To Write as if Already Dead: (Rereadings)

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.

Table of Contents:
Part I. Disappearance Part II. To Write as if Already Dead Acknowledgments Notes

About the Author :
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.

Review :
A Books of the Year 2021 selection Kate Zambreno has invented a new form. It is a kind of absolute present, real life captured in closeup. This book is a tour de force. I was completely awestruck by the way Zambreno enacts the concept of the title, and by the way she writes the body, hers and Guibert’s. It is a moving performative act, a document of our time from the trenches, and a brilliant critical study. The transgressive novelist and first significant memoirist of life with AIDS, Hervé Guibert was, by the time he died, expert at turning a book into a timebomb and vice versa. Thirty years later, against a backdrop of inequities exposed by the coronavirus public health crisis and amid her own ticking biology and professional precarity, Kate Zambreno considers the composite of guile and candor and care and betrayal that is high-stakes life-writing, itself perhaps a “virus that ‘preys on the human propensity to connect.’” The result is Zambreno’s most urgent and charged work since Heroines. Kate Zambreno’s To Write As If Already Dead is portrait and self-portrait. It's a book about friendship, or friendships—famous, fictional, friends we’ve had and lost. More than this, it’s about what it means to feel kinship with a particular book and writer, and so it's really about reading, that intimacy and solitude. Here, as ever, Zambreno proves herself a brilliantly generous and ambitious reader, one capable of engaging a text so acutely that the line between self and art blurs. To Write As If Already Dead is gossipy and smart, angry and agile, doubling and doubled—and a serious pleasure to read. Kate Zambreno stylizes a thrilling form of reading as writing and writing as reading, one that speaks to the overlapping crises of our contemporary moment in tones compelling, honest, and withering in all the right ways. No one thinks better and more carefully about the embodied practice of writing. She is the only person who could have written this book. In Kate Zambreno's To Write As If Already Dead, Hervé Guibert's voice is restored to the present through an act of transportation that left me slightly afraid of Zambreno's power. But then that's why you read her, and him: for a new awe of life. In this clever hybrid work, Zambreno interrogates her fascination with French writer and photographer Hervé Guibert . . . A cascading meditation on what makes writing possible and necessary. A fascinating, ambitious, unforgettable work. To Write As If Already Dead just might be the first truly great book about the coronavirus pandemic Kate Zambreno’s latest book, To Write as if Already Dead, is a study of Guibert’s uncompromising novel. Galvanized by much the same 'survival energy,' the conversation vibrates with eerie coincidence: two writers amid the chaos of a pandemic, working against erasure. [Zambreno] has some of [Guibert's] acidity, his charisma, his meditativeness, his improvisational grace. She has, too, his comfort with slipperiness, both in terms of subjectivity—is Guibert the "I" of his novels?—and of form . . . Despite its elliptical style, Zambreno’s book cultivates patience, a digressive but ruminative mode that goes beyond close reading of Guibert toward an actual embodiment of his voice. There’s no one like Kate Zambreno at finding connections in the art she’s consumed and making the reader feel like they too are a brilliant critical theorist. To Write As If Already Dead is a book that questions the point of writing, and proves the point that we need writers to explain what the hell is going on inside and outside of them, how these things impact each other, all the jagged edges of being alive and dedicated to thinking about what that means. There’s also the honesty of pettiness that exists in all creative worlds, the points of comparison that are fair and unfair, that gives the text the hiss of gossip that provides instant intimacy. Reading all Zambreno feels like the jolt one gets from a surprise cut or burn in the kitchen, that sudden recognition that you’re in a body and the body can be hurt. Zambreno attempts to write a study of Hervé Guibert’s To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, attacking it from two very different, very revealing angles. In her formally ambitious and genre blurring new book, Guggenheim Fellow Zambreno writes about trying (and failing) to write a critical study of Hervé Guibert’s To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life—as well as ruminating on themes like friendship, morality, literature, time, and memory. To Write As If Already Dead is highly attuned to the pleasures and possibilities of writing. [Zambreno] builds off Guibert to hint that while writing can take the form of companionship and solitude it can also be both and neither. Writing, she suggests, can offer privacy as well as communion. It can both mark the passage of time and obfuscate its progress. Writing can be a sketch, a failure, a confession, an expression and a negation of the self. Writing can come from the body, writing can replicate the texture of thought. Writing can be walking, a way of seeing, a physical space in itself. And for Zambreno as well as Guibert, writing can also serve as a missive of urgency. [Zambreno’s work] is exploratory, experimental, and meandering; it has episodic qualities and repetitions that invoke dailiness. It exists in community, incorporating the words and ideas of friends. It engages with books and authors and artists. It’s deeply intellectual and deeply personal . . . This is a book that circles around its own subjects and is about the very act of circling. It’s a whirling, unsettled book that inspires whirling, unsettled thoughts. It’s a bit of a flex to publish a book as a parent of young children that takes as its central concern the difficulty of writing a book while parenting young children, but Zambreno’s approach is not just a flex, it’s a quiet revolution. By approaching the experience of motherhood with the same seriousness and rigor applied to Guibert and his narrative of friendship and ego and human suffering, To Write as if Already Dead becomes proof that sometimes the only solution to that problem turned over and over in so many motherhood/art books is to collapse the boundaries between what we think of as ‘work’ and what we consider to be ‘life.’ [To Write's] expansion of narrative scope marks a fascinating shift in Zambreno’s corpus toward externality and a kind of communalism. Her writing has always been deeply interior, using personal (or authorial) experience to explore the past, whether on the madwomen of modernism or French New Wave cinema. What sets To Write apart from her past work might be the urgency with which it is rendered, knitting Guibert’s plague years into our immediate and actionable present. Zambreno is a natural fit for this series, and Guibert a natural choice for her . . . she sees many resemblances between herself and her subject: the fretting about time, the shape of one’s book and one’s life, the body as focus, especially when subjected to medicalization. The real re-reading, though, comes with the absorption of this criticism/appreciation within the limits and chaos and dynamics of Zambreno’s own life. The physical and mental shocks of motherhood, deadlines and commitments, creative blocks – these are in fact the foundation, necessarily unstable, of Zambreno’s encounter with Guibert, and, inevitably, of our encounter with Zambreno. Given its fragmented structure, intertextuality, quotations from and reflections on correspondences, and inclusion of the narrative of a pregnancy, the book feels like a companion to Drifts—another ‘library of the mind,’ this one encompassing texts on reading, writing, authorship, friendship, betrayal, the body, birth, and death. Zambreno writes with breathtaking clarity while untangling refreshing, sometimes daunting, concepts. In [To Write], the first-person “I” appears uncomfortable, fractured, ghostly, footnote-like — not “I” as in Kate Zambreno, the published writer, but “I” as in a glazed persona, hovering more comfortably as fiction than as an endlessly verifiable biographical self. Here too, Zambreno and Guibert share similarities. As in the index, the paragraph, the appendix, the self is an illusionary fragment, a mode operating out of bodies in proximity to their deaths and disappearances, a formal condition revealing its most thrilling truths in the guise of fiction. To Write As If Already Dead is a wunderkammer of ghosts, friendships, and ailments that engages the discourse around fictional appropriation by formally inhabiting the dialogic relationships that arise when writers read other writers… and discover themselves in the text . . . It’s a harrowing pleasure to read Zambreno. This book absorbed me so deeply I left part of myself inside it. [To Write as if Already Dead] assert[s] a model of writing that is constantly aware of the body. Art criticism that pauses to breastfeed. Not content to simply describe Guibert’s work, but instead digesting and inhabiting his methods to produce a discontinuous account of her own experience, Zambreno’s approach is a far cry from the neat comparisons of historical epidemics popular in mainstream media . . . To Write as if Already Dead, in its deep entanglement with its subject, expands the possibilities of adjacency and provides a powerful model for how we might recognize shared aims without collapsing differences. To Write As If Already Dead unfurls with a blazing urgency that intimates the precise conditions of its production. In so doing, it offers a series of revelatory meditations on Guibert’s novel that simultaneously draws the reader into Guibert’s project of writing against time—and Zambreno’s own. Zambreno examines what it means to write and to attempt to live a life of the mind in the midst of life's complexities. Wonderful, thought-provoking, and unexpected.