To Write as if Already Dead

A wonderful and brilliantly written meditation on illness and the body, as well as on friendship and alienation. It's interesting to read this book in context of her recent book Drifts, as I feel like this book is a kind of ghost book to that one, circling around similar themes and kind of written in that book's shadow (like her book Appendix Project is written in the shadow of her Book of Mutter). There's something very interesting that Zambreno is doing with these books on books, or books inside of books, all coming out of her own very prolific life-writing practice.

A beautiful, erudite exploration of writing and parenthood. With far-ranging references to the works and lives of the likes of Baudelaire and Foucault, Zambreno examines what it means to write and to attempt to live a life of the mind in the midst of life's complexities. Wonderful, thought-provoking, and unexpected, a must-read for anyone attempting art in the midst of intense familial obligations.

This book got at the experience of the pandemic (ongoing and maybe neverending?) like no other essay I've read. A book-length essay about Herve Guibert, it's also about gendered medical experiences, including but not limited to motherhood and pregnancy. I found myself highlighting long passages throughout the book, especially as it started to open up, and I saw that it wasn't just about Guibert but what it's like to write at all while navigating the unruly experiences of having a body.

This really defines categorisation; it's a mimetic piece of autofiction that thinks through Herve Guibert's own famous piece of autofiction, 'To The Friend Who Did Not Save My Life.' Theoretically grounded, it places with Barthes and Foucault, Kristeva and Mary Douglas; entirely personal, it dissects the writer's body and friendships, running analogously alongside (and against) its analysis of Guibert's own dissection of his body and friendships as he died of AIDs. It meditates on the death of the author, both figurative and literal; on how one writes when one is soon to be, or already, dead, on posthumous publication, on the problems of writing as a living writer about the living. I had difficulty putting a name to the genre Zambreno was using, but I was thoroughly delighted by the tangle of thought, theory, confession, literary criticism and memoir.

Kate Zambreno's new book beautifully weaves together many interrelated threads into a prismatic and often poetically charged narrative that explores the body, womanhood/motherhood, illnesses both individual and societal, and what it means to "write" and/or "write through" the body.

She covers a lot of ground here, centrally focusing on Herve Guibert and his writing of the body, particularly his own body living with AIDS. She interleaves this with a diaristic chronicling of her difficult second pregnancy, which overlaps with the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic and New York's lockdown in March/April 2020.

I found Zambreno's discussions of "autofiction" (both via Guibert and via her own work) particularly interesting - the ways our fictionalized selves can both resemble us and become our avatars, taking on characteristics beyond the scope of our off-the-page lives.

Thanks to Columbia University Press and NetGalley for the ARC!