Artistic movements are important because they offer artists who have new and startling ideas the space to migrate beyond the borders of the familiar. New movements generally happen away from the mainstream—oftentimes because they are challenging the mainstream—and the artists in these movements generally languish in obscurity before their contributions are recognized. In the case of autofiction, this pattern has been upended, and critics, even as they quibble with certain aspects of autofiction—its solipsism, its reflexivity traps—provide air support for a group of artists who already enjoy a fair bit of power relative to their Black, brown, and yellow peers.
It’s no coincidence that I’ve been reading Elizabeth Robins Pennell’s The Diary of a Greedy Woman. Generations before MFK Fisher or Julia Child, Pennell wrote essays enthusing the virtues of food for the London newspaper The Pall Mall Gazette. She ignored recipes in favor of first-person accounts of “the Beauty, the Poetry, that exists in the perfect dish.”
We are living in what might be called a truly hauntological moment, a period of disjunction, of melancholy and precariousness, in which the recent past seems suddenly distant and we are obsessed with the idea of our lost future. The Apparition Phase – an ever-so-slightly silly but also very successfully scary book about twins and chaos and loss – may be the perfect novel for our phantom present.
In Hysteria, Bryant uses her voice to both challenge the stigma associated with mental illness and expand our collective understanding of it.
As Clark, a professor at the University of Huddersfield, in England, and the author of a book about Plath’s and Hughes’s poetry, explains in her poignant and closely argued prologue, she believes that Plath’s “life has been subsumed by her afterlife” and that depictions of her as “a crazed, poetic priestess are still with us.” Drawing upon unpublished material, including Plath’s diaries and calendars, extensive archival holdings, and “previously unexamined police, court and hospital records,” Clark is at pains to see Plath clearly, to rescue her from the reductive clichés and distorted readings of her work largely because of the tragedy of her ending. “I hope to free Plath,” she writes, “from the cultural baggage of the past 50 years and reposition her as one of the most important American writers of the 20th century.”