Heroines

by Kate Zambreno

A manifesto for "toxic girls" that reclaims the wives and mistresses of modernism for literature and feminism.

I am beginning to realize that taking the self out of our essays is a form of repression. Taking the self out feels like obeying a gag order―pretending an objectivity where there is nothing objective about the experience of confronting and engaging with and swooning over literature."― from Heroines

On the last day of December, 2009 Kate Zambreno began a blog called Frances Farmer Is My Sister, arising from her obsession with the female modernists and her recent transplantation to Akron, Ohio, where her husband held a university job. Widely reposted, Zambreno's blog became an outlet for her highly informed and passionate rants about the fates of the modernist "wives and mistresses." In her blog entries, Zambreno reclaimed the traditionally pathologized biographies of Vivienne Eliot, Jane Bowles, Jean Rhys, and Zelda writers and artists themselves who served as male writers' muses only to end their lives silenced, erased, and institutionalized. Over the course of two years, Frances Farmer Is My Sister helped create a community where today's "toxic girls" could devise a new feminist discourse, writing in the margins and developing an alternative canon.

In Heroines, Zambreno extends the polemic begun on her blog into a dazzling, original work of literary scholarship. Combing theories that have dictated what literature should be and who is allowed to write it―from T. S. Eliot's New Criticism to the writings of such mid-century intellectuals as Elizabeth Hardwick and Mary McCarthy to the occasional "girl-on-girl crime" of the Second Wave of feminism―she traces the genesis of a cultural template that consistently exiles female experience to the realm of the "minor," and diagnoses women for transgressing social bounds. " When she experiences it, it's pathological," writes Zambreno. "When he does, it's existential." By advancing the Girl-As-Philosopher, Zambreno reinvents feminism for her generation while providing a model for a newly subjectivized criticism.

Genres: Nonfiction, Feminism, Essays, Memoir, History, Womens, Biography

313 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 5, 2012

About the author

Kate Zambreno is the author of the novels Green Girl (Harper Perennial) and O Fallen Angel (Harper Perennial). She is also the author of Heroines (Semiotext(e)'s Active Agents) and Book of Mutter (Semiotexte(e)'s Native Agents). A collection of talks and essays, The Appendix Project, is forthcoming from Semiotext(e) in April 2019, and a collection of stories and other writing, Screen Tests, is forthcoming from Harper Perennial in June 2019. She is at work on a novel, Drifts, and a study of Hervé Guibert. She teaches at Columbia University and Sarah Lawrence College.

Reviews

[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The specter of the ‘ugly’ feminist that still haunts us. For I still don’t want to be an ugly woman and when I write I am an ugly woman, I am rude and crabby, I am braless, my breasts knocking up against each other, I don’t wear deodorant or make-up, don’t leave the house for days, I forget what it’s like to be outside, a body a body lumpy from lack of exercise and a hasty daily diet.”

1) I can count on one hand the theory-related texts I've read that discuss mental health + creative production in a way I find responsible, helpful, and honest. That hand is holding this book.

2) Until reading this, I didn't realize that I have absolutely always considered myself a character, not an author. It's such an obvious extension of the agent/target, subject/object breakdown that it never occurred to me that I was aiding and abetting the cannibalization of my own experiences for other people's narratives.

3) The past 15 books I've read were the mediocre dates I had to get through in order to find this one. This one was the date that said, "Hey, bedmate, you are so, so good and so, so competent, and so, so enough. So enough you are excessive. I am, too."

4) In extension, this book has torn the covers off my relationship to reading--you know, in the "time to wake up, no more of this microfleece cage bullshit" type of way. It's not enough for reading to be consumptive--or narcotic (p.21)--it needs to be bothersome. It needs to activate my body, make me ugly, make me gush. In a way, it's only fair: writing is painful (I'm thinking of debridement, the act of cutting off necrotic or infected tissue in order to stimulate healing); it seems cheap to allow such a friction-less devouring.

5) Sometimes I fantasize about authors going on Goodreads when they feel like hot shit and reading through all the five star reviews (I choose to fantasize about this over the horrifying opposing reality, where the entire Internet is the rudest writing workshop and those one star reviews are always waiting.) I think about how these writers would consider my five stars. In this case, my five stars are a way of saying, "Thanks, Kate. This book is as important as you think it is. You know that girl you shook by the shoulders, hoping to shake her the fuck up and get her writing? Congratulations on publishing that shake."

[Jasmine Woodson]

I’ve gotten tired, I think, of Men do this, Patriarchy f-cks us over in this way, Look at the these assh-les, and, in the particular case of Heroines, Look at these literary assh-les.

Patriarchy, and in some cases, men, individual, specific men, (occasionally individual, specific women as well), silence us. Pathologize us. Confine us to a cage and cut our claws off if dare we make a move toward escape. I feel that Zambreno’s audience—which I imagine is largely comprised of literate, conscious women and men—knows this, is conversant this fact—she doesn’t need to go over it and over it and over it. This is the bulk of the work, by far. Zelda and Viv and Jean and June and Sylvia and Jane and Louise and their demise at the treacherous hands of the patriarchal institution and their husbands/lovers. Perhaps I’m tired of this litany of misogynist transgression because I’ve more or less accepted it as fact. Yes, I think that’s it: this is a fact of life, has been for much too long, and so I want to move beyond it, move beyond weeping and wailing and gnashing my teeth because my personhood does not exist except in relation to a man, and even then, when I’m allowed to be a human, that humanity exists as lesser. Again, let me say: I want to move beyond it. I strive to keeps it pushin, always. To refer back to the insidiousness of the men in these women’s lives at every turn caused me trouble. I didn’t particularly care to read about Scott and Tom and Ford and Ted and Gustave and Andre and Henry and the rest of those brilliant sons, those geniuses, those jerks, who suppressed and/or stole outright from and/or criticized for its messiness then the work of their wives. Instead of hearing about what Zelda and Viv didn’t do, I would have liked to read about what they did do. Show me their work, show me their scribbles. I realize that this, of course, is problematic due to the obliteration of much of what these women produced (or the stopped sensations on their souls that didn’t allow for production at all), but, and this brings me to my second problem with this work, without my eyeballs and mind and heart rolling over their writings and inciting miniature meltdowns over their prose, untamed, personal, “vomitious”, like I do when I read much of Zambreno’s writing, particularly when she writes her life, it’s difficult for me to put as much spiritual stock in the biographical details related throughout Heroines as Zambreno does--Janet Macolm’s The Silent Woman cast a long shadow over my biography reading, and so I can’t readily accept theories, feelings, emotional superstructures, built on biography. The biographer built the bricks of those books’ foundations, and erected the house. Their hands are all over it. More primary source material would have strengthened her case, to my mind.

Now, all that being said, the last 40, 50 pages of Heroines were goddamn amazing. Her mental trackings here, a rumination on how the internet, that oft-derided no-literary-man’s-land, has provided fecund spaces for women writers writing like motherf-ckin women as messily and bodily and glitterily as they want (though I had dips in and out of “Well, what about privacy? Safety? Digital footprinting?” Heroines isn’t the forum for this conversation, I don’t think.) are what I would have liked to have read more concerning . The dismantling of traditional notions of “literariness”. My god that made me so excited. I do realize that the recurrent marital treacheries Heroines is built from is what made my affective whoosh to the last fifth of Heroines possible, but still, ack, I wanted more Zelda straight up, a bit more critical rigor building rhetorical bridges from women’s voices into alternative spaces in which to enact and exercise those voices and a little less slapping down men’s necks on the guillotine lunette(I can do this particular brand of bad all by myself, and I suspect most women can, as well), I think.

Also, the bibliography is bonkers.

[Teresa · Rating 4 out of 5]

For me this is a continuation of a revelatory work I read years before Goodreads: The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. (Elaine Showalter’s A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx is another in this mode.) While the Zambreno is also informed by years of knowledge and research, it’s less of academic writing, and much more personal and impassioned in tone. It grew from Zambreno’s personal blog, itself a form of writing that’s disparaged—never mind her topics, which were also criticized. As well as sharing themes, Heroines’s fragmented nature reminded me of Tillie Olsen’s Silences. All of these works provoked the same feelings and reactions in me: deep interest; and appropriate anger over the suppression of women’s voices.

Zambreno’s particular concentration is on her beloved “mad wives,” the (supposedly) mentally ill women whose partners stopped them from writing. Many times these more famous individuals (all men except for a mention or two of Gertrude Stein) used their partners’ stories for their own writing: F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald being the prime example. A collusion of men (husband and doctor) kept Zelda from writing, even when she was at her calmest and the alcoholic F. Scott was at his most emotional. (The excerpt from their transcribed conversation is heartbreaking, as to Zelda.) This type of controlling behavior seems never-endingly relevant, as is the double standard concerning the determination of a mental illness.

(I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention my discomfort over the use of a gendered word I detest, one used here to describe Flaubert’s lover. I understand the word might be the “best” word—I registered one instance where it probably was— but, in general, I fail to understand why the word I just used (“lover”) isn’t used in lieu of a word that has no male equivalent.)

[Domenica · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book, while it has a special place for me, didn’t quite age as well as I’d hoped. This time around I had a hard time reconciling Zambreno’s goal of legitimizing typically “feminized” modes of writing such as diary and journal writing, writing that revels in and repurposes literary theory, pop culture, blog culture, and “frivolity” (clothes, makeup, etc.) with the more cringe-worthy passages of her sneering at her neighbour (a fucking adjunct teaching art history or something, not even some “townie”) for being excited when her subscription to Martha Stewart Living arrives in the mail.

Her sour attitude towards the small towns she lives in (that will never compare to her reverence for New York, London, or Chicago) also grates, as do the passages of her provoking her husband by getting physical and throwing things. This culminates for me in a callous scene where she rolls her eyes after making a student run crying from the room during a creative writing workshop and later physically shaking her in the hallway, all while privately congratulating herself for creating a profound teachable moment. I enjoy reading about and validating female rage and anger but these passages did sort of toe a line that unsettled me.

But especially disappointing is her silence around race and privilege. This is an extremely white book—all the mad wives of modernism, Zambreno herself, Zambreno’s contemporary idols and influences and publishers—which, like, okay I guess. But at least acknowledge it. Especially in a book about (gendered) oppression. For example, one of the book’s refrains “He do the police in different voices,” from Eliot’s The Waste Land, is clearly toying with Black and/or working class dialect and seems so politicized; it’s bonkers to me that this line is repeated again and again and yet race is never even mentioned a single time.

Maybe a good takeaway is how far we’ve come in our considerations of intersectionality that this book really stands out for what’s excruciatingly missing. I really did enjoy the ravenousness of all the references and the feminist reclamation of the writing, history, and stories of Zelda Fitzgerald in particular. The book tended to feel repetitive in places and re-used a lot of punning that I didn’t quite enjoy but I think I understand the overarching goal of structuring these as journals or notebooks and preserving a sort of “messy” unregulated quality.

[Roman Clodia · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Romany Arrowsmith · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is the type of feminist discourse that makes me temporarily want to quit being a feminist, because the label means I am tacitly associated with such a book. 300 pages of white women's tears. My god, the sheer vanity of it, of comparing oneself in one's own sentimental quasi-memoir to really horribly mistreated and uniquely brilliant writers like Zelda Fitzgerald and Virginia Woolf—especially infuriating as this comparison comes from a wealthy, independent professor in the 21st century, one who is very proud of her retro cloche hats and thinks living in Ohio or North Carolina is worse than death.

And yes, I say sentimental even though Zambreno has cleverly abrogated any negativity around her book by suggesting all of such emotion-directed criticism is sexist: but "Heroines" is sentimental, and narcissistic, and self-indulgent, like Philip Roth, but without anything interesting to say, also like Philip Roth. At least he was able to write with some shock value here and there, passages I could giggle transgressively to myself about. "Heroines" is just milquetoast, repetitive, punny nonsense—HAGiography and FLOWbert and "the invalid is invalidated", "she is raw material, too raw" SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP.

It was a Sisyphean task in itself to wade through her irritating writing style, which is all dramatic pauses and sentence fragments, like so:

Eliot, unfit because of his hernia. Fitzgerald, who enlisted but never actually saw the front lines, much to his disappointment. A return to those old roles we play, that we didn't even originate. All the ghosts of the past. Ghosts that aren't even our ghosts.

WOW, VERY FUCKING DEEP, KATE.

About 250 pages in, I thought I would give it two stars; she provided, after all, a lot of really interesting information about and some decent analysis of underappreciated female authors (Woolf, Fitzgerald, Rhys, Nin, Hardwick, etc). But then I came by the absolutely bone-chillingly stupid scene where Zambreno describes how she physically grabbed an anxiety-ridden student of hers, shook her, and told her to just fucking write. Zambreno jerks herself off over this teacherly moment, wistfully wondering if she could have been more brilliant had she had someone shake her in the same way. First, yuck, second, probably not, third, this reflects the odd lack of self-awareness Zambreno has of her own subject—does she think great female (or male) writers are made by being shaken into awareness? Wasn't the whole point of this stupid book that writers ought just to be given space and social sanction to be true to themselves, and that will be sufficient, no man-handling needed?

Whatever. I'm sick of thinking about it. I didn't hate this because it was "menstrual". I hated it because it was bad; trivial and bad. I think one reliable mark of a really weak autobiography is when the reader is afraid of hurting the writer's feelings. There's no vigor, no talent, no spine behind the writing.

[Ellen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Heroines by Kate Zambreno is a powerful book. At least for me. It is a book I want my daughter to read. A book that evoked tremendous rage, pain, a sense of loss, but also the possibility for change, for ownership of who and what gets written.

It is also a book that is frightening. To speak out as a woman is to invite a special kind of censure, even today. Who matters? What makes Jean Rhys less than F. Scott Fitzgerald?

Even writing a review of this work feels dangerous. But also exciting.

And since reading it, I have started to write again. For me, worth it for that alone. A book worth reading twice.

[Jesse · Rating 4 out of 5]

Heroines is a text that flares furiously: willfully ignoring Woolf’s fretting in A Room of One's Own over female authors whose work is driven by “the red light of emotion,” Zambreno instead throws in with the red-haired speaker of Plath’s “Lady Lazarus” who rises exultantly “out of the ash” to remorselessly chomp upon “men like air.” A showcase for Zambreno’s deep and wide-ranging study into the lives and experiences of a number of women of the modernist era, she also dares write herself and her experiences directly into Heroines, ingeniously undermining traditional distinctions between literary scholarship and personal memoir.

And I feel the need to stipulate right off: this is not my text. It is not mine in the sense that I am not a woman, let alone have experienced the kinds of mental illness or crippling insecurities disclosed throughout these pages. I feel it’s important to honor that reality, as scanning through the current Goodreads ratings and reviews it appears Heroines resonates much more with readers who identify as female than with the several males who have so far logged responses (with inevitable exceptions, of course) Considering how central the idea of creating a sense of community among women is central to many of Zambreno’s ideas, I respect and admire its attempt to record and actively construct a space of visibility and support.

On the other hand, this is very much my text; when she writes “I feel compelled to act as the literary executor of the dead and erased” I immediately recognized an impulse nearly identical to my own personal literary and academic project of Queer Modernisms , my blog on marginalized and forgotten queer figures of the modernist era. As someone also strangely compelled to spend so much time and effort to research and reclaim the life stories and artistic work of the historically erased (and outside of the typical orbit of academia), there were so many moments where I found myself muttering “yes, yes—that’s exactly it.” Reading Heroines in many ways felt like crossing paths with a fellow pilgrim while wandering in the wilderness—our trajectories or intended destinations aren’t the same, but the underlying motivation is.

Vivianne Eliot (married to T.S. “Tom”) and Zelda Fitzgerald (married to F. Scott) quickly emerge as the patron saints and great tragic figures of Heroines, with much space accorded to the explication of their heartbreaking life stories which eerily echo each other. A kaleidoscopic array of individuals also appear and disappear throughout the pages of Heroines, including Woolf, Plath, Jane Bowles, Jean Rhys, Djuna Barnes, Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Anaïs Nin, Elizabeth Hardwicke, Mary McCarthy, Anna Kavan, Laure (Colette Peignot), and countless others (though I will say this is a disappointingly white project: I was eagerly anticipating the appearance of Nina Simone as she appears on the collage on the original Semiotexte cover, but she only warrants one passing mention like a bit of trivia. But that’s still one more mention than afforded Josephine Baker, also glimpsed on the cover. This odd and unexpected myopia is my primary critique of the book—really, not even one allusion to the women of the Harlem Renaissance?).

Over the course of nearly 300 pages the fragmented paragraphs of Heroines twist and blur into many different forms as it blends familiar modes of literary analysis, autobiography, hagiography, confession, apologia, scholarship, criticism, reportage, and even the more informal, impassioned style of internet writing (the book is indeed rooted in Zambreno’s blog), a multitude of shapes that add up to something that often feels somewhat singular. If there are stretches that seem to lead to dead ends, it is always sustained by its energy and its passion. And as much as a Herculean effort of reclamation, Heroines also seems to me to function as a site of possibility, opening up spaces, paths, and avenues of expression and inquiry yet to be taken. It’s a thrilling thing to experience.

"So much of modernism is myth-making–who gets to be remembered? Whose writing is preserved and whose is not?"

[Andrew]

Kate Zambreno is at her best when she is writing about writers. When she is writing about her own academic life, she verges on obnoxious. “Canon/cannon,” really? Which is a shame, because a lot of her more memoir-y books are actually really excellent in a fun, scattershot way. But when you groan about the lack of vegan options when you’re among the heathens of Ohio, you’re not winning me any points. Nor are you when you’re banging on about how you hate a specific kind of novel because it reminds you of some dude you used to bang (and I think she's referring to Garth Risk Hallberg?). I mean I want to be on your team, when you a deliver a line like…

“I realize my therapist has probably never read Deleuze. I remember I am against psychiatry. I don’t return.”

…then I want to like you because it’s both bitchy as hell and also laden with implicit self-criticism, which inspires empathy. And like I said, when she writes about writers and their foibles, she’s amusing. But I only have so much time for gripes about insufficient inclusivity in the academy.

[Meghan Lamb · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read Heroines every year at the point when I feel most frustrated and alone in my writing. I've lived so much in the margins of this book, bending pages, underlining, scribbling, crying, sweating, dripping, through all the many baths of the many apartments I've moved among re-reading Kate's words. And for every time I go into this book feeling tired, anxious, ambivalent, and impossibly messy, I emerge exhilarated, exalted for all the mess that I am. This book is my armor. I am so grateful to Kate for writing it.

[Ibe Rossel]

Af en toe wat rommelig en herhalend, maar zo hartstochtelijk uitgewerkt en met de vinger op de etterende wonde dat ze er absoluut mee weg komt. Over Flaubert en T.S. Eliot en hun verhouding tot de vrouwen in hun leven schrijft ze: “Deze meesters schreven het emotionele, het hysterische, zij waren óók overspannen, maar zij richtten zich dan op de emoties van hun muzen in het echte leven, die ze straften en disciplineerden. (…) Zij is ruw materiaal. Te ruw, te open, te behoeftig, te emotioneel.“ De doorlopende metafoor van de schrijver-man als vampier die de muze-vrouw leegzuigt (en dan pretendeert dat het andersom is) werkt goed. Eigenlijk is het een beetje zoals mannen die guitig op hun dating profiel beweren dat ze op zoek zijn naar een ‘crazy’ vrouw, maar dan vooral een lege geërotiseerde versie van de manic pixie dream girl bedoelen waar ze tijdelijk hun oninteressante bestaan mee kunnen opfleuren. Als al die mannen nu ook eens meesterwerken zoals Madame Bovary zouden voortbrengen…

[AK · Rating 2 out of 5]

"Well, at least it's cool to be a bad feminist now," is my quip on finding this book mostly infuriating. I want Zambreno to write, to keep writing, to have space to write, and I want also for me to disagree with her, argue with her, fight with her over her definition of womanhood, her limited, narrow (white white moneyed white privileged HETEROSEXUAL) definition of what it is to be Woman. "Read some lesbians, Kate, jesus" is often what I thought during this book. (Natalie Clifford Barney was championing women writers since the very beginning of the 20th century, there are other histories besides 'F. Scott Fitzgerald is a dick'.) This book is so angry about the canon (fair!) but so obsessed with male acknowledgement as the ultimate arbiter of everything. If this were a materialist claim, that would be one thing, but there is no materialist analysis here, just a kind of luxuriating around in desire for male approval and the deliciously sick enjoyment of how shitty the Modernist men were. They were shitty, no argument there. But Zambreno colonizing their wives' lives and art and writing for her own purposes, in order to make some kind of claim that to be married to a professor in the 21st century, one that she makes abundantly clear dotes on her, cares for her, loves to fuck her, is just the same as it was to be married to T.S. Eliot because, I don't know, you are a wife of someone who writes? No.

But, you know, I enjoy being challenged by writing far from what I believe. Perhaps in time I'll become more sympathetic to the project this book represents.

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great new book by Kate Zambreno. In the summer, I emailed her a few questions about Heroines. You can read my intro to our interview below, or the whole Q&A on BOMBLOG.

Blending scholarship with memoir, Kate Zambreno’s Heroines is a gossip’s dream, full of digressions about the author’s own career as a novelist as well as the careers and marriages of modernists Jane Bowles, Vivienne Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Zelda Fitzgerald, and others. Although Zambreno delves deep into the personal lives of her heroines, her focus is on their writing—how their work has been dismissed, derided, or ignored altogether. In Heroines, Viv is no longer “the wife of T.S. Eliot,” but emerges as a fully rounded character, an eccentric woman of ambition, among other things. Zelda, who so desperately wanted to be taken seriously as an artist, is given her due through Kate’s close and idiosyncratic readings of her work and biographies. However, Heroines isn’t mere revisionist history; it is also an ebullient testament to the romance of reading. It’s a book about literature, and Heroines takes it as granted that books matter. It was in this spirit that I wrote to Kate about interviewing her for BOMBlog. As an editor at a small press, engaged in the process of editing, reviewing and promoting women’s writing, I wanted the conversation to continue, and to continue in the writing itself.

[flannery · Rating 2 out of 5]

Pushed past the first few pages where the author decries Akron, OH as a wasteland and regales the reader with "strange sights" like a woman eating a hot dog in a Radio Shack (what's wrong with eating a hot dog in a Radio Shack?) only to find the book over-serious and problematic. This is autobiography by example; less than an attempt to redeem her sisters from the shadows as much as it is to share the spotlight, to align herself with the maligned and marginalized women of literary history. But definitely no love here for the woman in the Radio Shack, the hardbodies in her yoga class, her friend who subscribes to Martha Stewart magazine, or the "girl-student with her Marilyn Monroe purse." A big part of my own coming-of-age has been to reconcile the differences between me (hairy, bookish, etc.) and other women (nice shoes, new purse, etc.) and realize it's no big fucking deal and learn to love everybody! There's so little love here, no tenderness even for her "sisters", her "my women writers, my compatriots", that the perfunctory bit at the end about writing without self-censorship seems exactly that, perfunctory, insincere.

"A new ritual I practice, as I get ready to write, I put on my new 4-inch platforms and stand in front of my floorlength mirror, sometimes as I'm eating chocolate almond-milk ice cream, and I intone to the mirror to myself: You're a fucking genius.

Now you try it."

Ok! You're a fucking genius! I feel better already.

[Lauren · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don't care about your blog.

[TinHouseBooks · Rating 5 out of 5]

Elissa Schappell (Editor at Large): I loved Heroines, the memoir by novelist, polemicist, and ass-kicking feminist, Kate Zambreno. On her blog Frances Farmer is My Sister, Zambreno champions the “wives and mistresses” of modernism. Female writers and artists such as Jane Bowles, Jean Rhys and Zelda Fitzgerald who played muse to great men at the expense of their own work and lives. Zambreno continues the conversation in Heroines creating a new canon—a fuck-you to the Great American White Male Way—inspires, and gives agency to all the women who want to make art.

[Ruby · Rating 5 out of 5]

"A new ritual I practice, as I get ready to write, I put on my new 4-inc platforms and stand in front of my floorlength mirrow, sometimes as I'm eating chocolate almond-milk ice-cream, and I intone to the mirror to myself: You're a fucking genius."

(4.5 It's sprawling & I don't agree with everything Zambreno writes here but that doesn't even matter - it's important, really important that someone wrote this)

[Megan Rose · Rating 5 out of 5]

Okay, this book was absolutely amazing! After a slow start (about 1/5 in) I ate this up. Zambreno's feminist blog posts-turned-book is a rollercoaster of emotions for the women she speaks of and the hidden histories behind their myths;Zelda Fitzgerald, her literary career cut short by men (including her husband) and her unfortunate death in an asylum; Vivienne Haigh-Wood Eliot's mental health problems ignored by her husband and incarceration in an asylum where she, unfortunately, dies alone with only her husband's "supposed" reaction that is mythologised as him losing his true love; Sylvia Plath who battled her mental health and bravely penned them in her novel and poems but is more remembered for her passing; and Virginia Woolf and her suicide that left a hole in the Bloomsbury and literary society of the 1920s.

Focusing on the Modernists: on the wives of authors, who were writers, themselves, but placed in the shadows of their husbands who "reinvented" eras of writing, Heroines argues for these literary gems whose works are beautiful in their own rights and should be read.

Zambreno is a definite must-read feminist writer who blends history and opinions into a thought-provoking book. If I had the chance to read again, I would in a heartbeat. Heroines is a must-read for anyone interested in literary women writers, feminism, feminist theory or an alternate type of writing.

[Tilly · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I decided someday I wanted to write the Infinite Jest for fellow fucked-up girls, for the slit-your-wrist girls like me. I hadn’t even finished Infinite Jest, but I knew it didn’t speak to me, just like I knew Kerouac’s On The Road didn’t speak to me, because he kept on writing about jumping into girls, and I knew I was one of the girls who were fucked and forgotten.

Yet no one had actually told me you could write about being a fucked-up girl. No one had given me permission, or told me that the young female experience was valid to write about in literature. This was not experience we are told we can use - our breakdowns, our love affairs. Too personal. Too emotional. Too ‘feminine tosh.'"

Zambreno's 'Heroines' is a brilliant straddling of a confessional writer's narrative and a more academic foray into the forgotten lives of literary wives (though this academic aspect never loses the sense of Zambreno's self, always focussed on the abject, always focussed on the erased, and always hunting for a sense of literary motherhood that the canonical MAN-tra of Great Novelists does not provide). Through her study of Zelda Fitzgerald, Vivien(ne) Eliot and Léona Camile Ghislaine Delacourt - the real Nadja - Zambreno reveals the way in which the canon has been skewed away from the personal, while the wives have been stunted by their husbands: their own semi-autobiographical works considered too 'confessional' to be any good, while their life stories and diaries are swallowed up by their literary partners. Their selves are turned into characters, called works of 'genius' while the real women are left to rot in asylums. Throughout it all, Zambreno is furious, and her rallying cries for women to recognise their own literary orphanhood and the need to JUST WRITE - to construct their own narratives when no one else will - feel necessary and inspiring.

The book is divided into two sections, with a short 'mirror' section between them. There is no doubt that the personal narrative in the second half feels stronger and more impactive, while the first section feels more drifting, lost, and perhaps indulgent - but I suspect this is deliberate. Reflecting on the novel upon finishing it, I was able to see how Zambreno's confidence as a writer grows directly out of her exposure to these forgotten wives, and her sense of purpose upon accepting her literary orphanhood is clear. On a re-read, I think the need to recognise the effects of the male domination of the canon and of modes of memory upon the female individual is clear, and Zambreno's more listless personal interjections are a powerful indicator of the self-doubt that our culture can induce. Indeed, as her personal and writerly confidence grows, so does her prose: a strong argument for reading novels such as this, and for the empowering effect that they can produce.

This is a powerful book with very revealing details. In this, the 50th anniversary of the death of T.S. Eliot, I would surely recommend it for the insight into an often-ignored aspect of his life: his foul treatment of Vivien(ne) (many biographers merely write off this relationship as 'equally damaging for the both of them'. Zambreno begs to differ). I'd also highlight, though, one of the aspects of this book that I personally most enjoyed: the wide reading referenced within, and the introduction to many female writers that now feel really necessary to me. Jean Rhys, Kathy Acker, so many more - my life now feels better for having been introduced to their work, and for that I thank Zambreno. She may have felt orphaned, but I expect many will feel a parental connection to this text.

[Emma · Rating 5 out of 5]

This felt almost crafted just for me! The personal nature of this was wonderfully specific - all the better to connect with for this compared to the distance and self-declared universality of the men of modernism (and really, the rest of the 20th century and the 21st too) so often discussed in the book. Though I wouldn't like to overstate the importance of men in the book too much - while it is about women placed in the shadow of their Great literary husbands, these women are emphatically centred, the men really only considered in relation to the women. There were a few things I found a little grating - in dismissing much mental illness diagnosis of fucked up girls as pathologising I felt she went a little too far. While women have so often been deemed mad to control them + prevent attempts to control their own narratives, the abuse + neglect (that Zambreno discusses so much!) is inevitably traumatic. I think there was some space for nuance there that was missed a bit (women given highly gendered diagnoses -schizophrenia in 20s and then bipolar, bpd etc nowadays - that pathologise feminine emotionality etc etc AND women exp so much interpersonal trauma that they often become mentally ill as a result? Idk it felt like she missed the opportunity to talk abt these two things at once). Also was not keen on the menstruation metaphors + their implicit gender essentialism. But that said still one of the best books I've read all year, spoke to me so much as a writer (albeit an aspiring one) and as a fucked up girl and as a lover of the overly emotional honest diary-obsessed modernist women. (I hope this makes sense cos it's 2.30 am and I'm just trying to get this down before I forget)

[Mind the Book · Rating 4 out of 5]

Helt full av marginaliaklotter och mad.bad.sad-utrop!

#BOTNS-bingoruta: 'One-word title'

Förrförra sommaren lyssnade jag på Lee Smiths 'Guests on Earth' till rutan Historical Fiction, har jag för mig. Om Zelda Fitzgeralds tid på Highland Hospital, Asheville.

Besökte själv the Museum of the Mind på Bethlem Royal Hospital, formerly known as Bedlam, med den här boken i väskan i fredags. Kunde då knappt skilja på (non-)fiktion och verklighet eftersom många passager handlar om diagnoser, behandlingsformer och metoder inom psykiatrin.

"Can I examine any of these brilliant girls as heroines of a sort? Were they heroines? They were ultimately silenced and contained, institutionalized in asylums, where they experienced dehumanizing, degrading treatment. They suffered terribly (bodily, physically). Also institutionalized in literary works that stole their identity."

[Moira · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was, perhaps, the book of the year. I want to give a copy to every woman I know.

[Pomegranate]

Älskade den bitvis, men blev också irriterad och provocerad.

[julia · Rating 4 out of 5]

it’s so funny when you want to love something so badly. are basically desperate for this book to be a life-altering experience. and it’s not to say that i don’t find much of what zambreno has to say / vocalize / synthesize impactful. so much of the experience she shares, both her own and that of the other women’s she so meticulously and generously collates, feels not only relevant but depressingly evergreen. but again, through no fault of its own, time has had its way with this book, with its theories and solutions. why don’t we try cutting out the intermediary and writing earnestly and explicitly? well that’s fine but it won’t work i respond from 12 years in the future. but the gaps which hindsight allow us to see clearly align with the missteps made in this reader’s estimation. the narrowness of the scope of subject a byproduct of the focus on what they were denied: the so-called attainment of some bourgeois ideation of “artistic genius”. by focusing on these women from similar periods classes and social strata and comparing them to their male counterparts (whose procurement of this “genius” status was far from a salve for all of their problems), what at the time may have come across as a knowing narrowing of lens now reads as a glaring omission of perspective. these women were silenced, many of them brutalized in the process, but their stories still echo louder than the vast majority of women who have lived and struggled and fought despite (in spite!) of the hellish suppressive circumstances they were born into. those who don’t have the luxury of modern madwifery. the swiss alp institution muse treatment. what of those women’s stories? does a story only matter if it’s written? do i not carry around lessons in the pit of my stomach that were there before i was even born?
but these are the aspirations of an aspiring writer. an aspiring genius. and this is a snapshot of a person a focus a moment in time. the content of which leads me to believe that the author would have no hesitation owning up to the mistakes made and opinions changed. its insistence on theorizing synthesizing and visceralizing the immediate. on proving beyond a shadow of a doubt the value that that has. nothing else i’ve ever read has impressed upon me so firmly that if there is something you must do you must do it. Or made me more sure that there is literary value in cataloging one’s masturbatory habits.
there is no better embodiment of this than the introduction to the updated version, to me the most impacting portion of the entire book. written by jaime hood, one of if not the great contemporary writer exploring the intersection of gender sex artistry and personhood, so obviously and admittedly in zambreno’s lineage. the way hood recounts the jolt this book sent through her life rebounds and echoes in mine. together she and zambreno encourage me not to take their word for it but to figure out what i think. yes i. me.

[Tiah]

~I am realizing you become a wife, despite the mutual attempt at an egalitarian partnership, once you agree to move for him. You are placed into the feminine role–you play the pawn.~

~It is like you have two selves. And you have no memory of the other self. You can be withholding, cold. You can be nurturing, supportive. I have two selves too. The me that lectures women on literature where husbands oppress their wives, and the me that secretly lives that life.~

~A definition, I think, of being oppressed is being forbidden to externalize any anger.

I am beginning to realize that the patriarch decides on the form of communication. Decides on the language. The patriarch is the one who rewrites.~

~To be a woman, perhaps, is always to be a foreigner.~

~Sometimes it seems impossible to be real friends with other women writers, we are all such trainwrecks, messes, it seems, but sometimes it seems impossible to be real friends with other women who do not identify primarily as writers. Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf: We spoke of silence.~

~Even if women in traditional roles in this era could rebel against their schooled selves, trained to experience shame and guilt for going outside of bounds, like Zelda arguably did, for a time, they couldn't escape society, in the form of their husband, the doctors, their mothers. They couldn't escape judgement and discipline.~

~ Perhaps the goal is not to be the next Great American (Male) Novelist. This is perhaps closed to us anyway. The point, perhaps, is to write–by god to write–to write and refuse erasure while we're living at least–and to use up all the channels possible through which to scream, to sing, to singe. All of these things. To write because we desire to, because we need to–and to refuse to be ignored. Or stopped.~

[Mara · Rating 4 out of 5]

I want to write a review. I wanted to write a review when I looked up last night and realized it was 12:30 when I finished it . I made a semi-resolution that I would use Goodreads more effectively this year by at least jotting notes to myself about the things I finished reading instead of hoping I'd somehow be able to find my notes in the stacks of paper journals I go through in a year. Which is, at last count, some 50 journals finished in ten years of daily writing. Catching up with Anais Nin, here. I mention, slightly embarrassed. Not wanting to come across as immodest,. It's just it's relevant because this book stirs up all the questions about identifying as a writer as a part of writing and about blogging and journal keeping and pursuing publication. Or not. And it was good to be poked there.

And I'm editing as I jot, thinking about the influx of new Goodreads connections through Facebook, people I know to varying degrees and who I imagine getting my notes to myself in their inboxes because I manage privacy settings poorly, and would anyone be offended if I use the language of this book, the 'fucked up' to describe girls who are not even maybe any more crazy or messy than anyone else I know, but who are less invested in projecting the facade of managing perfect lives? And if this is a note more or less to myself that I am aware other people may be able to read and I get uncomfortable about using the language of the book, which seems perfect and appropriate to the book because the book is "about" (among half of dozen things) the feminine problem of trying to choose between being nice, not offending, and being honest, being a writer. And seizing that label someone else is going to apply and owning it. And I sort of do identify as fucked up, for that reason, the frustration with superficial and nice and the need to wrestle, a little with the sucking chasm in the center of our lives that it's so easy to want to fill with shopping or substances or relationships or careers, that that universal wrestling seems to me like the Reason to Write/Reason to Read, the willingness to be not alone, even where we are often completely Alone. But I don't want you to think I'm not nice. So it's still weird to mention how relieving those pages were, when I opened the book on a day when I had written in the journal how I sometimes think we're like donuts, that the holes in the center of our lives are there by design, and I still find myself lonely, grasping wishing relationships would fill them up. And the recognition of others writing, and the company of literary biography makes me feel not so broken.

That said, I'm still a little ambivalent sometimes about the ways of writing and reading about being fucked up. The trying to manage identifying/glorifying, the being honest but not providing an instruction manual so that a description of an eating disorder or of cutting doesn't start seeming like a how-to manual to another woman trying, in the vastness of the internet, to place herself and her own loneliness, fear, loss of control , despair in context. I know that this was descriptive and not prescriptive, but the correlation of fucked up and writer, I say sternly to myself, doesn't mean that you have to be fucked up to write. And the places where I don't identify, the places where Heroines starts feeling like a manifesto for a blogging, publishing revolution, and I adore some of the blogs she highlights but I am still standing outside, my own blog apparently irrevivably dormant, the loneliness I was feeling the day I picked this up, is still there. As maybe it should be.

Reading this, writing about it, I guess I am grateful and admiring and maybe still filled with questions about my own relationship to other writers, living and dead, to the question of identifying with writers and identifying as a writer, between authorization and authorship, and about what it means to write mostly for myself. Which isn't satisfying, but there it is.

[Sian Lile-Pastore · Rating 3 out of 5]

I like to read about the self in essays and I like to read about women writers and the wives and mistresses of famous male writers who have been overlooked. I also liked the section Zambreno wrote about blogs and blogging and her encouragement of us all to write, and generally I am really happy that such books as this are around and being written and published. I am also annoyed about the 'Great American Novels' supposedly all being written by men, that the lists of the 'best books ever' hardly have any women writers on them, and I hate the terms 'chick lit' and 'women's novels'. I found lots of interesting things in this book and it made me want to read more about some of the people mentioned.

But. But, there is so much here I didn't like. I found it all a little unstructured and it reminded me of Elizabeth Wurtzel's 'Bitch' which may or may not be unfair/correct as it's been so long since I read any Wurtzel. I found Zambreno to be somewhat depressive/depressing and obnoxious, I hate that she told two women in an art gallery who were giggling at Yayoi Kusama's work (while also wearing shorts of all things!) that 'she's a very great artist, I intone, impatient' and I hate that she appears to be telling us what we can and cannot like - it's wrong (or idiotic) to like reading Martha Stewart's magazine, but we should like Eileen Myles (what if (like me!) we like both Zambreno?). She complains about Jimmy Chen (I have no idea who he is) and how he posts 'images with inane captions to merge high-brow with hipster irony' and yet on the next page says that Bataille is like a 'Surrealist Charlie Sheen'

So, a bit of a mixed bag for me. Perhaps I should add that I loved Green Girl so y'kno I thought I'd have liked this too.

[Nancy Freund · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's rare I'll dish out a five-star rating, but this stunning memoir/biography of the silenced (abused, institutionalized, marginalized) modernist literary wives was such an eye-opener, and so honestly written, I can't give it fewer. Zambreno's raw delivery begins boldly and builds and builds. Thorough historical research and anecdotal asides about the experiences of Zelda Fitzgerald, Vivienne Eliot, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf (and many more) substantiate Zambreno's angry style as their stories unfold. The lack of a falsely imposed structure (chronological, say, or "one wife at a time")strengthens the conversational effect of the whole work. Certain lines repeat beautifully -- "Ring Lardner's quip: Mr. Fitzgerald is a novelist and Mrs. Fitzgerald is a novelty" -- for instance. Every page delivers an intense experience, and encouragement to writers to brave writing their own intensity of experience. By the end, Zambreno herself seems to have become an intelligent, impassioned and inspirational friend. Big impact. I'm thrilled it found its way to publication -- exactly as it reads. Big respect for Semiotext(e) and for this remarkable writer. I can't wait to check out her fiction.

[Dave · Rating 2 out of 5]

Pros - interesting stylistically; had a great deal of empathy for Zambreno's dissatisfaction with her Midwestern digs; introduced me to new titles and authors that I hope to experience first-hand in the future

Cons - same didactic tone maintained throughout; is itself sexist (she claims men can never understand women, but presumes that women can understand the innermost motives and desires of men); makes some historically fishy claims in terms who gets credit for what

I agree with her thesis that many of these artistic women were abused in a variety of ways, some personal others societal, and found the swathes about her personal relationship to these neglected figures touching. Unfortunately, I overall found her tone self-righteous and aggrandizing. The book became tiresome about halfway through, at which point I found myself skimming for recommendations.

[Helen McClory · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mind blowing, readable and stirring, I felt this was the beginning of something (that is to say, more please!) Read my full review on PANK http://www.pankmagazine.com/pankblog/...