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3.0 

To Write as if Already Dead

By Kate Zambreno
To Write as if Already Dead by Kate Zambreno digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

To Write As If Already Dead circles around Kate Zambreno’s failed attempts to write a study of Hervé Guibert’s To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life. In this diaristic, transgressive work, the first in a cycle written in the years preceding his death, Guibert documents with speed and intensity his diagnosis and disintegration from AIDS and elegizes a character based on Michel Foucault.

The first half of To Write As If Already Dead is a novella in the mode of a detective story, searching after the mysterious disappearance of an online friendship after an intense dialogue on anonymity, names, language, and connection. The second half, a notebook documenting the doubled history of two bodies amid another historical plague, continues the meditation on friendship, solitude, time, mortality, precarity, art, and literature.

Throughout this rigorous, mischievous, thrilling not-quite study, Guibert lingers as a ghost companion. Zambreno, who has been pushing the boundaries of literary form for a decade, investigates his methods by adopting them, offering a keen sense of the energy and confessional force of Guibert’s work, an ode to his slippery, scarcely classifiable genre. The book asks, as Foucault once did, “What is an author?” Zambreno infuses this question with new urgency, exploring it through the anxieties of the internet age, the ethics of friendship, and “the facts of the body”: illness, pregnancy, and death.

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10 Reviews

3.0
“Två essäer, kan man nog kalla det, den ena om en online-vänskap och den andra kanske snarare en litterär vänskap, en slags parallell läsning av Guiberts To the friend who did not save my life, en slags autofiktion om författarens uppdagande av AIDS, och en av de första skildringarna av sjukdomen, som läses parallellt med Zambrenos graviditet under pandemin. Två berättelser om "plagues", och hur det påverkar oss, också "bara" en skildring av hur svårt det varit att komma till skott med texten om Guiberts roman, som hon skriver på uppdrag. Om USA:s sjuka sjukvårdssystem. Den här texten går inte lika djupt in under skinnet som Green girl och Drifts, det känns som att hon skriver lite för mycket under press. Men jag har fått stöta massor av tankar gentemot hennes, upplever det som en inspiration, en text som stimulerar mitt tänkande och kännande.”

About Kate Zambreno

Kate Zambreno is the author of many acclaimed books, including Drifts (2020), Appendix Project (2019), Screen Tests (2019), Book of Mutter (2017), and Heroines (2012). Her writing has appeared in the Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She teaches in the graduate nonfiction program at Columbia University and is the Strachan Donnelley Chair in Environmental Writing at Sarah Lawrence College. She is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Nonfiction.

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