DUST AND LIGHT

“Following the hints of glitter among the heap of rubble.”

Barrett’s bouquet of essays reflects on her craft as a writer of historical fiction. Each essay seeks to get behind the subjects of her work, while at the same time raising questions about how blurry the line may be between fact and fiction in literary narrative. It has been said that anything, once turned into a story, becomes a kind of fiction, and Barrett explores how telling people’s stories turns them into novelistic characters. She surveys a range of subjects whose stories she has tried to tell: 19th-century Arctic explorers, the Victorian polymath Oliver Lodge, early-20th-century Brooklyn, the history of disease and cure, the ruminations of Virginia Woolf, World War I heroism, and specialists in everything from insects to anatomy to narwhals. This is a highly personal book, rich with lived anecdotes about what it meant to come to books as a child, what it meant to try to write after the terror attacks of 9/11, and what it means, now, to be a professional author. Barrett quotes the scholar Saidiya Hartman, who herself has experimented with fictionalized historical narratives: “How can narrative embody life in words and at the same time respect what we cannot know?” That is the key question of this book. Written in a conversational style, the collection works well on the page; it would likely be even better as an audiobook, with the listener hearing and feeling the writer’s embodied life in words.

Evocative essays on the challenges of writing and reading historical fiction, memoir, and literary biography.