She Who Never Knew Men

Hello everyone! It is I, Robbie. It’s great to see you again.

Today’s post is going to be about a book I read last week, titled, “I Who Have Never Known Men.” This post will share how the book affected me, and will cover the plot in detail. In other words, there are spoilers in this post. The book is fiction.

But, with this post being out of the ordinary compared to what I usually do here, I did consider you, the reader, as I started the post. Since I am going to talk about a book I read, and I will talk about it in a way that spoils the book, I believe you will fall into one of the following categories.

Category 1 - you have already read this book. This is probably the best-case-scenario in terms of you, the reader, enjoying this post. You will have already formed your own opinion about the book, and will be able to compare and contrast our thoughts on it. Given that the majority of the people who visit this site do so via the link in my Twitch profile, I would hazard a guess that the odds are extremely slim that you’re in this category. After all, my Twitch has nothing to do with literature. To you, I would say: I love that you’ve also read this book! I hope you enjoy hearing me talk about it.

Category 2 - you have not read this book, but you’re interested in hearing me talk about a book you will never read. Maybe this is you. Thinking back on my life though, I honestly don’t know if I have ever read someone else’s synopsis and analysis about a book that I have not read. It just doesn’t seem like something that interesting to do. But, then again, a lot of what I do on the internet, while it may not be reading blog posts about books I will never read, nonetheless, is often uninteresting, yet it happens anyway. This will probably be the overwhelming majority of the people who read this post. So, to you, I say: while the premise of this post isn’t very interesting, hopefully you enjoy it.

Category 3 - you are a super fan of this blog, and having read up to this point, you have now decided that you’re going to close out of this tab, go read this entire book, and then, upon completion, you will return and read the rest of this post. Given the relatively small traffic on my site and my complete lack of fame or notoriety, I would estimate that 0.0 people will fall into this category. So, to you, I will say: nothing, as I am almost certain you don’t exist.

With that, let’s talk about the book.

I Who Have Never Known Men

The author of this book was born in 1929 in Belgium. She was Jewish, and had to flee home during World War II to avoid the Nazis. Why would I suddenly have interest in reading an author who ran from Nazis? Oh, no reason. None at all. There are no modern parallels. Despite this lack of a connection to our present day here in 2025 America, I read it anyway. I’m super random like that.

In the book, our nameless female protagonist tells us that she has spent the past month recounting the strange experience that was her life. That recounting is the book. She is telling us her life’s story, and is doing so at the end of her life. She is alone, and her days are numbered. She says that recounting her life has strangely been a really happy experience, even though her life itself wasn’t really that happy or enjoyable.

I can’t help but be reminded of this blog and my own life. Things do tend to seem more fun when you look back on them. Even my time spent reading this book could be described as such. I am here telling you all about it, which seems to suggest that I was enthralled by the book, but at the time, I remember being kind of bored and restless during most of my reading of it. One day, I took an ill-advised nap too early in the day that caused me to be awake from 8pm - 4am. During that timeframe on that restless night, I read this book. I read it out of a sheer lack of other options. Was it fun? Well, now that I’m telling you about it, I guess it sort of was.

The protagonist’s memories start in a large cage. 39 adult women and our protagonist, a child, live in this large cage. They are constantly surveilled by a rotating crew of male guards. They are given just enough food to survive, soap, and very little else. Occasionally, they might be given some new cotton to work into garments, though an event like that represents peak excitement. It is a miserable existence.

It is also a confusing existence. No one really remembers being put into this cage. The older women assume they were drugged, which caused memory loss. They do have some recollection of their lives before their imprisonment. None of them knew each other prior. None of them were particularly important or special in the ‘real world’.

Also confusing is the fact that this imprisonment doesn’t have any clear purpose. All forty of the women who started off in the cage are still there, living, years later. Our protagonist goes from a young girl to an older teen, and all the while everyone is just living life in the cage. The guards enforce good behavior (e.g., no touching the other women, no attempting to harm yourself), via whips, but otherwise do not communicate with the women at all. As the days become months which become years, nothing ever happens.

In her later teenage years, our protagonist has a novel idea. She decides that she will count how many heartbeats she has as a way to gauge time. Inside the cage, there are no windows. Light is all electronic, and controlled by the guards. Lights come on and you eat breakfast. Some time later, you eat supper, and the lights get turned down, and you sleep. Rinse and repeat.

By counting her heartbeats and doing some math, our protagonist concludes that something is amiss. These do not appear to be 24 hour ‘days’ they are living. She estimates that a cycle of ‘one day’ here in the cage - that is, from lights on, to lights off, back to lights on again - is closer to 16 hours.

Needless to say, this is fascinating news in a cage where nothing ever happens. The women speculate endlessly as to why this time difference exists. Are they on a different planet that only takes 16 hours to rotate? Is it an act of intentional deception by the guards? For the first time that we are ever privy to, a new jolt of life is surging through the cage.

That is, until the jolt dies out. Eventually, life just continues on. They are all still in the cage, and while sure, it IS kind of mysterious that their days are 16 hours instead of 24, how much can you really discuss that fact? In time, all the theories are floated and dissected and analyzed, and there’s just nothing left to talk about. It’s old news, and no one knows the real answer.

As an aside, if there is a a branch of philosophy I would associate most with this book, it is absurdism. The protagonist, and therefore us, the reader, never find answers to much of anything. We never come to understand why the women were subjected to this 16 hour cycle. In fact, we never find out why the women were locked up in this cage at all. We also never understand why the protagonist is the only young child; her mother is not among the 39 other women. Whenever we start to feel like we will understand the reasons for life’s circumstances, there are always just more questions.

What we do know, is that these women lived in the cage for several years, until one day, an alarm sounded. At this point, our protagonist is an older teenager. As soon as the alarm sounds, all of the guards immediately run and leave the area. Thankfully, the alarm sounds just as one of the guards is using his key to open the cage to move some supplies in, and he leaves the key there as he runs away. This means that the women are able to escape. The forty women escape the cage, and climb upwards to the surface.

Now able to take stock of where they have been living all this time, the women piece together that they have been underground. Once they reach the surface, they are in a cabin. The cabin has a lot of frozen food in it - enough to feed all forty women for several years. It also has soap, some clothing, and other necessities. There are no over-the-top luxuries. There are also no people - there is no sign of any of the guards, or any other people at all.

Stepping outside of the cabin, the women encounter a flat, grassy plain, with nothing to see in any direction. Initially they are cautious, but before long, it becomes evident that the guards are not coming back anytime soon. There is no trace of them. The women set up a camp a bit away from the cabin, and begin living there. They return to the cabin to grab more food and other supplies as necessary.

After living in quiet for a little bit, the women decide that it is best to venture off into the unknown, to see if they can find some sort of civilization. They pack two month’s worth of food, and off they go. The grassy plains are monotonous, and seemingly never ending. After a month of walking, they finally encounter something: another cabin.

This cabin is exactly like the one they came from. It has similar supplies, it has no guards or other people in it, and below the cabin there is an underground cage just like the one these women had previously been living in. Except, the women in this cage were not as fortunate as they had been - they never got out of the cage. It seems as if the stroke of luck that led to the key being left in the protagonist’s cage’s keyhole was unique. These 40 women have all starved to death. There are no survivors.

No matter what direction our women travel, the only thing they ever find is another identical cabin, always with a locked cage in the basement. Interestingly, sometimes the cage holds 40 deceased men, not women. It is as if this book is so determined to make sure it explains nothing, it even went out of its way to dispel the assumption that only women were being locked up. Cabin after cabin after cabin after cabin, all separated by the same monotonous grassy plains, is all the women ever find.

At this point, some of the women in the crew are in their 60s, and living a nomadic lifestyle as a group is physically difficult. Combined with the fact that there doesn’t seem to be anything to find, the women choose to settle in one area. They build houses near a well stocked cabin, and start living life. The years start ticking by, and eventually, some of our 40 women start to die of old age. Our protagonist, who was by far the youngest member of this group, starts to see the writing on the wall: eventually, though many, many years in the future, she will be the only one left.

Our protagonist also notes that in a sense they have simply moved from one prison to the next. Yes, they are now ‘free’ in that they can move around and do as they choose, but really, there’s nothing to do. They are still trapped. They can eat and drink water and chit chat, but otherwise, they’re really just awaiting death.

The years keep rolling by, and the members of our once 40-person group keep dwindling. After 13 years of freedom from the cage, eight have died. Other than their decreasing number, nothing about their material lives on this monotonous grassy plain has changed.

Eventually, many years later, the last member of the group is buried, and it truly is just our protagonist and the empty landscape. Still physically capable, she decides to travel. She spends years and years and years wandering the plains in solitude.

One day, she comes across a pile of rocks in this large expanse of nothing. There are never piles of rocks, so this reads as quite suspicious to her. She moves all of the rocks and beneath them all, she finds a hatch leading underground. This hatch leads to an area that is quite a bit nicer than any of the bunkers she has seen during her lifetime. There is carpet, and a bed, and real chairs, and it looks like a place someone could live. There are books, and a few new foods that none of the bunkers had, like bread, chicken, and powdered eggs. There’s even a hot bath!

Similar to the other unknowns in this book, we never find out the origin of this luxury hatch. We never find out who lived here, or where they disappeared to. Eventually, this hatch is where our protagonist awaits her death in old age. It is also where she writes the novel we have been reading.

We never find out whether this place the story took place in is Earth. We never find out why the women were imprisoned. We never find out anything about the guards - in fact, our protagonist wonders if the guards, too, knew nothing about what was going on. We never find out where the guards left to, or how they left. We never find out where the guards used to sleep, as there were no dormitories in those cabins.

We never find out how those cabins were powered. We never find out if there is a town, or a city, or a power plant, or anyone watching. It’s not at all dissimilar to life here on Earth, where even the most basic of questions still completely elude us as a species. Why are we here? Is there any point at all to this expanse of nothingness we live in? Is there anyone else?

Living under the thumb of some oppressor with unclear motives also calls the present day to mind. Is there any reason why we can’t just feed and house everyone? Like the mysterious imprisonment of our 40 women, sometimes it feels like the only answer to why our current power dynamic on Earth is the way it is, is: ‘just because.’ Even once freed from the overtly oppressive cages, is the idleness and nothingness of our day to day lives a more subtle form of oppression, or is that actually freedom, and this is all life is?

The only thing that ever breaks up this idleness and nothingness is something new, but things cannot be new forever. This is also not that dissimilar to life on Earth. The revelation of the 16 hour day was a jolt of newness for the women in the cage. It captivated their imagination for as long as it could, but eventually it wasn’t new and exciting and interesting anymore. New foods and scalding hot baths were a jolt of newness for our protagonist once she found the luxury hatch, but those too quickly become the norm, and mundane after-thoughts. Jolts of newness come and go, but really just serve as temporary distractions from the fact that we’re all eating and sleeping and chit chatting and waiting around until we die.

Really, there’s nothing to do other than try to enjoy life with whatever 39 other people you happened to be in the same cage as. Some you will like, some you won’t, and some will be lesbians (I didn’t mention that - some of the 40 women in the story did form couples). Our lives gain context through the relationships we make. From there, what all of you decide to chit chat about and make for dinner is life. It looks kind of boring in the present, looks kind of fun in the rear-view mirror, and there’s never any real answers.