I'm From Nowhere

by Lindsay Lerman

I'm From Nowhere follows Claire as she mourns the sudden death of her husband and comes to terms with the fact of being a woman without a child, a job, a husband, or agency. She confronts a dying planet and an emerging sense of self. Is it possible for a woman to reclaim her life and set its terms without succumbing to suicide or submission?

"A beautiful treatise on grief and everything that comes after—the uncertain friendships, the numbness, the regret, and, eventually, the newer, different life. For everyone that's ever grappled with an ending, only to discover something new and beautiful about themselves, this is a touching debut that evokes elements of both Leonard Cohen’s The Favorite Game and Max Porter’s Grief is the Thing with Feathers."

- Jennifer McCartney, New York Times bestselling author of AFLOAT


“Lindsay Lerman's "I'm From Nowhere" rages with the quiet intensity of a lake concealing an inferno. I can't help but feel this book took a piece of me with it. Insinuated itself into me, and lingered like an echo in an empty space.”

Autumn Christian, author of GIRL LIKE A BOMB


“Devastating insight into feminine consciousness unbound.”

- Charlene Elsby, author of HEXIS


"Breathtakingly honest, intimate, sexy, and sad, this book is the soft, subversive voice whispering wisdom in the eye of the global hurricane. I love it immensely. And if you still have a sputtering spark in your soul, you probably will too."

- John Skipp, author of THE ART OF HORRIBLE PEOPLE



Claire puts herself in the hands of men—some of her oldest friends—who she imagines have come to save her, as though she were a contemporary Penelope with a raft of suitors and unspent erotic capital. Set in the American Southwest of today or ten years from now, this book is an examination of the stories we are told, and the stories we tell ourselves, about identity, permanence, and love in our beautiful, hostile world.

Genres: Fiction, Horror, Literary Fiction, Womens, Literature, Novels, Dark

170 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 24, 2019

About the author

Writer, Translator, Editor

Reviews

[Danger · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is so much raw, emotional truth packed into this thing as a young widowed woman searches for any kind of port to call home while unsteadily adrift in an ocean of grief. Meditations on relationships, love, loss, life, and where all these major roads intersect, I'm From Nowhere doesn't have any big climactic scenes that drive the point home, merely quiet ones that whisper these barbed revelations in your ear. Sometimes, it's the softest voice that ends up the most disarming. And that's the case here. This was a good book.

[Lori]

I'm working with the author to provide publicity so I will refrain from rating it. Prepare yourself, this one's a dark, harrowing journey through the grieving process of a suddenly widowed housewife. Lindsay toys with the ideas of permanance, depression, and acceptance as her main character Claire tries to make sense of the world and her new place within it.

If you'd like to review this for us, send me a DM here!

[Tess · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you're into piercingly dark novels set in a subtly dystopian landscape, read this book before the summer is over. In the sweltering Virginia heat, in a lawn chair (if possible). You will not find a more beautifully-written unraveling of a female human this year, guaranteed.

[Chandler Morrison · Rating 5 out of 5]

A powerful, poignant portrait of grief and melancholic memories. It engulfed me in a single sitting, and Lindsay's carefully-articulated prose took my breath away. I want to stand and applaud, but she's rendered me weak at the knees.

[Barry Paul Clark · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am cut very deeply, bleeding out, and not interested in closing the wound because this felt right. Thanks Lindsay.

[Dave Fitzgerald · Rating 5 out of 5]

So I've been posting these reviews - one or two a week - for a few months now, and this is the first thing I've come across that really gave me pause for a moment. The first book that made me ask myself questions like "who am I to say anything about this book?" and "is it even appropriate to 'review' a book like this at all?" Of course, you're reading this, so you know I decided to go ahead and give it a go, but I want you to know I'm feeling unsure of myself here. I feel like I need new words. Different words. Better words than the ones we have. Or maybe worse ones. Terrible words that we'll only come up with once the bleakly inevitable future I'm From Nowhere alludes to is closer at hand. This book is astounding. Lerman's vision is immense and all-consuming, but also breathtaking in its interiority. You can read it, and you should, but know going in: you cannot contain this novel. You cannot hold it, or handle it, or keep it with ease. It will get inside you, and expand until it rips you apart.

The story - in as much as there is one - is about Claire, a woman in her late 30's, childless and newly widowed in a vague, but not-too-distant future where climate change has begun to irrevocably destroy the planet. As she drifts wraithlike through the days following her husband's funeral - crying with friends, attending to affairs, coming to terms - Lerman's subtle, almost offhand references to the dessicated state of the natural world begin to work like a magnifying lens, both compounding Claire's grief into a monolithic despair, and setting her afire like an ant beneath a bully's scorching sun. Without this existential environmentalist conceit, I'm From Nowhere could easily be just a book about the death of a loved one (it would still, quite frankly, be one of the best I've ever read on the subject), but with it, it becomes so much more. A book about the death of the future. About the death of possibility. About the death of life.

And all of that is without even getting into the very distinctly and specifically female nature of all this terrible loss; the nature of what it means to be a woman, alone, in a dying world. I don't want to unpack it too much - I honestly don't think I could do it justice - but suffice it to say, if you are the kind of man who genuinely wants to better understand women; to understand not just the ways in which they are "magical" or "mysterious" or "in touch with their emotions," but the ways in which they too can brood, and doubt, and wallow, and self-destruct, and hurt until they want to burn it all down just like men so often shake their fists and wail about wanting to do (and all too often think they hold the patent on so doing), then I'm From Nowhere is an absolute must-read.

You know what? Scratch that. I'm making a blanket statement. I'm From Nowhere is a must-read for everyone. No exceptions. There are no gimmicks here. No weird tonal shifts or showy experimentation. No playful typefaces or whimsical illustrations. There is only everything we are most afraid of, and nowhere to hide. This kind of relentlessly straightforward writing feels uncommon these days, not even because it's fallen out of fashion per se, so much as that it's just almost impossible to do it well without coming off like a self-serious tool. The discipline and mettle behind I'm From Nowhere is intense, and indisputable. Lerman's prose pulses like an open wound. Reading it feels like touching a third rail. I don't use this phrase lightly, but in its spare 150 pages, this book contains the weight and depth of a modern classic. I do believe I'll be thinking about it for the rest of my life.

[Diamond]

After the sudden death of her husband, Claire finds herself alone and grieving in a dying world. She throws herself into the arms of two men she has been friends with for years while examining--and trying to reclaim--her individual identity.

So upfront, real talk to start with. My synopsis doesn't do the story justice at all (and in all likelihood, neither will this review) but plot isn't the star here. This is a short book, and on the surface appears to be a fairly simple one, but it is full of the kind of complexities that tickle at my brain and give it a depth that I found exciting and want to continue to mull over. Following Claire's thoughts as she grieves for her husband (and the person she was with him) made for a beautifully written, and incredibly compelling, read.

Claire herself is a complex and deeply human character flanked by Andrew (quintessential fuckboy for lack of a better word), Luke (the nice, sensitive guy), and John (her deceased husband). Three men who you could say love her, and what you could call a love triangle, but it's nowhere near that simple. Claire is placed on a pedestal where she is idealized and simplified by men's desires, while she herself tries to understand her own desires and complexity. That on it's own sounds like it could be the makings of a torrid romance novel, but it truly only scratches at the surface. There isn't an ounce of melodrama here, and the amount of nuance boggles the mind. Oh, and to subtly tie in climate change? It is honestly beyond me in the best possible way.

So much of what made this a standout for me was the way it hit me on a personal level. I've shared those thoughts, I've asked myself those questions, I've analyzed relationships to death. So as with anything, you're mileage could vary greatly, but as often as Claire's actions were world's different from what my own would be, her thoughts and feelings resonated so deeply with me, and not simply with my own relationships. I analyze everyone (thanks mom and dad) and this is the kind of book I wish I could go back in time and give not just to my younger self, but many of the women and girls in my life.

Lerman has crafted an impressively insightful and multilayered look at female identity with a genuine depth that's hard to find. This book is a must read from writer to watch!

[Josh Doughty · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is about grieving the loss of a husband and the fallout after.

We share Claire’s introspective thoughts throughout the novel and it’s not pretty. Grieving the dead is never pretty.

This book is Red House Painters without Kozelek.
This book is Manchester By the Sea without Aflec.

I highly recommend this to those who are interested in a contemporary perspective on grief and depression.

This book can only accrue more value as time goes on.

We are all from nowhere, but here nonetheless.

[Cara · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book to marinate in. Spend time with the text to really savor the richness. It addresses grief, absolutely, but if you spend your time worrying about the larger crises of our planet, or your role in it, this is a beautiful meditation.

[xenia · Rating 1 out of 5]

middle-class malaise set to the rhythm of heteronormativity's demise

call me callous, but i don't see why anyone buys into tradwifery in the first place (edit: perhaps as an escape from the anxiety of precarity?)

straight people are inconceivable to me

—

the malady of death, giovanni's room, and nightwood are much more potent and incisive explorations of desolation, desperation, and desire

[Mike Thorn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Check out the Craftwork interview with Lindsay.

“Whether you think of it as heavenly or as earthly, if you love life immortality is no consolation for death.”
– Simone de Beauvoir, A Very Easy Death

To describe Lindsay Lerman’s I’m from Nowhere as a book about grief might be accurate, to some degree, but it is also something of a reduction. In Mourning Diary, Roland Barthes writes, “Don’t say Mourning. It’s too psychoanalytic. I’m not mourning. I’m suffering.” Lerman’s book captures the magnitude of this suffering, the scarring nature of loss, the unfathomable nature of its somatic and emotional tolls. Tracing protagonist Claire’s early processing of her husband John’s premature death, this novel interlocks past and present to present a stunning portrait of psychological ruptures, anticipatory mourning, and complex forms of libidinal desire.

Lerman expertly deploys flashbacks and interior monologue to study the imprint of memory on present experience, using Claire’s reflections to reflect on the multifaceted nature of loss. Claire strives to comprehend the hidden corners of her deceased husband’s psyche, but Lerman beautifully demonstrates the impossibility of fully knowing another. In this sense, the book brings to mind Jacques Derrida’s The Work of Mourning, namely the philosopher’s statement that “the [deceased] friend can no longer be but in us, and whatever we may believe about living-on, according to all the possible forms of faith, it is in us that these movements might appear.” The novel explores Derridean notions of mourning another through Claire’s inner questioning: “What self was there worth defending or preserving if John and his self, so mingled and fused with hers, would eventually be gone?”

Some of the book’s most painfully resonant passages arrive in its study of a relationship’s lifeline: Lerman showcases an awe-striking ability to capture love’s inchoate doubts, the transformation of passion, the essentiality of commitment and faith above all else. Love is the meeting of two subjectivities, universes of individual traumas and embodied experiences and biases and neuroses, and mutual conviction is a necessity for its survival. One chapter closes with a mournful moment of reflection, in which Claire notes that “All any of us has is each other” before sharing a simple, elegiac expression of grief-denial: “Don’t leave.”

At two key moments in the novel, Claire shares the belief that “Love is never far from fear.” This statement captures the aforementioned faith at the foundation of love, but also the inevitable and anticipatory mourning imbedded therein. Derridean scholars Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas note that, “[t]o have a friend, to call him or her by name and to be called by him or her, is already to know that one of the two of you will go first, that one will be left to speak the name of the other in the other’s absence.” Through brilliant psychological and narrative construction, Lerman accentuates this idea throughout.

The present sees Claire navigating the advances of two men, Andrew and Luke, who see opportunity in the immediate wake of John’s passing. Lerman is adept at depicting the complications of Claire’s intimate encounters: reverberating with tension, but also underscored above all by the heartbreaking need to confirm that she still exists.

This is an extremely special book, an instant favorite, one of the few reads in recent memory that made me cry. Seek it out.

[Kenning JP Garcia · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book dives into the emotional arithmetic of a person living in the aftermath of a marriage that has left them alone with their thoughts and a new or renewed sense of the world. Both introspective and retrospective.

[Jack Skelley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ripped through it 1 Saturday in 2 rewarding sittings. A relief for “literary” fiction to provide mind/heart jolts sans surfacy technique, with organic insights into “agency” via the character’s mix of vulnerable command. In fact, the entire effect is aggressively sophisticated/vulnerable.... juicy with ambiguities. Charmed from the first graph.

[Hayley DeRoche · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is lovely, dark and deep. Read it, read it now, then read it again.

[lily · Rating 4 out of 5]

A beautiful, deep-dive inquiry into grief, desire, and living with impending disaster and endings... Can't wait to see what Lerman writes next!

[Bruno · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hyper-acute social observation, like the Virginia Woolf of a dinner scene in To the Lighthouse, a scene where characters read or misread one another with a good deal of nuance about inner worlds. But here that gaze is turned on American life, on a social order in which--and what I'm about to say I mean as high praise-- two people seldom have much of a reason to speak to one another, or certainly to be in the same room together, unless they are married or dating. I want to be clear that the novel's presentation of this impoverished social life--coupledom or barbarism-- is a strength. As is its evocation of a historical moment in which the unfolding disaster has erased the world we grew up in. This moment of the novel is and isn't our own; some of the particulars aren't yet ours, like the reliance on canned goods, perhaps because of crop failures. (but how many summers away is that? One?) This is: the sense, while watching news, that "none of the old categories worked anymore, they were living on borrowed time like everything else, but if they paid close enough attention to the facts of the disaster, they wouldn't have to *think* about it."

It's weird that I haven't yet said anything about the novel's main character, newly widowed Claire. Except I have, since she's the chief observer. (One of its observers; there's a narrator and implied author, and, and...) She's so scrupulous an observer she sees how much evades our observation, how much we lie about or push away. It's a remarkable feat that a novel so cognizant impossible problems should nonetheless resolve, beautifully, without lying about grief.

(Marriage, love: this novel might as well be set on Mars, for all my real-life familiarity with its content. Ha. It's that good, even those of us outside the pale recognize it. [I don't mean that my "coupledom or barbarism" pair lines up exactly with the novel's "submission or suicide." I'm not sure about that.] The novel's gaze takes in some harsh facts about contracts and the sexual division of labor, and yet those facts coexist with facts of love.)

[David R. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great writing and existential insights

Superficially, this is about a woman and her existential anxiety, triggered externally by her relationships, their demise and the way she interprets them through an academically-trained ideological filter.

More importantly, however, is that the main character's existential angst is profoundly relatable to any human being over thirty years of age who becomes sensitive enough to the dilemma between self-fulfilment and existing in the world.

The flow and seamlessness of the writing is beautiful, the philosophical angles just enough, and it is alive. The only thing the stops it from being all it can be is the ideological trap: men have it easy, everything women suffer is men's fault. Even the scenes portrayed in the story make it evident that the obviously "privileged" main character chooses her own destiny every step of the way, only to then fall back and blame men for everything that is wrong in her life.

Dormant below the narrative is the fact that women are immensely powerful, if they can recognize and capitalize on it without self-denigration. Moreover, this power does not lie ik becoming manlike, but in extending the cunning, resourcefulness and intuition of women to the point where they don't ever need them, but simply enjoy them as equals without "laws" needing to be passed to "fake it so".

[Amanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

You don’t get to sit around dreaming for free. Everything costs something. Sometimes we just don’t know that we’re paying, or what we’re paying for.

Stupidity is undervalued, she thinks. Forgetfulness is undervalued. Ignorance is undervalued.

Why bother? Why bother with anything? Because, she knows, we ache with unfulfillable wants. We are feverish with desire to be more than we are. Because we can’t stop hoping that our chunks of bone and blood and flesh can somehow exceed their casing, that we matter, that these desires that make us shake with fury are indicative of more than a biological imperative to reproduce. It’s the wanting to carry on that is the exceeding.

Who cares if the world is ending? It has always been ending.

Is there anything other than submission or suicide? Rebecca pays for the groceries at the check-out—sweetly…

[Suz Jay · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Sometimes people can walk away with the best parts of you—or any parts of you—tucked safely under their arms. You can keep looking for those parts but you’ll never find them. They are not where you left them.”

After her husband John dies suddenly, Claire, jobless and childless, struggles to find her place in the world. Their friends Andrew and Luke share in her grief, but her feelings toward the men complicate matters.

This literary novel explores Claire’s sense of identity as she compares herself to famous literary characters such as Penelope from the Odyssey, Gatsby’s Daisy, as well as Shakespeare’s Juliet and Ophelia. In addition to Claire’s perspective, the reader gains insight into the minds of each of the men in her life. Her relationship with John is examined as is their opinions on children and fertility. Claire’s journey reminds us what it’s like to be aimless, when best laid plans have gone awry, and when there’s plenty of life left to live, yet there seems to be little hope for the future.

[Toilet Sweat · Rating 3 out of 5]

I want Lindsay to like me. Something tells me she has unusually flatulent glutes. How I go absolutely apeshit for big brained braphogs. But I probably use way too much toilet paper for her taste. I’ve been known to mummify my hands in a roll apiece and wipe until first blood. Well, I tried to polish my undercarriage with the gut-punching pages of her debut, but it’s so short, my fingers tore clean through and perforated my rectum. I’m not complaining. It’s as though the author were gently pegging me. Unfortunately, my brand new boxer briefs now bear angry skidmarks. I’m thinking of getting a bidet.

[Tucker · Rating 5 out of 5]

Claire has a slow process of self-discovery. She's past 30, and she very much wanted a pregnancy, but it seemed she and her husband were an infertile couple, and now her husband has suddenly died. She doesn't have a career and doesn't know who she is. She has to start over, in a sense. She looks backward to understand her life but realizes she can't go back. In part, this book is about how, by the time you comprehend a moment and are ready for it, it's already past. Building is rebuilding; rebuilding is building. At midlife, it is the first time. Quietly intense.

[Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A sublime character exploration of a woman dealing with the loss of her husband, and all the intricate complexities that go along with it. Lightly experimental and austere, this kind of literary fiction isn't a kind that I normally gravitate to, but having read it, it's one that satisfies that itch.

[Scott Parson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thoroughly enjoyed living in the mind of a young, grief-stricken spouse who was so totally invested in the relationship that, being severed from it, leaves her at sea and having to reconstruct her singleness. Re-read in March 2021, to make sure I got the whole good of it.

[Robert Fromberg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loving, swirling, important contemplation

This novel is a fully engrossing, hard-won observation of life at a moment of crisis, a clear and honest attestation of a lack of easy answers, and a delight in every one of its pages.

[Chloe Isabelle-Alper · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lerman speaks from a particular grief that all people from various backgrounds can find themselves in - especially the woman. Death to the damsel in distress, she is here nonetheless.

I cannot wait for her second book.

[Michael Onofrey · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book reaches deep down inside!

[Greg Mania]

I already can’t wait to re-read this book.

[Kelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lerman's book is both sparse and deeply affecting. I read this in one sitting and scenes flashed through my mind for months afterward. There are moments that will make the right reader gasp aloud with painful recognition -- as well as genuinely funny moments despite the dark, foreboding world they're situated in. Like most brilliant books, you'll want to come back to this one at different parts of your life to receive it differently -- and it will change for you, depending on what you bring to it. In that way, Lerman really is in conversation with their readers, which makes the most difficult parts of the book so, so worth it.

[Elliot J Harper · Rating 5 out of 5]

Moving, engrossing, and at times heartbreaking. This novel feels raw and personal. A real page turner.

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

So good. Would give it an 11.