Auto nonfiction, critical memoir, cultural criticism, creative nonfiction, auto ethnography, theoretical biography…call it whatever you want, I'm all in. This form bending multigenre work stitches together art, artists, and alter egos to restore and rebuild a self. With fearless shapeshifting and reflexivity, Jefferson remixes and repurposes herself and others to discover and embrace who she was, who she is, and who she’d like to become.
Settle in and float with Kate Zambreno while she investigates my favorite part of the writing process - not writing. She catalogs the act of not writing in bursts of notetaking, research, observation, in both the quickness and dragged out passing of time. How does one write the present? How does one document the internal? How does the body reflect time? How does one find the time? Pushed and pulled between the growing body of the novel and that of her yet to be born daughter, Zambreno creates a sea of connection in the daily moments of a life in thought, communing with dead literary bachelors and other isolated and laboring female writers, all while working through the clouds of the future and among the movement of her beloved dog Genet and the neighborhood residents she observes, mostly cats. This is a meander, perfect for hot days filled with slow thinking.