To Write as if Already Dead

April 1, 2021
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 Herv� Guibert, whose 1990 novel, To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, was a roman � 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.

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April 12, 2021
In this clever hybrid work, Zambreno (Drifts) interrogates her fascination with French writer and photographer Hervé Guibert, whose novel To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life (1990) controversially outed friend Michel Foucault of having died of AIDS. In the first of two parts, Zambreno sets out to explore “the problem of a friendship,” first between herself and a famous author she met under a pseudonym online, then between Foucault and Guibert, before the novel—which traces Guibert’s own suffering with AIDS and featured a character named Muzil, based on Foucault—was written. “At what point,” she wonders, “does the writing become an act of betrayal?” Part two takes a diaristic turn, covering Zambreno’s pregnancy-related ailments and the daily demands on her as a working mother, as the act of writing becomes more difficult: “I need to push it out as if through my body... even if the thinking is fickle, even if it changes over time.” As her investigation turns to the financial and material needs motivating her to write in the first place, it morphs into a feverish quarantine journal wherein she questions the meaning of language during crisis, especially the use of first-person writing. The author’s fans will savor this cascading meditation on what makes writing possible and necessary. Agent: Harriet Moore, David Higham Assoc.