Choke Box: A Fem-Noir

by Christina Milletti

When Edward Tamlin disappears while writing his memoir, Jane Tamlin (his wife and the mother of his young children) begins to write a secret, corrective "counter-memoir" of her own. Calling the book Choke Box, she reveals intimate, often irreverent, details about her family and marriage, rejecting -- and occasionally celebrating -- her suspected role in her husband's disappearance.

Choke Box isn't Jane's first book. From her room in the Buffalo Psychiatric Institute, she slowly reveals a hidden history of the ghost authorship that has sabotaged her family and driven her to madness. Her latest work, finally written under her own name, is designed to reclaim her dark and troubled story. Yet even as Jane portrays her life as a wife, mother, and slighted artist with sardonic candor, her every word is underscored by one belief above all others: the complete truth is always a secret. But the stories we tell may help us survive -- if they don't kill us first.

Genres: Fiction

160 pages, ebook

Published April 29, 2019

About the author

Christina Milletti’s novel Choke Box: a Fem-Noir won the Juniper Prize for Fiction and is forthcoming from University of Massachusetts Press. Her first collection of stories, The Religious and Other Fictions, was published by Carnegie Mellon University Press. You can find her recent stories in journals such as The Iowa Review, Harcourt's Best New American Voices, The Master's Review, The Cincinnati Review, and Denver Quarterly among many other publications. She’s an Associate Professor of English at the University at Buffalo where she curates the Exhibit X Fiction Series.

Reviews

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ghostwriter. Housewife. Mother. I’ve been trained to silence myself in countless ways.

At the start of this Gordian knot of a novel, a woman named Jane Tamlin is writing a ‘counter-memoir’ from the deepest point of her silencing—inside the walls of a psychiatric hospital. As she twists the unreliable narrator trope back and forth like the dangling scab on a freshly healed wound, Christina Milletti slow-releases Jane’s history of fading identity through her own words, which we are never quite sure are actually her words. In circuitous prose, Jane describes her troubled childhood and young adulthood, the transformation of motherhood, the growing distance she feels from her husband, and the ‘accidents’ that eventually led to her incarceration.

We are nothing more than memory. So it’s the simplest, most complete annihilation to be forgotten by those we love—particularly when the amnesiacs are seedling reflections of yourself.

Jane has a fraught history with words and writing. This ‘counter-memoir’ she is writing could be a correction to her husband’s memoir (through which she believes he continues to control her life) and/or to the series of memoirs she (unwillingly) ghostwrote at a young age for her brother, who subsequently became a Gen-X teenage writing phenomenon before overdosing on painkillers. Ultimately, though, the mysteriousness surrounding the events in the lives of Jane and her family begins to feel like a distraction intended to make an authorial point. It’s the sort of novel that one could read hoping to discover answers, and yet that might mean missing this point.

What accrues through the muddle of these mysterious events is an overwhelming sense of futility over Jane’s position as a woman slowly being stripped of her identity. A crust of ongoing indignities has formed over her life—indignities born of unsupported motherhood, spousal neglect and infidelity, maternal disapproval and blame, and neighbors’ animosity. Her explanations for the series of troubling events at the core of the book are disregarded, and instead she has been singled out as their cause. As a result of this extreme case of gaslighting, one could even conclude that she has been blamed in the end for her own disappearance. Everything has been taken from her, including both her own existence and the words she left behind to document it.

[Bill Hsu · Rating 3 out of 5]

I loved the opening chapters. Milletti's sinewy prose quickly establishes the narrator's paranoia and unreliable nature. Metafictional hints are sprinkled, and there are many funny moments.

Unfortunately, there followed a lot more spinning and re-spinning of domestic details, when I was hoping for more glimpses of the narrator's intriguing backstory. The dysfunctional exchanges between the narrator and her mother were jaw-dropping and hilarious. But the aspects of the narrative that I found more interesting were mostly developed further in the final afterword.

Maybe I would have appreciated this more if I'd identified the quotes in the tables. (I'll admit I'm terrible at this sort of task.) Still, I'd be interested in checking out Milletti's short fiction.

[Asha Kodah · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Christina Milletti is a comic genius, a gorgeous stylist, and a master of inventiveness, who has, in this tour de force novel, fashioned a conceit of Nabokovian brilliance that challenges all our assumptions about domesticity as it simultaneously reinvigorates the English language. A man, his wife. His book, her knife. Her cunning counter-memoir. Choke Box will keep you guessing, and its delightfully slippery narrator will charm you as she sets the record straight."―Mary Caponegro, author of All Fall Down

" Choke Box is a chilling and wonderfully thrilling, lyrical book that will send its readers on a journey through truth, violence, and language, straight up to the tantalizing border of bodies and brains. Christina Milletti has forged a gorgeous monster."―Samantha Hunt, author of The Dark Dark

"The velocity of its intelligence and its wit, and the grace of its language, makes Christina Milletti's Choke Box a wild, audacious and utterly pleasurable ride.”—Carole Maso aka Queen Maso


I read this one in a sitting, which amounted to about three hours time, definitely worth it, the thing took hold and held on. I came to Milletti by way of her interview in Flore Chevaillier’s Divergent Trajectories, and although I did expect something great—like Singer and Di Blasi and Kapil and Gladman and Tomasula etc—I had no idea the great would be this good. Thoroughly impressed. Highly recommended.

[Nadya Booyse · Rating 5 out of 5]

A quick read and an absolute page turner. There are just so many levels in which this book can be delved into, but at its core lies the troubled mind of a modern woman losing her identity, being seen as the cause for all that goes wrong in her children’s and husband’s lives.
But there is also a slight twist. As you delve into the mind of a woman, a mother, accused of the worst things, you start to will find yourself taking one side after the other, and willing it all to a good end.
Perhaps it does, perhaps it doesn’t. This Fem-Noir has been one of the best reads I have had this whole year, beautifully written, relatable in so many ways, with depth and mystery rolled into a tight little novella, and I refuse to spoil it for anybody.

[Aimee Parkison · Rating 5 out of 5]

This brilliant Fem-Noir novel is a page turner. I was totally captivated by its engaging psychological mystery about marriage and motherhood and the secrets the mind keeps from itself. I couldn’t put this book down! The mystery of the protagonist's character is hidden in the counter-memoir of Jane, a ghost writer confined in the Buffalo Psychiatric Institute. Like “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Choke Box calls into question misogynistic practices used to treat women where “treatment” is confinement. Highly recommend.

[Shaun · Rating 5 out of 5]

Review forthcoming

[Melissa Freeman]

Very interesting.

[Sonya Cohen · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.4