TO WRITE AS IF ALREADY DEAD

The experimental novelist wrestles with mortality, identity, parenthood, and friendship—and that’s before the pandemic hits.

This contemplative, rhetorically austere memoir is a kind of companion piece to Zambreno’s excellent 2020 novel, Drifts. That work of autofiction followed the author as she labored to meet a book deadline while navigating teaching gigs, her creative direction, and parenthood. Same story here: Zambreno has been commissioned to write a study of the French writer Hervé Guibert, whose 1990 novel, To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, was a roman à clef about his friendship with philosopher Michel Foucault. The novel was controversial (and became a French bestseller) for disclosing that Foucault died of AIDS. Though Zambreno tries to stay on point, Guibert’s book mainly serves as a launchpad for more personal excursions she can’t set aside. Much of the first half of this book is focused on a friendship with a writer who wished to keep her identity obscure. Was their connection more authentic for being anonymous, Zambreno wonders, or a more distant connection of two artistic personas? In the second half, Zambreno focuses on life as a new mother consumed with thoughts about intimacy, relationships, and (of course) finishing the Guibert book. As the pandemic grew in scope, Zambreno’s sense of disillusionment and despair intensified, feelings she finds echoed in Guibert’s work. Drifts was digressive but possessed a lyricism, sense of humor, and passion that justified its fragmentary nature. By contrast, this book is meandering and chilly. Zambreno clings to Guibert’s book as a signifier of troubled friendships, first-person writing, and physical illness, but there’s little sense of resolution or coherence. That’s partly the point, of course. The author is frustrated by the way memoir is “supposed to be incredibly earnest and moral.” She wants to push back against that tradition, but the result is more an exercise in sangfroid than transgression.

A somber meta-memoir, rich in ideas but set at an emotional low boil.