Circe Made Me Root for a Woman Who Turns Men Into Pigs

A minor goddess, several centuries, one very long grudge

Here’s the setup, and I’ll keep it clean because half the joy of this book is watching it unfold. Circe is the daughter of the sun god Helios and a nymph, which sounds like a good deal until you realize it makes her the least impressive person in a palace full of preening immortals. She’s got a weird voice, an awkward face by godly standards, and absolutely no talents anyone respects, until she discovers she has a gift for witchcraft, for pharmaka, the transformation of plants and words into power. This terrifies the gods enough that they exile her to the island of Aiaia, alone, presumably to rot in obscurity.

Instead she builds a life. She perfects her craft. She turns a ship of hostile sailors into pigs (deserved, see above), gets tangled up with Daedalus and the Minotaur situation on Crete, hosts Odysseus for a year that changes both of them, and eventually has to decide what kind of mother, witch, and woman she wants to be when nobody with more power than her is telling her the answer. Miller pulls from the Odyssey, the Metamorphoses, and a scattering of other classical sources, but the trick of the book is that Circe was always a footnote in someone else’s story. Miller hands her the pen.

The good, the slow, and the thing nobody wants to admit

What Miller does brilliantly, and I mean this specifically, not as a blurb reflex, is pacing a life. Most books about immortals fumble the scale of forever. Miller doesn’t. Circe’s centuries on Aiaia have a felt weight, the loneliness compounds, the small competencies she builds (herblore, a loom, a pack of lions who are actually kind of sweet) accumulate into a personhood instead of a montage. The prose is the other reason people fall for this. It’s controlled, almost cool to the touch, and then every so often it opens up into something that stops you cold. The description of Prometheus being whipped, witnessed by a young Circe who understands for the first time that cruelty is just a thing gods do for entertainment, is one of the ugliest, best passages in the book.

Now the part I have to be honest about. The middle third sags. There’s a stretch after the Minotaur business and before Odysseus arrives where Circe is mostly alone, mostly reflecting, and the momentum drops into something closer to a mood piece than a novel. I put the book down for almost two weeks during that stretch, on a friend’s recommendation that had made it sound like nonstop myth-adventure, and I remember feeling a little betrayed. It’s not a slog exactly. It’s just quiet in a way the marketing doesn’t prepare you for.

And here’s my heresy: I think the Telemachus romance in the back third is the weakest material in the book. It’s tender, it’s thematically tidy, it gives Circe the ending she’s earned. It also felt, to me, like the least surprising choice available, a soft landing after two hundred pages of a woman refusing soft landings. I’ve seen readers who love that ending more than anything else in the book, so take my grumbling with a grain of salt. Maybe I just wanted her to stay difficult a little longer.

I also want to flag, because I think it’s true and rarely said out loud: this book is sometimes credited with more originality than it has. Circe’s arc, isolated woman weaponizes her marginalization into real power, is a shape a lot of recent mythology retellings share, and Miller didn’t invent feminist myth revisionism (Ursula K. Le Guin and Margaret Atwood got there first, decades earlier). What Miller brought was the sentence-level craft and the specific, patient tenderness toward a character mythology treated as a monster. That’s not nothing. It’s just not the wholly new thing some of the hype implies.

The gods don’t get to decide who deserves to be more than a warning in someone else’s story, and neither does anyone else.

About Madeline Miller

Madeline Miller has spent most of her adult life teaching and translating Latin and Greek, which explains why her mythology never feels like homework, it feels lived-in. She wrote The Song of Achilles for roughly a decade before it found a publisher, then watched it win the Orange Prize and become the book people press into each other’s hands at parties. She’s slow, deliberate, and clearly allergic to cashing in on a formula, which is maybe why we’ve gotten two novels from her in over a decade instead of eight.

If Circe wrecked you, read these next

• The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller, for the same devastating tenderness applied to Achilles and Patroclus, and honestly the better ending if you want to cry properly.
• Lavinia by Ursula K. Le Guin, another woman pulled from the margins of epic (this time the Aeneid) and given interior life.
• The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood, sharper and funnier, Penelope narrating her own myth with a grudge and a chorus of hanged maids.
• A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes, the whole Trojan War refracted through every woman the original poets forgot to name.

You can grab a copy here: Circe by Madeline Miller.

For your book club

1. Circe’s exile is meant as punishment, but it’s also the making of her. What does the book suggest about isolation as a condition for power?
2. Do you buy the ending with Telemachus, or did you want Circe to end up somewhere less settled?
3. How does Miller’s Circe compare to the witch of the original Odyssey, and what does that shift say about who gets to tell the story?
4. Which of the gods in this book disgusted you the most, and why do you think Miller wrote them that way?
5. Is this actually a feminist retelling, or is that label doing more marketing work than the book itself does?