Making Gods Out of Feeble Men
An Inspired Thought From Reading "Luster" by Raven Leilani
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“Luster” by Raven Leilani is a bold, incisive novel that confronts the reader with the discomfort of seeing a young woman try to make a life out of scraps. Themes such as numbness, race, power dynamics, male dominance, belonging, and sexuality intersect to reveal the interior world of a protagonist who is endlessly positioned as peripheral—someone who must fight to be seen in a world determined to render her invisible.
From the first page, Edie is presented as a woman standing just outside every circle she wishes to enter. She doesn’t quite belong anywhere: not in her childhood home, not among her peers, not at work, and certainly not in the home of the married man she becomes involved with. Her age, her finances, her trauma, and her Blackness all function as barriers that repeatedly cast her as the “other.” She is so accustomed to existing on the margins that the reader can’t help but hope she will eventually claim a higher standard for herself. But she doesn’t—and that absence of awakening becomes part of the ache of the narrative.
Reading this book was uncomfortable in the most revealing way. It forces you to consider how isolating life can become when no one ever teaches you what you’re allowed to want, what you’re worthy of, or what intimacy should actually feel like. Edie’s repeated lowering of her own standards creates the illusion that meaningless encounters are the closest she can get to intimacy. And in that void, she does what many women raised in scarcity do: she makes a god out of a feeble man. She elevates someone profoundly undeserving simply because his attention—however limited—momentarily interrupts her invisibility.
Ultimately, reading “Luster” made it painfully clear how important it is to have a community where your presence isn’t questioned — where you’re not fighting to be seen. Without that grounding, it’s too easy to misinterpret crumbs as devotion and to continue placing people on pedestals they never deserved in the first place.
In this email we’ll cover:
What’s New
Reflections
Insights
Closing Remarks
“I think of how keenly I’ve been wrong. I think of all the gods I have made out of feeble men.”
― Raven Leilani, Luster
What’s New?
Book of the Week:
“Luster” by Raven Leilani
Personal Rating:
⭐️⭐️⭐️
Genre:
Fiction
Synopsis:
Write
Why We Love It:
This book is written beautifully. Leilani has spoken before about her love of language, and you feel that on every page. The writing isn’t just descriptive — it’s psychologically and artistically intentional. The story is fractured, unpredictable, and often abruptly cut, which mirrors Edie’s own life. Her identity is pieced together from moments that never fully resolve, and the structure forces the reader to sit inside that same emotional friction. You feel destabilized in the exact way Edie is consistently destabilized by her circumstances.
Luster isn’t a book you wander into lightly. It confronts you when it’s ready — with loneliness, numbness, race, sexuality, power, and the uncomfortable realities of wanting more for yourself while accepting so much less. It reads like a collection of “almosts.” Edie is visible for a moment, then the moment dissolves. So much of the story is presented in fragments, giving us half-shadows of her thoughts and experiences. The writing teaches us that parts of her will always remain inaccessible, even to herself. The structure becomes an extension of her voice: unfinished, interrupted, searching.
There are always two layers to trauma: what happened, and how we were supported in the aftermath — or how alone we were. This book made that painfully clear. Edie is repeatedly left to process everything by herself, both in childhood and adolescence. There is no guiding presence, no voice helping her understand what any of it means. And children aren’t shaped simply by the events they endure, but by the loneliness they feel inside those events. Without someone to reflect their reality back to them, their inner world becomes disjointed. Unanchored. That’s the foundation Edie grows up with, and it’s exactly the kind of foundation that makes it dangerously easy, later in life, to put people on a pedestal — because when you’ve never been guided, even the smallest attention can feel like intimacy.
Key Message:
At its core, “Luster” is a story about a young woman who has learned to survive on emotional scraps, and what it means to try to build a self while feeling fundamentally unseen. Edie moves through the world as someone always on the outskirts — socially, financially, racially, psychologically. The novel shows us how a person raised without consistent guidance or emotional reflection becomes someone who interprets connection through fragments. Her identity, like the structure of the book itself, is made of unfinished sentences and almost-belongings. It’s not that she doesn’t want wholeness; it’s that she was never taught how to experience it.
The key message of the book is that when we grow up without steady mirrors — without people who help us understand our experiences and anchor our worth — we internalize the belief that we deserve very little, and then we behave that way. Our inner belief is shaped to disempower us. Edie is not drawn to chaos for its own sake. She is drawn to intensity because it is the only thing that cuts through her numbness. She confuses volatility with intimacy because her early experiences taught her that support and safety are luxuries, not expectations. And so she keeps reaching for people who give her the bare minimum, because the bare minimum still feels like more than she had.
This book shows us how women learn to make gods out of feeble men. When you have lived in emotional isolation, even inconsistent affection feels like devotion. Even a man with nothing truly meaningful to offer can look like a savior simply because he acknowledges you. Edie doesn’t pedestalise Eric because he is extraordinary — she pedestalises him because she has been conditioned to see any moment of recognition as a lifeline. The message of the book is not merely that Edie deserves more, but that many women are taught so early to expect less. So much so that we become fluent in elevating the unworthy. This book asks, with unsettling clarity: what happens to a woman’s life when her hunger, not her standards, becomes the loudest voice guiding her choices? In the end, Edie’s choices only debilitated her self-worth further.
Quotes and Questions To Reflect On
Quote of the Week:
“I understand that I had engaged seriously with someone who only engaged theoretically, and I was so humiliated by this that we never spoke again.”
― Raven Leilani, Luster
Reflection Questions:
How does the main character’s journey come across to you as the reader?
Are there moments in the protagonist’s relationship to men that you may empathise with or have seen in your environment?
What decisions did the character make that you found empowering or thought-provoking?
What do you think she learned from this experience?
How can you apply the lessons from this story to your own life?
Insights and Inspiration
Author Spotlight:
Raven Leilani
Background:
Raven Leilani is an American writer, whose debut novel “Luster” won several awards and received amazing praise. Having written this book whilst she was completing her graduate degree at NYU, makes this even more impressive. Her intention and passion is felt in her prose, and her structural choices intentional.
Beyond the Book:
Vogue Article by Chanté Joseph: Is Having a Boyfriend Embarrassing Now?
Upcoming Releases:
Books to Look Out For:
To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
Women Without Kids by Ruby Warrington
Closing Remarks
The title itself becomes a bitter kind of irony. “Luster” suggests shine, polish, something coveted—and yet what we see instead is the hollow glow of people pretending to be more luminous than they are. Edie moves through this world searching for something that feels like belonging, and every time she reaches for it, the veneer flakes away. It happens so often, it’s becoming her standard of expectation. The men she encounters, especially Eric, carry this polished exterior: stable job, adult life, authoritative presence. But beneath that is emotional incompetence, cowardice, and the quiet entitlement of a man who has never been asked to self-question. The “luster” he projects is a costume, and Edie keeps finding herself attracted to the light while knowing it’s artificial.
Edie’s willingness to engage men who are fundamentally beneath the standard she deserves isn’t just about desire—it’s about survival patterns. She gravitates toward men who overestimate themselves because she has been conditioned to underestimate her own worth. These men are feeble, not in strength but in character: men whose self-importance is inflated, who rely on women’s emotional labor to feel substantial. In a world where Edie’s own identity feels fragmented, their false confidence initially looks like certainty. But as she moves through the broken, episodic chaos of the narrative, the truth becomes obvious: the fragmentation mirrors the emotional incoherence of the men she keeps attaching herself to.
The story feels disjointed because Edie herself is disjointed—no smooth arc, no false clarity, only the sharp edges of a woman learning in real time where she’s been selling herself short. Reading this book I want to emphasize that we have the opportunity to identify, acknowledge and grow from these types of thought patterns. If, like Edie, there have been moments where you’ve sold yourself short, it doesn’t have to stay that way. We can reclaim the shine that luster represents, and instead of projecting it, we can create it for ourselves. We do this by finding our place and belonging. Recognizing that we may not be in full bloom yet, but that we have room to grow and should seek out opportunities that help challenge us in that respect.
Until Next Time!
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Keep living life on your terms.
June Tara
Creator of Spark Siren