Phoebe Greenwood: Manminded

“Manminded” is a novel about a family of women who kill men. A darkly comic, all-female reworking of “Oresteia”, set between Greece, London, and Australia, it looks at how generational cycles of gendered violence can be broken now that we no longer have gods to end them for us.

It begins with a return. After a decade away, a daughter is drawn back to Greece to make peace with her dying mother. Instead, she finds a deeper, darker crisis. Confronted with competing versions of a shared past, it becomes clear that, in her family, stories are weaponized, truth is manipulated, and violence has become instinct. Her homecoming is a reckoning: can this cycle of harm be broken?

The novel unfolds across three acts, loosely following Greek tragic structure, and asks what it takes to replace vengeance with resolution.

During her stay at Onassis AiR, Greenwood will focus on developing the structure of the novel and its relationship to Greek myth, while situating the work in the place where that myth was formed. Alongside writing, she will research the psychological function of storytelling and the ways in which inherited narratives shape behavior within families and across generations.