First published 2023
Mary Gaitskill turns her analytical eye inward, excavating the origins and obsessions buried within her own fiction. She splices together personal history, literary commentary, and fragments of her novels with a fairy tale about a girl who enters Hell through a cellar door in suburbia. This becomes the frame for examining how personal and societal pressures shape a writer's work. Gaitskill reveals the life story concealed between the pages of her books, using collage techniques to weave criticism with memoir and mythography. The result addresses her critics while exploring the forces that create contemporary fiction and those that work against it. At its core, this is a writer's unflinching examination of her own imagination and the hidden chambers of experience that feed artistic creation.
Genres: literary-fiction, american-fiction, autobiography, memoir, biography-memoir, criticism, 21st-century, academic
Vibes: analytical, atmospheric, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: collage, memoir, self-examination
Period: 21st-Century
279 pages · Kindle Edition · McNally Editions