# What to Read After Fleabag **Published:** July 19, 2026 **Author:** Achriom **URL:** https://www.achriom.com/blog/what-to-read-after-fleabag > Six books for the Fleabag hangover: unreliable narrators, performed competence, and grief that hides behind a joke. A cross-media reading list in Phoebe Waller-Bridge's key. **Tags:** books, recommendations, cross-media --- If Fleabag left a hole, these six books get closest to filling it: *I'm Thinking of Ending Things* by Iain Reid, *The Bell Jar* by Sylvia Plath, *Notes on a Scandal* by Zoë Heller, *How Should a Person Be?* by Sheila Heti, *Attachments* by Rainbow Rowell, and *Conversations with Friends* by Sally Rooney. None of them break the fourth wall. What they share with the show is the thing the fourth wall was doing: a woman narrating her own life while performing it, funny right up to the moment she stops being funny, using competence as a costume over grief. Below is what each book is, why it fits, and where to start depending on which part of Fleabag you miss most. There is a short section at the end on the shows that share Phoebe Waller-Bridge's nerve. --- ## What Makes a Book Feel Like Fleabag ![Fleabag BBC series poster (2016)](/blog/assets/what-to-read-after-fleabag/fleabag-tv.jpg) Fleabag is a comedy about a woman who talks to us because she cannot talk to anyone in her actual life. The direct address is the wound. She is charming, quick, and in control of the joke, and all of that is a way of not looking at the thing she is carrying: a friend's death she feels responsible for, a family that grieves by competing, a hunger she is ashamed of. The books that match it tend to share a few of the same parts. **An unreliable self-narrator.** The voice is the whole draw, and the voice is not telling you everything. She is choosing what to show you and how she comes off. The gap between what she performs and what she is actually feeling is the book, the same way it is the show. **Performed competence over collapse.** The narrator looks like she is handling it. She has a job, a routine, a wit, a plan. Underneath, something has come apart and she is spending enormous energy keeping the surface intact. Watching that energy is half the tension. **Grief that arrives as a joke.** These books are funny, and the humor is not a break from the sadness. It is how the sadness is delivered. The laugh and the flinch land in the same sentence. **Desire treated as a real force.** Wanting, in Fleabag, is dangerous and honest and rarely dignified. The books that fit take a woman's want seriously as an engine of the plot, not a punchline about her. --- ## I'm Thinking of Ending Things ![I'm Thinking of Ending Things by Iain Reid book cover (2016)](/blog/assets/what-to-read-after-fleabag/i-m-thinking-of-ending-things-book.jpg) [Get it on Bookshop.org](https://bookshop.org/a/126057/9781982155841) Iain Reid's debut is a road trip toward a farmhouse dinner with a new boyfriend's parents, narrated by a woman who keeps telling us, and not telling him, that she is thinking of ending things. The voice is intimate and slightly wrong from the first page, and the wrongness is the point. This is the pick for Fleabag's most formal quality: a narrator who is performing her own account while she gives it, so that you trust the closeness of the voice before you have any reason to. Reid uses that trust the way the show uses the camera. You feel let in, and being let in is what she is counting on. It is a short, unsettling book, closer to horror than comedy in its back half. Read it for the register of a self-narrator who is not a reliable witness to her own story. --- ## The Bell Jar ![The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath book cover (1963)](/blog/assets/what-to-read-after-fleabag/the-bell-jar-book.jpg) [Get it on Bookshop.org](https://bookshop.org/a/126057/9780060174903) Sylvia Plath's only novel follows Esther Greenwood through a glossy magazine internship in New York and the depression that pulls the floor out from under her afterward. Esther is sharp, funny, and observant, and she narrates her own unraveling with a clarity that makes it worse, not softer. The connection to Fleabag is performed functionality. Esther knows exactly what a successful young woman is supposed to look like, and she can do the impression, and the distance between the impression and what she feels is the whole book. Her wit is not relief. It is the instrument she uses to describe the collapse while it happens. This is the darkest pick on the list and the most foundational. Fleabag's interest in a woman managing her own interior weather while smiling for the room runs straight back to Esther. --- ## Notes on a Scandal ![Notes on a Scandal by Zoë Heller book cover (2003)](/blog/assets/what-to-read-after-fleabag/notes-on-a-scandal-book.jpg) Zoë Heller's novel is narrated by Barbara, an aging London schoolteacher, as she chronicles her younger colleague's affair with a fifteen-year-old student. Barbara is one of the great unreliable narrators in recent British fiction: possessive, lonely, and convinced she is the only sane person in the story she is telling. This is the British class-and-desire pick, the one that gets closest to Fleabag's specific social texture. The manners, the snobbery, the way want moves underneath a surface of propriety and gets uglier the more it is denied. Barbara performs reasonableness the way Fleabag performs being fine, and both performances are covering something they cannot say directly. Read it for the British register and for a masterclass in a narrator who is lying to you and to herself in the same breath. --- ## How Should a Person Be? ![How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti book cover (2010)](/blog/assets/what-to-read-after-fleabag/how-should-a-person-be-book.jpg) [Get it on Bookshop.org](https://bookshop.org/a/126057/9781250032447) Sheila Heti's novel follows a character named Sheila, a playwright in Toronto, as she records her own life, her friendships, and her attempts to figure out the title's question by watching people she admires. It blends fiction, transcribed conversation, and essay, and it is constantly aware of itself as a performance of a life being lived. This is the pick for the self-conscious narrator, the one who is always a little outside her own experience, narrating it as it happens. Heti's Sheila is doing in prose what Fleabag does to the camera: turning toward an audience mid-scene, checking how she is coming across, using the act of being watched to hold herself together. It is funnier and stranger than its reputation suggests. Read it for a narrator who cannot stop performing her own life and is honest about that. --- ## Attachments ![Attachments by Rainbow Rowell book cover (2011)](/blog/assets/what-to-read-after-fleabag/attachments-book.jpg) [Get it on Bookshop.org](https://bookshop.org/a/126057/9780452297548) Rainbow Rowell's first novel is set in a newspaper office in 1999, where an IT worker whose job includes reading flagged staff emails falls for one of the women whose messages he is supposed to be policing. Most of the book is the email correspondence between two best friends, and it is very funny and very warm. This is the pick for the laugh-cry tone with the volume of dread turned down. Fleabag is grief wearing comedy, and Attachments earns the same emotional swing without the despair: two women talking each other through work, family, and love, with the exact rhythm of jokes that are actually about something. Read it when you want the wit and the intimacy of Fleabag but need a book that will be kind to you at the end. --- ## Conversations with Friends ![Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney book cover (2017)](/blog/assets/what-to-read-after-fleabag/conversations-with-friends-book.jpg) [Get it on Bookshop.org](https://bookshop.org/a/126057/9780451499066) Sally Rooney's debut follows Frances, a Dublin student and spoken-word performer, through an affair with an older married actor and the tangle it makes of her friendship with her ex, Bobbi. Frances narrates in a flat, controlled voice that keeps insisting she is fine while the reader watches her come apart underneath it. This is the class-desire-grief pick with a contemporary edge. Rooney writes want as a problem of power and money as much as feeling, and Frances performs detachment the way Fleabag performs the joke: as armor she cannot afford to drop. The cool surface and the wreckage under it are the same move the show makes. Read it for the modern version of the emotionally guarded narrator, and for the specific ache of a smart young woman who has decided that needing things is a weakness. --- ## Keep the Thread in One Library Fleabag pulls from a lineage that runs across formats: the confessional novel, the British comedy of manners, the prestige half-hour that treats grief as material for a joke. The show is a node in that web, and the fun of a hangover like this one is following the connections outward, from a series to a novel to another series that shares its DNA. Achriom keeps all of it in one place. Log the show that broke you, add the books it sent you toward, and your AI librarian can name the thread running between them: the unreliable narrator, the performed competence, the grief hiding in the punchline. A tracker built for one format alone cannot see across the gap where these connections live.

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--- ## How These Books Compare | Book | Unreliable Narrator Type | Grief Register | British Class Axis | |------|--------------------------|----------------|--------------------| | *I'm Thinking of Ending Things* | Self-narrator who withholds | Dread, buried | Low | | *The Bell Jar* | Clear-eyed and still hiding | Depression, direct | American | | *Notes on a Scandal* | Self-justifying, possessive | Loneliness | High | | *How Should a Person Be?* | Self-conscious performer | Low-grade, existential | North American | | *Attachments* | Warm and mostly honest | Light, tender | Low | | *Conversations with Friends* | Detached, controlled | Ache under the surface | Irish, class-aware | --- ## Which to Read First **For the closest match to the direct address:** *How Should a Person Be?* or *I'm Thinking of Ending Things*. Both put you inside a woman performing her own account as she gives it, which is the page version of Fleabag turning to the camera. **For the British class and desire:** *Notes on a Scandal*. The manners, the snobbery, the want moving underneath propriety. It shares the show's exact social texture. **For the grief under the comedy:** *The Bell Jar*. The darkest pick, and the one that takes performed functionality all the way down. **For the warmest landing:** *Attachments*. The laugh-cry rhythm without the despair. Read this one when Fleabag left you tender rather than gutted. **For the modern version:** *Conversations with Friends*. A young woman using detachment as armor, written with Rooney's cool control over heat. --- ## Beyond the Page If you want to stay in motion rather than open a book, three shows share Fleabag's sensibility. *Killing Eve* is the direct line: Phoebe Waller-Bridge developed and wrote the first season, and it carries the same wit and the same interest in women whose appetites are larger than their permission slip. *Catastrophe*, from Sharon Horgan and Rob Delaney, is the British sitcom that treats marriage, parenthood, and grief as farce without ever going soft on the feeling underneath. And Sally Rooney's novels, including *Conversations with Friends* and *Normal People*, have both become series that keep her guarded narrators intact. ![Catastrophe (2015)](/blog/assets/what-to-read-after-fleabag/catastrophe-tv.jpg) ![Killing Eve (2018)](/blog/assets/what-to-read-after-fleabag/killing-eve-tv.jpg) Each one is a way to follow the same thread into a different room. --- ## The Honest Answer Nothing is Fleabag, because Fleabag is doing a formal trick that only works on screen: a woman looking straight at you, making you her confidant, and then flinching when you get too close to the truth. No book can point a camera at you. What a book can do is give you the voice underneath the trick. The picks that get closest, *I'm Thinking of Ending Things* and *How Should a Person Be?*, are built on a narrator who is performing her own life while she narrates it. *Notes on a Scandal* gets the British class and desire right. *The Bell Jar* gets the grief right. *Attachments* gets the warmth right. You do not need to read all six. Pick the part of the show you miss most and start with the book that carries it. Then let the thread pull you to the next one. --- ## Common Questions **Is Fleabag based on a book?** No. Fleabag began as a one-woman stage play that Phoebe Waller-Bridge wrote and performed at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2013, then adapted into the BBC series. The play has since been published as a script, so you can read it, but there is no source novel behind the show. **Will there be a Fleabag season 3?** Phoebe Waller-Bridge has said repeatedly that the story ended where she wanted it to end, and she has shown no intention of returning to it. The second series was written as a conclusion, and the final scene closes the door on purpose. Treat two seasons as the whole thing. **What should I read for the fourth-wall, direct-address feeling?** Look for first-person narrators who are clearly performing their own story as they tell it. *I'm Thinking of Ending Things* and *How Should a Person Be?* both put you inside a woman who is managing how she comes across, which is the closest prose gets to Fleabag's glances at the camera. **What other Phoebe Waller-Bridge work is like Fleabag?** *Killing Eve* is the obvious next watch. Waller-Bridge developed and wrote the first season, and it shares the show's appetite, wit, and fascination with women who want more than they are supposed to. Her earlier series *Crashing* and the published *Fleabag* stage script are also worth finding. **Are these books funny or just sad?** Both, deliberately. Fleabag's method is a joke that turns out to be about grief, and the picks that match it best, *Attachments* and *How Should a Person Be?*, do the same laugh-then-flinch move. *The Bell Jar* and *Notes on a Scandal* lean darker, and use their wit to describe the collapse rather than soften it. **Which book is most like Fleabag's second season specifically?** Series two is about wanting something you are not supposed to want and being funny about the wanting until you cannot be. *Conversations with Friends* is the closest match for that: a young woman in an affair she cannot justify, narrating her own guilt and desire in a voice that keeps insisting she is fine. ---