Domenica's Reviews > Heroines

This book, while it has a special place for me, didn’t quite age as well as I’d hoped. This time around I had a hard time reconciling Zambreno’s goal of legitimizing typically “feminized” modes of writing such as diary and journal writing, writing that revels in and repurposes literary theory, pop culture, blog culture, and “frivolity” (clothes, makeup, etc.) with the more cringe-worthy passages of her sneering at her neighbour (a fucking adjunct teaching art history or something, not even some “townie”) for being excited when her subscription to Martha Stewart Living arrives in the mail.

Her sour attitude towards the small towns she lives in (that will never compare to her reverence for New York, London, or Chicago) also grates, as do the passages of her provoking her husband by getting physical and throwing things. This culminates for me in a callous scene where she rolls her eyes after making a student run crying from the room during a creative writing workshop and later physically shaking her in the hallway, all while privately congratulating herself for creating a profound teachable moment. I enjoy reading about and validating female rage and anger but these passages did sort of toe a line that unsettled me.

But especially disappointing is her silence around race and privilege. This is an extremely white book—all the mad wives of modernism, Zambreno herself, Zambreno’s contemporary idols and influences and publishers—which, like, okay I guess. But at least acknowledge it. Especially in a book about (gendered) oppression. For example, one of the book’s refrains “He do the police in different voices,” from Eliot’s The Waste Land, is clearly toying with Black and/or working class dialect and seems so politicized; it’s bonkers to me that this line is repeated again and again and yet race is never even mentioned a single time.

Maybe a good takeaway is how far we’ve come in our considerations of intersectionality that this book really stands out for what’s excruciatingly missing. I really did enjoy the ravenousness of all the references and the feminist reclamation of the writing, history, and stories of Zelda Fitzgerald in particular. The book tended to feel repetitive in places and re-used a lot of punning that I didn’t quite enjoy but I think I understand the overarching goal of structuring these as journals or notebooks and preserving a sort of “messy” unregulated quality.