FICTIONS

A struggling writer writes about her writing and the challenges posed by translating her real life into compelling fiction in Honeysett’s genre-blurring novel/memoir.

The author slowly and artfully dispenses information about her unnamed protagonist, a 38-year-old woman struggling to be a writer. Her devotion to her craft is not casual—she sends out story after story (and receives just as many rejections) and has been attending a writing workshop faithfully for seven years. Once, she wrote 30 stories within a month’s time to prove to herself that she was a real writer. She obsessively discusses her stories and the manner in which they are drawn from her own storehouse of experiences; in fact, she discusses this very book, as well as the feedback she received about it from the other members of the workshop. “But you know, this is also a story about my stories—about all the fiction I’ve spent so much time on and whether I’ve been saying anything worthwhile.” This is the crucial element of her character: For all of her commitment to writing fiction, she is relentlessly dogged by insecurity regarding its quality. She often writes about herself and her life, touching on her loving mother’s resentments about her own unloving mother, her sister’s difficulties with drug addiction, and her own trials as a mother of a young boy, Cathal, who “renewed my sense of possibility, in my writing as in everything else.” The protagonist’s prose is spare, unembellished by poetical flights of fancy or verbal acrobatics, and a touch underwhelming. The structure of the book is much more impressive—the character’s fictions and her own remembrances start to blend into each other, challenging the distinction between them. However, for all the flashes of sparkling intelligence—one editor rightfully acknowledges her promise—the entire work is too small, too preciously idiosyncratic, and too quietly undramatic to fully fix the reader’s attention. This fictionalization of a writer’s diary simply reads too much like an actual diary—a wending assemblage of impressionistic meditations.

A fictional memoir too narrowly personal and quotidian to grab the reader.