Last Woman Standing: This feminist revenge thriller will make you feel seen—and maybe a little dangerous

There’s a specific kind of fury that comes from realizing you’ve spent years swallowing your own rage to make room for a man’s ego. Dana Diaz, Amy Gentry’s protagonist in Last Woman Standing, is a stand-up comic trying to make it in a world where men still hold the mic—and the power. She’s talented, hungry, and has learned how to laugh off a thousand microaggressions just to survive. But when something happens to her—something she’s not even sure counts as assault because there was no physical contact—she doesn’t laugh it off. Not this time. Not after meeting Amanda Dorn.

The setup of Last Woman Standing is irresistible: a revenge pact between two women who agree to go after each other’s harassers, à la Strangers on a Train. But instead of a train, they meet at a comedy show. Instead of cold, calculated revenge, what unfolds is messy, complicated, and disturbingly real.

Dana’s story echoes so many #MeToo accounts—the unspoken but well-known “open secrets,” the way women feel shame for what he did, the gut-deep fear of not being believed. Gentry doesn’t flinch from showing how murky and self-doubting that terrain can be. Dana spends much of the novel questioning herself: Was it really that bad? Did she do something to invite it? Why didn’t she say no louder, sooner, stronger?

And that’s what makes this story so compelling. It’s not a clean arc of victim-to-avenger. Dana is confused, reactive, angry, and at times unreliable—even to herself. But isn’t that what happens when we finally start speaking the truth after years of silence?

Reading this, I couldn’t help but reflect on all the times I’ve stayed quiet when I should have said, “Don’t fucking touch me.” The times I didn’t shove someone back. The times I felt it was safer to laugh something off than to draw a hard boundary. Only recently have I found myself stepping into that “teacher-mom” mode when some frat boy steps too close. Now, I push him back—gently, firmly, until he’s at arm’s length—and tell him, “This is the distance you need to keep between yourself and a woman until she gives you permission to get closer.” That’s the shift we need to see: women stepping into their own power and teaching the next generation of men how to act right.

One particular line from this novel hit me right in my tired-mom soul:

Instead, I drove on, farther and farther from my mom’s odd, half-present comfort, her unsittable sofas and silent conversations and the plates full of food that she put herself out to make but did not stick around to watch me eat. It was her way of teaching me to be self-sufficient, I’d once thought, but now I suspected she was simply operating at the very limits of her capacity to live with another person.”

As someone who’s been momming for 26 years, I felt this to my core. Sometimes, it’s not about “strong female characters” who rise above. Sometimes it’s about the ones who are just done. Touched out. Used up. Ready to claim a little peace, even if it means burning things down first.

Ultimately, Last Woman Standing is about agency. And how damn hard it is to have any in a world that teaches women to shrink, to smile, to stay quiet. Gentry dares to ask what happens when we don’t. When we finally give ourselves permission to break the rules—and maybe even break a few people along the way.

Have you read Last Woman Standing? Did you root for Amanda—or did you struggle with her choices? Would you have forgiven Dana in the end? What would you have done in Dana’s situation? Drop your thoughts in the comments below.

Related Content

• Women talk about it all the time: An interview with Amy Gentry (Fiction Writers Review)
• The subversive power of female comedians (The Saint)
• The stories we tell about rape culture matter (Electric Lit)
• Standing up for yourself doesn’t make you any less kind (Tiny Buddha)
• People who struggle to stand up for themselves and be assertive often had these 8 childhood experiences (Blog Herald)
• Women in comedy: Double standards and the woman who defies them (Violent Femmes 2015)

Now available in print and on Kindle!

Now that Jack has been forced to reflect on everything he has to lose, he resolves to do better. He’s determined to spend more time at home with his family and repair the relationships that have suffered over the years while he’s been so focused on work. But as Callie’s behavior becomes increasingly bizarre, Jack realizes he has a lot more room to improve than he realized – and it might be too late to save his daughter after all.

For fans of We Need to Talk About Kevin, The Push, and Baby Teeth.