Roman Clodia's Reviews > Heroines

When she experiences it, it's pathological. When he does, it's existential.

This is a gloriously liquid and messy tapestry of thoughts that springs from Zambreno's obsession with the 'mad' wives and mistresses of modernism - Zelda Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, Viv Eliot, Jean Rhys, Jane Bowles with a few others like Sylvia Plath and Anna Kavan scattered in there - but which, at heart, is thinking about those still pressing questions of women and writing.

Tackling head on the issue of women's writing being marginalised and denigrated as '(over)-emotional', as 'petty', as 'personal', as 'amateur', even as 'menstrual', and switching up to the histories of women whose very ambitions and desires to write have been pathologised leading to breakdowns and, often, institutionalisation, this is openly personal and subjective, claiming back the legitimacy of excess and female writerly desire.

At heart, what Zambreno is doing here is questioning all the canonical categories that have traditionally been used to block women, from the fetishisation of the 'male genius' and his 'great book', ideas with which the big mainstream publishers, the machinery of reviews and the academe have traditionally been complicit, to exploring the huge amount of female writing that subsists in diaries, journals and, increasingly, blogs.

It's not so much that the ideas of women writers and madness is new - just think of how The Yellow Wallpaper, first published in 1892, is the paradigmatic myth of the 'rest cure' for the 'hysterical' woman whose creative impulses become perverted and distorted precisely from being forced underground though there's a kind of crazy triumph, too, as she crawls over her horrified husband - but that Zambreno relates these biographies of women mostly married to the 'great men' of modernist letters whose co-authorship or self-ambitions are thwarted or written out of literary history to wider contours of patriarchy and the resulting practices of reading and writing. She unashamedly writes of her own troubles with mental health diagnoses, and with that identity of being a female 'writer' not disconnected from the ways in which her career has been made subordinate to that of her (well loved) husband.

In this sense, Zambreno is not just theorising how women can be enabled to write against the canon but embodies in with this text - a text which is self-consciously breaking the boundaries: it quotes theoretical and biographical literature without indicating and footnoting sources (though there is a 'working bibliography' at the end); it casually moves between 'she' and 'I'; it's unsystematic in its approach to thinking about its themes and ideas and it embraces the subjective rather than the objective 'scholarly' methodologies. It challenges ideas not just of how women are supposed, culturally, to behave but, importantly 'how literature should behave'.

For a book first published in 2021, with an update in 2024, I was surprised that this doesn't discuss issues around female autofiction and I was especially thinking about Annie Ernaux here. Still, iconoclastic, witty, sometimes enraged, always provocative and open rather than dogmatic, this feels like a book that is in active dialogue with its readers - a cool and refreshing, even exciting, book that I found inspirational.