Kate Zambreno

Loved it. Vividly captures the ennui of young women. We as young women aren't allowed to define ourselves, and even when we eventually decide we no longer buy the performance we've been taught we must undertake as women, we still can't win.

A few short passages from Drifts:

Everyone says it’s so healthy to have friends, she writes to me, but I find it sometimes more isolating. The self-harm of social media – we both understand it and yet feel compelled by it, these pictures and narratives of success and happiness, however fictional.

Cornell copying down into his journal a line from a Rilke biography: “In the letters written between 1910 and 1914 we find Rilke (continually) expressing a longing for human companionship and show more affection, and then, often immediately afterwards asking whether he could really respond to such companionship if it were offered to him, and wondering whether, after all, his real task might lie elsewhere.”


At the end of September, a prominent writer of so-called autofiction, with a half-million-dollar advance on his last book, wins the so-called genius grant. All day, friends contact me to complain. This writer’s name had become synonymous for the type of first-person narrative we also wrote, and yet no one found our struggles worthy of reward. Why do these prizes and awards only seem to breed more prizes and awards? Yes, something about breeding, something I didn’t quite grasp. Maybe our work was too much about acknowledging failure, about doubt. We saw something beautiful and comradely in our doubt. Maybe prize committees prize confidence, the ooze of it.

How much I understand that sentiment – although every book I’ve published embarrasses me.

I used to dismiss so many artists who wanted fame – but then the ones who want fame are the ones who are remembered, more often than not. Like Robert Mapplethorpe, who played the game, unlike Peter Hujar, who did not. I wonder sometimes about my identification with writers and artists who were failures. Anna wrote back that yes, in a person’s lifetime, the successful ones are the ones who want to be, who are in the right place in the right time with the right look and the right agent and the right personality, but after we’re all dead, she thought, it’s anyone’s game who’s remembered. Which of course is how she would think about it, as a competition, still, ever after death. show less

It's rare I'll dish out a five-star rating, but this stunning memoir/biography of the silenced (abused, institutionalized, marginalized) modernist literary wives was such an eye-opener, and so honestly written, I can't give it fewer. Zambreno's raw delivery begins boldly and builds and builds. Thorough historical research and anecdotal asides about the experiences of Zelda Fitzgerald, Vivienne Eliot, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf (and many more) substantiate Zambreno's angry style as their show more stories unfold. The lack of a falsely imposed structure (chronological, say, or "one wife at a time")strengthens the conversational effect of the whole work. Certain lines repeat beautifully -- "Ring Lardner's quip: Mr. Fitzgerald is a novelist and Mrs. Fitzgerald is a novelty" -- for instance. Every page delivers an intense experience, and encouragement to writers to brave writing their own intensity of experience. By the end, Zambreno herself seems to have become an intelligent, impassioned and inspirational friend. Big impact. I'm thrilled it found its way to publication -- exactly as it reads. Big respect for Semiotext(e) and for this remarkable writer. I can't wait to check out her fiction. show less

The experimental, semi-surreal style of writing is raw here, not fully contained and thus a little more rough around the edges than Green Girl but I think I might prefer it to that, at times. It's interestingly flawed and a badly-behaved book, and I mean that as a compliment. It grapples with questions of femininity, abjection, isolation, mental illness, ennui in strange and alienating ways.