky.

“But have you read any Noam Chomsky?” the professor asked.

“Well, no,” the classmate replied.

It was an odd moment that stuck with Casale, enough so that it spawned her BFA fiction thesis at Emerson in 2011. There she worked with a thesis adviser who understood her project and encouraged her to experiment.

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