RaveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksIf there’s a narrative analogue to the atlas, the debut memoir of T Kira Madden is a luminous example ... nothing short of astonishing. The book spoils us with stylistic and structural novelty from start to finish. It’s a song of self at once stunningly variegated and yet somehow powerfully unified ... How, though, can a book composed of prose poems and micro-meditations, hefty essays and lyrical riffs, cohere? In a word, through its voice. Madden’s is singular: her turn of phrase throughout is both strange and arresting in its strangeness ... Madden’s incantatory prose is spell-binding ... The book is like an attic kingdom the reader can climb up into, an alternative reality glinting with redemptive humor and singular pain ... Right where you might expect a memoir to move to a more meditative plane, waxing reflective in a dust-settling sort of way, Madden pummels you with a suspenseful, unforeseen finale. The stunning conclusion only makes the kaleidoscopic nature of the book all the more remarkable ... What Madden has given us in an atlas of self. A book that whispers: I don’t believe in one story. I believe in the collective force of many.
