THE LIGHT ROOM

A deeply personal memoir of motherhood in a time of isolation.

In her latest memoir, Zambreno thoughtfully drifts through her daily experiences parenting young children during the pandemic. The author opens at the end of summer 2020 in Brooklyn's Prospect Park, where she brought her 4-year-old daughter and newborn, "another private pandemic baby who sees faces only at home,” for their weekly forest school. When not at the park, she and her husband alternated parenting duties while teaching online courses from their cramped apartment. This book bears similarities to Yuko Tsushima’s Territory of Light, a novel about “the vertiginousness of early motherhood, of exhaustion and despair and small joys,” which Zambreno was reading in stolen moments during the pandemic. Zambreno, too, lays bare her feelings of near-constant fatigue, effectively contrasting darkness and light, frustration and pure happiness. At the same time, she was reading artist Joseph Cornell’s diaries, strewn with scribblings that document the minutiae of his life. Like Cornell, Zambreno compiled a vast archive of notes, observations, and feelings "to catch something that's vital or sublime,” which, for Cornell, provided what he called “a sense of illumination.” Of her own fragments, Zambreno asks, "Is that what these paragraphs are? Are they lightboxes?” Other artists provided similar inspiration, among them writer Natalia Ginzburg, whose "Winter in the Abruzzi" further nudged Zambreno toward seeking the light in each moment. The seasons, cycles of new Covid-19 variants, finding a moment to commune with friends, the baby's teething eruptions—all became measurements of the day’s passing. Zambreno's writing is lyrical throughout, and allusion, imagery, and color—the pink of her feverish child's cheeks, bright blue of the baby's eyes, and constant green of the linden—take on the shape of waves upon which her readers drift pleasantly through this meandering meditation.

Through her unflinching chronicling of its externalities, Zambreno plumbs the poignant interior of her experiences.