Imposter Syndrome

The Secret Thoughts of Successful Women

Dr. Valerie Young · 2011

Young, who has studied imposter syndrome for decades, identifies the specific patterns of thinking that sustain it and explains why certain groups experience it more acutely than others. For anyone who feels uniquely fraudulent, Young provides both the reassurance that they are not alone and the practical tools to start thinking differently.

You Are a Badass

Jen Sincero · 2013

Sincero’s irreverent, direct approach to self-belief is particularly useful for imposter syndrome because it does not ask you to feel ready before acting. She is funny and practical and entirely unimpressed by the inner critic’s case, which is sometimes exactly what is needed.

The Artist’s Way

Julia Cameron · 1992

Cameron’s twelve-week course in creative recovery addresses the inner censor — the voice that says you are not really an artist, a writer, a thinker, a person who belongs doing what you love — with one of the most effective tools available: daily unedited writing. For readers whose imposter syndrome specifically attacks their creative work, this is the standard prescription.

Lean In

Sheryl Sandberg · 2013

Whatever your view of its broader arguments, Sandberg’s chapters on imposter syndrome and the internal obstacles women place in their own way remain among the most clear-eyed accounts of how the syndrome operates in professional contexts. For readers whose imposter feelings centre on work or ambition, Sandberg names the mechanism with unusual precision.

The Bell Jar

Sylvia Plath · 1963

Esther Greenwood is objectively accomplished — prize-winning, top of her class, interning in New York — and still cannot shake the sense that she is failing at being herself, that everyone else received an instruction manual she never got. Plath captures, with unnerving precision, how achievement and a conviction of fraudulence can occupy the same person at once.

Conversations with Friends

Sally Rooney · 2017

Frances is clever, published, watched by people she admires — and privately convinced she is faking her way through every room she is let into. Rooney writes the interior monologue of imposter syndrome with almost uncomfortable accuracy: the constant self-surveillance, the certainty that admiration is a mistake waiting to be corrected.