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Go On
How to tell your story? “I want to talk,” the Author says on page 1. The Narrator who has been assigned to assist her knows that what is needed now is permission. “Go on,” says the Narrator - and a book is born.
Weaving threads and following tangents, Tania Hershman’s debut novel, a hybrid “fictional memoir-in-collage”, tells one story and many stories: how is it to be a woman moving happily alone through the world? Who are you if not in relation to others? A woman walks through the cemetery, talking to the dead. A class of schoolgirls grapples with what anger is and might be. A baby is left by scientists in a forest. Someone claims to be your grandmother.
As the Author writes her way into and through what she needs to say, the Narrator watches her develop and blossom and wonders what will happen when they reach the end. Go on.
PRAISE for Go On:
This formally daring book throws itself and its questions open to the reader with tenderness, seriousness, and a deep joy.
– K J Orr, Light Box
'A sifting, shifting examination of the writing self and written selves, Hershman's project considers and reveals its themes of gender, singularity and control with wit and urging, urgent tenderness.'
– Eley Williams, The Liar's Dictionary
Alternately languid and lacerating, Tania Hershman's Go On is a multivoiced narrative of a writer exploring the process of writing, simultaneously breaking the trappings enforced upon her and embracing the new and unexplored, the what-if of what women, writing, and women's writing, can be.
– Cathleen Allyn Conway, American Ingenue
Weaving threads and following tangents, Tania Hershman’s debut novel, a hybrid “fictional memoir-in-collage”, tells one story and many stories: how is it to be a woman moving happily alone through the world? Who are you if not in relation to others? A woman walks through the cemetery, talking to the dead. A class of schoolgirls grapples with what anger is and might be. A baby is left by scientists in a forest. Someone claims to be your grandmother.
As the Author writes her way into and through what she needs to say, the Narrator watches her develop and blossom and wonders what will happen when they reach the end. Go on.
PRAISE for Go On:
This formally daring book throws itself and its questions open to the reader with tenderness, seriousness, and a deep joy.
– K J Orr, Light Box
'A sifting, shifting examination of the writing self and written selves, Hershman's project considers and reveals its themes of gender, singularity and control with wit and urging, urgent tenderness.'
– Eley Williams, The Liar's Dictionary
Alternately languid and lacerating, Tania Hershman's Go On is a multivoiced narrative of a writer exploring the process of writing, simultaneously breaking the trappings enforced upon her and embracing the new and unexplored, the what-if of what women, writing, and women's writing, can be.
– Cathleen Allyn Conway, American Ingenue
136 pages, Paperback
Published November 17, 2022
1 person is currently reading
10 people want to read
About the author
Tania Hershman
45 books90 followersA queer writer of odd things, short, very short, and longer, writing teacher and editor based in Manchester, UK, my tenth book, It’s Time – A Chronomemoir, a hybrid creative non-fiction book about time, is published on July 17th 2025 by Guillemot Press.
I also have four books of poetry, three short story collections and two further hybrid books out in the world. My second poetry collection, Still Life With Octopus, was published by Nine Arches Press in July 2022, and my debut novel, Go On – a hybrid fictional memoir-in-collage partly inspired by being writer-in-residence in Manchester’s Southern Cemetery – by Broken Sleep Books in November 2022.
I am editor of the charity anthology FUEL: 75 Prize-Winning Flash Fictions Raising Funds to Fight Fuel Poverty (Feb 2023), and was honoured to be Arvon’s writer-in-residence from Nov 2022-April 2023.
I also have four books of poetry, three short story collections and two further hybrid books out in the world. My second poetry collection, Still Life With Octopus, was published by Nine Arches Press in July 2022, and my debut novel, Go On – a hybrid fictional memoir-in-collage partly inspired by being writer-in-residence in Manchester’s Southern Cemetery – by Broken Sleep Books in November 2022.
I am editor of the charity anthology FUEL: 75 Prize-Winning Flash Fictions Raising Funds to Fight Fuel Poverty (Feb 2023), and was honoured to be Arvon’s writer-in-residence from Nov 2022-April 2023.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
November 19, 2022
OMG!!! This book is Fucking Brilliant! It is! It is brilliant and wonderful and new. Here is a voice that is quiet and loud both at the same time. A voice that gets in your head and (like the Narrator) a voice you don't want to leave behind when it is finished. This is a wonderful experiment in form and it is quite simply (and complexly) fantastic. I fell in love with the Narrator and with the Author - because I am a Falling-In-Love-Person - but here is a new and very real person and this book helps you to understand that and to accept that. This book is a triumph - for Broken Sleep Books and for Tania Hershman. I want to press copies into the hands of all serious readers - for they will be delighted by it too. You HAVE to read this - it is a ten star read!
January 20, 2023
There's a lot going on in this book, in the best possible way. A woman writing a story, with the help of a gentle but firm Narrator, thoughts on aloneness and living a life that is not 'the norm', without children or partner, and a kind of weighing up of a life lived up to the point of writing the book.
The back and forth between the author writing the book and the narrator reads like a part of a self talking to another part, and creates a fascinating - and encouraging! - study of the writing process. The conversations with the narrator are interspersed with all sorts of interesting explorations: a crowd of cemetry ghosts, lists about the meaning of particular words like 'single' and 'rage', some very amusing lists on topics like "How to Say 'No'" (assertions of the author's right to be herself in whatever way she wants to), fictional stories, and pictures.
I especially enjoyed the section about mothers - don't we all have one! The author mentions mothers obliquely, how they seem different as you get older, and then decides she doesn't want to carry on exploring the topic. A brilliant device.
I liked Hershman's definite ideas about self, nonetheless written with an openness to the possibility that life can take unexpected turns, keeping in mind that our past and future selves are not necessarily our present selves.
The book's dense and vivid hybrid structure is intriguing because it can be read as fiction or non-fiction and lives up to its description as a hybrid 'fictional memoir-in-collage'.
It's the sort of book you will go back to, to read in its entirety, or in sections, not necessarily in linear order.
The back and forth between the author writing the book and the narrator reads like a part of a self talking to another part, and creates a fascinating - and encouraging! - study of the writing process. The conversations with the narrator are interspersed with all sorts of interesting explorations: a crowd of cemetry ghosts, lists about the meaning of particular words like 'single' and 'rage', some very amusing lists on topics like "How to Say 'No'" (assertions of the author's right to be herself in whatever way she wants to), fictional stories, and pictures.
I especially enjoyed the section about mothers - don't we all have one! The author mentions mothers obliquely, how they seem different as you get older, and then decides she doesn't want to carry on exploring the topic. A brilliant device.
I liked Hershman's definite ideas about self, nonetheless written with an openness to the possibility that life can take unexpected turns, keeping in mind that our past and future selves are not necessarily our present selves.
The book's dense and vivid hybrid structure is intriguing because it can be read as fiction or non-fiction and lives up to its description as a hybrid 'fictional memoir-in-collage'.
It's the sort of book you will go back to, to read in its entirety, or in sections, not necessarily in linear order.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews