Two parents stand by powerlessly as their only child seems intent on destroying herself. As the mother―a novelist―attempts to understand her daughter, she finds herself revisiting her own uneasy, unresolved relationship with her mother.
Epistolary ... It is a bit of a head-scratcher. While plenty of people write autofiction, few are interested in energetically reopening serious wounds in both their public and private lives ... Myerson’s attempt to blur the line between fiction and nonfiction makes her book less successful as either one.
Affecting and winkingly titled ... The ethical dilemma of writing about the self is both the core tension of Nonfiction and what beckons it into existence ... Poignant, if subdued ... A feeling of triumph glimmers between the lines ... Yet the confines of Nonfiction grow perplexingly and frustratingly narrow as the book progresses. The narrator may be flayed open, but the other characters are held at arm’s length, vague and bloodless ... I wanted Myerson to step back from the mirror at times, to more fully engage with her other characters. But Myerson seems most interested in parsing the act of writing about one’s personal experiences ... These are the novel’s animating questions. Given all that she has endured, Myerson had the opportunity to offer fascinating answers. Instead, she supplies noncontroversial defenses of artistic expression.
Though Myerson has built up a sizeable backlist of edgy, psychologically dark tales, this 11th novel cuts deeper than any of its predecessors. Its title may sound overly meta, but here is a book that instantly sucks the reader down into a swirling vortex of grief, trauma and powerlessness ... It’s a self-lacerating exercise that’s impossible to look away from. Sometimes cautious, occasionally accusatory, frequently rinsed of any feeling except stunned horror, the text is addressed throughout to 'you,' meaning her daughter, though the reader can’t help but feel somehow implicated ... 'Raw,' a word that will probably be used a lot of Nonfiction, captures its headlong intensity but simultaneously undersells the authorial alchemy at play here. Because this novel blazes with truths about not just addiction but female identity and maternal love, compassion and creativity. And in its bare-knuckle engagement with what it means to be a writer – with the compulsion to turn life into art, whatever the cost, and the extent to which any wordsmith can ever really be trusted – it’s almost shockingly exposing. More so, perhaps, than true nonfiction ... With this new novel, the author goes further than most and the results are nothing less than incandescent.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay[/caption]
