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An Image of My Name Enters America: Essays
From a “brilliant, one-of-a-kind maestro” (Booklist), a vibrant tapestry of memoir, research, and criticism
Again, today, if I must choose between love and memory, I choose memory.
What would you risk to know yourself? Which stories are you willing to follow to the bitter end, revise, or, possibly, begin all over? In this collection of five interrelated essays, Lucy Ives explores identity, national fantasy, and history. She examines events and records from her own life―a childhood obsession with My Little Pony, papers and notebooks from college, an unwitting inculcation into the myth of romantic love, and the birth of her son―to excavate larger aspects of the past that have been suppressed or ignored. With bracing insight and extraordinary range, she weaves new stories about herself, her family, our country, and our culture. She connects postmodern irony to eighteenth-century cults, Cold War musicals to a great uncle’s suicide to the settlement of the American West, museum period rooms to the origins of her last name to the Assyrian genocide, and the sci-fi novel The Three-Body Problem to the development of modern obstetrics. Here Ives retrieves shadowy sites of pain and fear and, with her boundless imagination, attentiveness, and wit, transforms them into narratives of repair and possibility.
Again, today, if I must choose between love and memory, I choose memory.
What would you risk to know yourself? Which stories are you willing to follow to the bitter end, revise, or, possibly, begin all over? In this collection of five interrelated essays, Lucy Ives explores identity, national fantasy, and history. She examines events and records from her own life―a childhood obsession with My Little Pony, papers and notebooks from college, an unwitting inculcation into the myth of romantic love, and the birth of her son―to excavate larger aspects of the past that have been suppressed or ignored. With bracing insight and extraordinary range, she weaves new stories about herself, her family, our country, and our culture. She connects postmodern irony to eighteenth-century cults, Cold War musicals to a great uncle’s suicide to the settlement of the American West, museum period rooms to the origins of her last name to the Assyrian genocide, and the sci-fi novel The Three-Body Problem to the development of modern obstetrics. Here Ives retrieves shadowy sites of pain and fear and, with her boundless imagination, attentiveness, and wit, transforms them into narratives of repair and possibility.
336 pages, Paperback
First published October 15, 2024
28 people are currently reading
2847 people want to read
About the author
Lucy Ives
23 books79 followersLucy Ives is the author of several books of poetry and short prose, including The Hermit and the novella nineties. Her writing has appeared in Artforum, Lapham’s Quarterly, and at newyorker.com. For five years she was an editor with the online magazine Triple Canopy. A graduate of Harvard and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she holds a Ph.D. in comparative literature from New York University. She teaches at the Pratt Institute and is currently editing a collection of writings by the artist Madeline Gins.
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Displaying 1 - 27 of 27 reviews
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September 17, 2024A disappointing DNF for me. I have requested, been approved for and finished 10+ books since this arrived on my shelf. It's been months now. For some reason - even 20% in - I'm just not connecting with it. I think in large part that's due to the poorly formatted ebook. I primarily read on my kindle and the eARC I received was missing the essay titles, so I am just now having to go back and find out where each started and stopped (aside from b/w essays 1 and 2). I realize it may make me sound a little dumb, but I think I read straight through from there as if it were a novel. The start of the second essay was only obvious to me because I started losing interest pretty quickly from its start.
My other hang up was how dense and wordy the writing is. Maybe I'm in more of a rush than I should be, but I constantly felt like I had read SO MUCH for hardly any payoff.
As a mood reader I'm well aware of my need to give books a break sometimes, and give them another go after a palette cleanser or two. I tried that here. For months. This just isn't for me, unfortunately.
I don't think it's the book's problem though, I'm confident it's a "me" thing.
{Thank you bunches to NetGalley, Lucy Ives and publisher for the eARC in exchange for my honest review!}
My other hang up was how dense and wordy the writing is. Maybe I'm in more of a rush than I should be, but I constantly felt like I had read SO MUCH for hardly any payoff.
As a mood reader I'm well aware of my need to give books a break sometimes, and give them another go after a palette cleanser or two. I tried that here. For months. This just isn't for me, unfortunately.
I don't think it's the book's problem though, I'm confident it's a "me" thing.
{Thank you bunches to NetGalley, Lucy Ives and publisher for the eARC in exchange for my honest review!}
March 13, 2025
How to rate this! When it’s good, it’s GOOD. Ives doesn’t just put her finger on certain experiences, she digs and scratches and gets them under her nail. The diction here is delicious…. So many sentences to drink and sigh about! Sometimes though, they are too tortured, or the distinct parts of an essay feel too deattached; I think you should only get license to use a page divider to jump around once or twice per essay, and even then it gets old if not executed perfectly. Some of these didn’t cohere for me (the titular piece, in particular) but the first one on unicorns and the last one on birth…. I’m agog!
January 27, 2025
Often very compelling (though I do have some quibbles with the bits on love / Lacan / psychoanalysis). About halfway through the book though I noticed the architecture of each essay is basically following the same schema — faux red herring, short digressions that meander the appropriate amount before looping back and making the proper connection. Like extremely talented grad school writers workshop essays, and I don't really mean that as a compliment or as a criticism, more of a value neutral observation.
February 10, 2026
Genuinely one of the worst books i’ve ever read in my life. this has little to no redeeming qualities. profoundly arrogant in a way i know very few people able of displaying. incredibly self-indulgent white woman others herself through the basic everyday experiences of everyone in the entire world, except she’s different because she’s assyrian, depressed, and pregnant. Girl get an epidural next time!
June 11, 2025
“The End” and “The Three-Body Problem” belong in the Essay Hall of Fame, but the first 3 pieces didn’t land for me
January 26, 2025
Getting to know Ives' own way of thinking, which is formally as lovely as a honeycomb but whose turns are as startling as the present day, transcends any points she may be arriving at. I loved watching her search, and simultaneously feeling that this as a text is the work of art I've been searching for. We continue.
July 24, 2025
Hard for me to accurately rate this collection… overall it felt like a reading assignment for grad school. I really thought I would connect with the essays but I just didn’t. Maybe not the right time for me to read them.
July 23, 2024
This is one of the smartest books I've ever read. A deep love of language combined with a boundless imagination supported with facts. The curse and the blessing.
Stunningly good!
Stunningly good!
January 27, 2025
This is everything I want in an essay collection. Never at any point did I know where one of her essays would go. That's one of my favorite things about Virginia Woolf's essays, and now Lucy Ives too. Got slightly lost on the theory essay, but only in a way that made me desperate to look up all the references and understand. The essays varied widely - on My Little Pony and unicorns, a history of her last name, science fiction, childbirth, poststructuralism - and yet they all managed to speak to each other. If not directly then in their thematic resonances, circling around questions of memory, love, the body, violence, history. Definitely will seek out more Lucy Ives after this.
April 26, 2024
3.5
A collection of 5 essays by Lucy Ives that at once explore theory while also diving into her family history and moments from her youth. Each of the essays have a psychoanalytic spin to them, regularly referencing Lacan and in The End (my favorite essay of the collection) playing word games/puzzles. I’m very appreciative of the galley from Graywolf Press and am eager for the release date 7/15.
A collection of 5 essays by Lucy Ives that at once explore theory while also diving into her family history and moments from her youth. Each of the essays have a psychoanalytic spin to them, regularly referencing Lacan and in The End (my favorite essay of the collection) playing word games/puzzles. I’m very appreciative of the galley from Graywolf Press and am eager for the release date 7/15.
September 27, 2024
Thanks to NetGalley and Graywolf Press for the ARC!
Lucy Ives’s An Image of My Name Enters America reads like Susan Sontag for the terminally online, moving breathlessly and comfortably from Lacan to 4chan memes to My Little Pony. It’s an absolute blast.
The book is comprised of five essays that shuffle along, starting as one thing before morphing into something else entirely. There’s an interesting tension at play here—re-reads are almost certainly necessary if one is to appreciate the scope of what Ives is attempting, but so much of the writing’s spark is in its immediate, off-the-cuff energy.
This momentum makes An Image of My Name Enters America a little incoherent and so earnest that one almost wonders if it’s a very complicated joke. It’s the wonderful kind of cultural criticism that welcomes its own silliness so that it can be genuinely serious. I think “Earliness, or Romance” is exceptional, shapeshifting between a reflection on the film Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and an exploration of how our cultural notions of love are situated in the same cruel optimism that Lauren Berlant wrote about. Oh, also there’s mention of naming one’s Oregon Trail avatar after genitals. Strangely, it works, resulting in a lovely call to care—a yielding of our expectation for romance to make us feel fully known.
That said, this can be a deeply frustrating book for the same reasons that it can be very fulfilling. It’s all over the place. If you ever slip from Ives’s wavelength, it’s an absolute plummet, almost ensuring that you will be lost for the remainder of the essay. The difference between ambling and rambling writing is simply readers’ patience, and I think Ives tests it often. Occasionally, you might stumble over the detritus of what feels like an earlier draft of an essay, and it’s grating. It didn’t ruin the experience for me, but I’m sure it will for many readers.
An Image of My Name Enters America won’t be for everyone. In fact, I think it won’t be for most people, but it’s still worth diving into. These are thought-provoking essays that occasionally prod at the heart. Lucy Ives is a challenging writer, and it feels exciting to see a great mind at work, even in moments when it isn’t clear how it works.
Lucy Ives’s An Image of My Name Enters America reads like Susan Sontag for the terminally online, moving breathlessly and comfortably from Lacan to 4chan memes to My Little Pony. It’s an absolute blast.
The book is comprised of five essays that shuffle along, starting as one thing before morphing into something else entirely. There’s an interesting tension at play here—re-reads are almost certainly necessary if one is to appreciate the scope of what Ives is attempting, but so much of the writing’s spark is in its immediate, off-the-cuff energy.
This momentum makes An Image of My Name Enters America a little incoherent and so earnest that one almost wonders if it’s a very complicated joke. It’s the wonderful kind of cultural criticism that welcomes its own silliness so that it can be genuinely serious. I think “Earliness, or Romance” is exceptional, shapeshifting between a reflection on the film Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and an exploration of how our cultural notions of love are situated in the same cruel optimism that Lauren Berlant wrote about. Oh, also there’s mention of naming one’s Oregon Trail avatar after genitals. Strangely, it works, resulting in a lovely call to care—a yielding of our expectation for romance to make us feel fully known.
That said, this can be a deeply frustrating book for the same reasons that it can be very fulfilling. It’s all over the place. If you ever slip from Ives’s wavelength, it’s an absolute plummet, almost ensuring that you will be lost for the remainder of the essay. The difference between ambling and rambling writing is simply readers’ patience, and I think Ives tests it often. Occasionally, you might stumble over the detritus of what feels like an earlier draft of an essay, and it’s grating. It didn’t ruin the experience for me, but I’m sure it will for many readers.
An Image of My Name Enters America won’t be for everyone. In fact, I think it won’t be for most people, but it’s still worth diving into. These are thought-provoking essays that occasionally prod at the heart. Lucy Ives is a challenging writer, and it feels exciting to see a great mind at work, even in moments when it isn’t clear how it works.
February 8, 2025
Ives is a virtuoso and that’s mostly a good thing: there are sections of this that read as breathlessly as a good novel. There are also moments where I feel like she’s reveling a bit much in her own virtuosity, like a concert pianist extending a cadenza just a touch past the point of musicality. But as a humanities PhD survivor, this collection was one of my first forays back into this kind of writing and it was a good choice: though Ives occasionally ventures into the kind of heavily footnoted abstraction that put me off pursuing academic research (both because I am very bad at it and because I find it largely tiresome, despite the fact that I find the primary texts and even some of the secondary texts fascinating) — or offers a gloss on a theoretical text that fails to elucidate its points without recourse to the same obscurantist flights of language that make those texts so punishing for me personally — she is also very funny and willing to engage with pop culture in a way that is neither overly self-serious nor pandering. The essay on her depersonalization disorder is stunning, and the rest all contain several beautifully figured sections that had me fully onboard even if my overall experience was one of fits and starts, often racing but sometimes plodding. Curious to read one of her novels and will keep an eye out for more essays!
(…Okay but I can’t not point out this pet peeve that is also anathema to me as a survivor of academia: “…when we attended the same midwestern writing program.” If you want us to know you went to the Iowa Writers Workshop, just tell us! You already name-dropped Harvard without doing this “I went to a liberal arts school in Cambridge” thing and that is totally okay! The much more conspicuous faux-sheepish half-reveal will always rankle, but I’m glad I kept reading.)
(…Okay but I can’t not point out this pet peeve that is also anathema to me as a survivor of academia: “…when we attended the same midwestern writing program.” If you want us to know you went to the Iowa Writers Workshop, just tell us! You already name-dropped Harvard without doing this “I went to a liberal arts school in Cambridge” thing and that is totally okay! The much more conspicuous faux-sheepish half-reveal will always rankle, but I’m glad I kept reading.)
May 13, 2025
Lucy Ives writes:
“Whether we are convinced by the metaphors selected by Freud and Lacan, a general effect of these psychoanalytic accounts, celebrated by literary critics perhaps more than clinicians, is to foreground the ways in which behaviour associated with a time when we could not survive on our own determines whom we love as adults and how. Indeed, it is the famous mechanism of repetition you’ve surely heard about: the treatment you receive at the hands of a caregiver becomes the action you associate with someone who loves you. Thus, in this account, do parents win for their children their future partners. If a parent physically abuses their child, that child will seek a lover who will do the same, even if that child is able to recognize that physical abuse is, in the abstract and rationally speaking, harmful and in no way loving. Because a child is compelled to understand an abusive parent’s behaviour as loving, because to survive a child must view a caregiver as loving.
Contemporary psychoanalytic approaches, even if circumspect about Freud and Lacan, often privilege a sort of practical suspicion designed to help the patient explore self-defeating narratives adopted as a protective veil during childhood. To undergo treatment, then, is a bit like stopping where one is on the path of life and turning to face something that one has for so long kept at one’s back. It’s the thing you think is going to kill you. That thing. That unspeakable thing. The one thing that lacks contingency and seems fated and is therefore “yours.” In a way, you’re not wrong. In the past, it could have killed you, when you were small and vulnerable, but it cannot harm you anymore. What is harmful is that you run from it – and that you run, uncannily, toward it, as in a waking dream. What is harmful is that when you find another person you believe figures this thing for you, you fall deeply in love with them. And the whole world falls away.”
“Whether we are convinced by the metaphors selected by Freud and Lacan, a general effect of these psychoanalytic accounts, celebrated by literary critics perhaps more than clinicians, is to foreground the ways in which behaviour associated with a time when we could not survive on our own determines whom we love as adults and how. Indeed, it is the famous mechanism of repetition you’ve surely heard about: the treatment you receive at the hands of a caregiver becomes the action you associate with someone who loves you. Thus, in this account, do parents win for their children their future partners. If a parent physically abuses their child, that child will seek a lover who will do the same, even if that child is able to recognize that physical abuse is, in the abstract and rationally speaking, harmful and in no way loving. Because a child is compelled to understand an abusive parent’s behaviour as loving, because to survive a child must view a caregiver as loving.
Contemporary psychoanalytic approaches, even if circumspect about Freud and Lacan, often privilege a sort of practical suspicion designed to help the patient explore self-defeating narratives adopted as a protective veil during childhood. To undergo treatment, then, is a bit like stopping where one is on the path of life and turning to face something that one has for so long kept at one’s back. It’s the thing you think is going to kill you. That thing. That unspeakable thing. The one thing that lacks contingency and seems fated and is therefore “yours.” In a way, you’re not wrong. In the past, it could have killed you, when you were small and vulnerable, but it cannot harm you anymore. What is harmful is that you run from it – and that you run, uncannily, toward it, as in a waking dream. What is harmful is that when you find another person you believe figures this thing for you, you fall deeply in love with them. And the whole world falls away.”
September 17, 2025
Weirdly balled over by essayists intelligence and voice but understood it. She’s so smart but also a good communicator but also I felt like she was writing like she didn’t care if I got it, just felt honest. Fav essays in order were The End, three body problem, image of my name. Literally read and reread the love essay and didn’t get it. Keep reading banger finishing essays (Natalia Ginsburg little virtues) about womanhood and motherhood(sort of ish)
Learned I can use anything to write an essay (personal experience, research, movie analysis, criticism, convo transcripts even??) and it’s not important for the reader to get 100% of what you say if you can properly communicate the feelings and vibes and ideas well enough.
Lost the lib copy at the Harvard campus center and then went back for it. Security guard said they throw everything out at the end of the day 😭 wtf. Went to Porter sq books to read the last 15 pages and will pay the lib fine.
Read for Alex chee workshop
Learned I can use anything to write an essay (personal experience, research, movie analysis, criticism, convo transcripts even??) and it’s not important for the reader to get 100% of what you say if you can properly communicate the feelings and vibes and ideas well enough.
Lost the lib copy at the Harvard campus center and then went back for it. Security guard said they throw everything out at the end of the day 😭 wtf. Went to Porter sq books to read the last 15 pages and will pay the lib fine.
Read for Alex chee workshop
January 17, 2025
Those who have read Lucy Ives' novels will be more or less prepared for this book. If you enjoyed the "botox" digression at the start of "Life is Everywhere", well, buckle up. This book is full of lengthy, detailed historical explanations of things, beginning with My Little Ponies and unicorns in general. This can feel like an intellectual wall set up by the author to make the discussion impersonal. But then the veil drops suddenly, and it ties into something deeply personal and revealing.
The reading is difficult (my god, the footnotes!) and can sometimes be not particularly enjoyable, but it always feels urgent and important. The essays progress into increasingly dark territory, until we are finally let off the hook by the hopeful and triumphant final essay.
I have never read anything remotely similar to this, and found it fascinating.
The reading is difficult (my god, the footnotes!) and can sometimes be not particularly enjoyable, but it always feels urgent and important. The essays progress into increasingly dark territory, until we are finally let off the hook by the hopeful and triumphant final essay.
I have never read anything remotely similar to this, and found it fascinating.
April 9, 2025
This collection was a mixed bag for me. I enjoyed the first and last essays ("of Unicorns" and "The Three Body Problem"), which were extremely astute and emotionally affecting. These two pieces had a much more successful balance of memoir, research, and criticism than the remaining essays. At times her struggle to write this collection was visible both in the repeated reflexive move to comment on the process of writing each essay in the middle of almost every one and the density of her prose. Many of the researched and heavily annotated sections were frankly a slog and felt unnecessarily burdensome with limited payout. Overall, though, Ives has a very sharp mind and I am curious to explore her fiction.
November 12, 2024
Essays I want to teach. I want everyone to read. Essays I just want. Want to be in, want to write, want want want...
"For memory is partial. This is its form [...]
"Here it is: the image that affects you most may be the one (perduta, smarrita ) in shadow. The vivacity or strange, muffled darkness of that which lies under erasure--buried, crossed out, immolated bathed (paradoxically) in too much light--should never be underestimated.
"Anyway, this is just a story of something that preceded my birth and refused to be lost, hardly an uncommon sort of tale where humans are concerned. Chances are you, too, could tell me something like it."
"For memory is partial. This is its form [...]
"Here it is: the image that affects you most may be the one (perduta, smarrita ) in shadow. The vivacity or strange, muffled darkness of that which lies under erasure--buried, crossed out, immolated bathed (paradoxically) in too much light--should never be underestimated.
"Anyway, this is just a story of something that preceded my birth and refused to be lost, hardly an uncommon sort of tale where humans are concerned. Chances are you, too, could tell me something like it."
September 5, 2025
I’m very glad I read this book. It is brilliant and interesting and written in a fascinating, thoughtful way - it feels like it is written at breakneck speed, but it is incredibly well crafted. She covers things personal (the birth of her child, her childhood affections, a relative’s suicide, etc..) and large movements (settling the American West, the Assyrian genocide, etc…). She is fascinating and I learned a lot
December 9, 2025
Like others here, the final two essays compelled me more than the first three. There is something distancing and disembodied about this writing that I relate to, yet it is the more embodied pieces, the ones that sit on the threshold between flesh and intellect, between earth and world, that are the ones that resonate strongest.
May 6, 2025
I couldn't stop reading this even though it's finals week. My god. I feel so grateful to have experienced this book. Thinking a lot about language and the self and what this feels like (pain), and what this looks like (the body), but mostly I'm just astonished. wowowow
June 17, 2025
the barbara johnson essay in this felt like fanservice to me—characteristically baggy with the flat humor of bald absurdity sprinkled throughout. restores my faith in the strange and roving potential of essays—and makes me realize i miss rakoff’s sprinting jokes at times
September 26, 2024
A diverse collection of essays. One uses the alphabet as its spine. Another discusses the mystery shrouding childbirth in the US. A nice nudge to think from different viewpoints.
March 22, 2025
The childbirth essay was a super-shredder.
June 20, 2025
4.5 stars!
The second and fourth essays were my favorite. I love filling my brain with facts that one day will be relevant in the most random moments.
The second and fourth essays were my favorite. I love filling my brain with facts that one day will be relevant in the most random moments.
September 23, 2025
stunner
November 24, 2025
Quite dense writing that loosens up in certain essays. Overall really liked this, but was not in entirely the right mindset to read. There were particular passages that I won't soon forget.
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