This week, we’re taking a closer look at Powell’s Pick of the Month, Nonfiction by Julie Myerson.
I’ve spent a lot of this last year thinking about family and the stories we tell about family. It’s been a difficult year for my family, which means that we’ve done a lot of reminiscing and storytelling as we process our loss and grief. Inevitably, this storytelling becomes something closer to a bargaining session: “that’s not what happened” versus “no, this is what I remember” versus “okay, but this is the version I want the story to stay, so stop arguing with me.”
This idea about legacy and stories and family, and how little we can control any of it, is at the center of Julie Myerson’s newest novel,
Nonfiction, a blistering autofiction written from the perspective of a woman whose identity as a mother and an author are increasingly at odds as she does her best to navigate her relationship with a daughter addicted to drugs.
...a blistering autofiction written from the perspective of a woman whose identity as a mother and an author are increasingly at odds.
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The story jumps through time — we meet the daughter as a young, perfect baby; we watch the mother conduct an ill-advised, confounding affair; a couple decades later, the parents do their best to set boundaries and rules for what their daughter can ask of them, while still wanting to do everything they can to save her but knowing that her redemption wouldn’t come from them. Throughout, the mother examines her complicated relationship with her own mom, as well as her relationship to her writing, which all feels slippery when readers of the mother’s work ask her how she can stand to so blatantly write from her own life.
“Slippery” is maybe putting it lightly when talking about a book titled
Nonfiction that’s a work of autofiction about a writer who writes autofiction, who becomes less and less sure about the importance of her own writing, what she should be allowed to write, what she shouldn’t, and when pulling from your lived experience might be a different kind of danger.
“Slippery” is maybe putting it lightly when talking about a book titled Nonfiction that’s a work of autofiction about a writer who writes autofiction.
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There’s a moment toward the end of
Nonfiction, where the narrator says, “This isn’t a ghost story, but,” and then she goes on to list all the times she thought she’d seen her daughter wandering the streets the week before.
Which is what reading this book felt like — being haunted by yourself, by your daughter, by your mother — by all the versions of yourself and those you love, and all the stories you will and won’t be able to tell about them.