Tilly's Reviews > Heroines

"I decided someday I wanted to write the Infinite Jest for fellow fucked-up girls, for the slit-your-wrist girls like me. I hadn’t even finished Infinite Jest, but I knew it didn’t speak to me, just like I knew Kerouac’s On The Road didn’t speak to me, because he kept on writing about jumping into girls, and I knew I was one of the girls who were fucked and forgotten.

Yet no one had actually told me you could write about being a fucked-up girl. No one had given me permission, or told me that the young female experience was valid to write about in literature. This was not experience we are told we can use - our breakdowns, our love affairs. Too personal. Too emotional. Too ‘feminine tosh.'"

Zambreno's 'Heroines' is a brilliant straddling of a confessional writer's narrative and a more academic foray into the forgotten lives of literary wives (though this academic aspect never loses the sense of Zambreno's self, always focussed on the abject, always focussed on the erased, and always hunting for a sense of literary motherhood that the canonical MAN-tra of Great Novelists does not provide). Through her study of Zelda Fitzgerald, Vivien(ne) Eliot and Léona Camile Ghislaine Delacourt - the real Nadja - Zambreno reveals the way in which the canon has been skewed away from the personal, while the wives have been stunted by their husbands: their own semi-autobiographical works considered too 'confessional' to be any good, while their life stories and diaries are swallowed up by their literary partners. Their selves are turned into characters, called works of 'genius' while the real women are left to rot in asylums. Throughout it all, Zambreno is furious, and her rallying cries for women to recognise their own literary orphanhood and the need to JUST WRITE - to construct their own narratives when no one else will - feel necessary and inspiring.

The book is divided into two sections, with a short 'mirror' section between them. There is no doubt that the personal narrative in the second half feels stronger and more impactive, while the first section feels more drifting, lost, and perhaps indulgent - but I suspect this is deliberate. Reflecting on the novel upon finishing it, I was able to see how Zambreno's confidence as a writer grows directly out of her exposure to these forgotten wives, and her sense of purpose upon accepting her literary orphanhood is clear. On a re-read, I think the need to recognise the effects of the male domination of the canon and of modes of memory upon the female individual is clear, and Zambreno's more listless personal interjections are a powerful indicator of the self-doubt that our culture can induce. Indeed, as her personal and writerly confidence grows, so does her prose: a strong argument for reading novels such as this, and for the empowering effect that they can produce.

This is a powerful book with very revealing details. In this, the 50th anniversary of the death of T.S. Eliot, I would surely recommend it for the insight into an often-ignored aspect of his life: his foul treatment of Vivien(ne) (many biographers merely write off this relationship as 'equally damaging for the both of them'. Zambreno begs to differ). I'd also highlight, though, one of the aspects of this book that I personally most enjoyed: the wide reading referenced within, and the introduction to many female writers that now feel really necessary to me. Jean Rhys, Kathy Acker, so many more - my life now feels better for having been introduced to their work, and for that I thank Zambreno. She may have felt orphaned, but I expect many will feel a parental connection to this text.