We Take Me Apart

by Molly Gaudry

Shortlisted for the 2011 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry
2nd finalist: 2011 Asian American Literary Award for Poetry

Taught at:
Wesleyan University
Brown University
Cornell College
Queens College, CUNY
New Mexico State University
Mount Mary College

“There is no more perfect place to be than in Molly Gaudry’s tender, dirt-floored novella, We Take Me Apart. Oh cabbage leaves, oh roses, oh orange-slice childhood grins: this book broke my heart. Its sad memory-tropes come from fairy tales and childhood books. With language, Gaudry is as loving and careful as one is with a matchbook . . . when wishing to set the whole world on fire.” —KATE BERNHEIMER

“Molly Gaudry’s debut evokes the spirit of iconic fairy tales that have transported readers for centuries. Her variations on these themes delineate the psychological journey from girlhood to womanhood. But We Take Me Apart is more than a retelling. In it, Gaudry reconstitutes the essence of what makes fairy tales compelling, and she does so imaginatively and with great attention to language, the earmarks of poetry.” —CHRISTOPHER KENNEDY

“If you consider her novella poetry, then it borrows much from prose. And if you see it as prose, it allows for a poetic flavor. Gaudry walks this line with great poise and in that poise we find her greatest strength as a writer.” —THE BROAD SET WRITING COLLECTIVE

“A Molly Gaudry word is so precise, it feels like a sentence.” —GREAT TWIN CITIES POETRY READ & ROAD SHOW

“An epic poem of epic mastery, We Take Me Apart centers on a girl who grows into a woman who grows into a heroine.” —PRICK OF THE SPINDLE

“This incredible verse novel(la) is infused with fairy tales and Gertude Stein, not to mention Gaudry’s own dreamlike, luscious voice. An almost visceral delight.” —FLAVORWIRE

“Gaudry’s mastery of language, [her] use of . . . silence, the wet white space around the burn of language, reads at times as if a character from Beckett had crawled or hobbled into a fairy tale—the kind of Beckett character that keeps his or her silence, only to suddenly wax eloquent in manic bursts.” —AMBER SPARKS

“A cross between silence and fairy tale, Gaudry’s Beckettian narrative sews bright bits to near-faint whispers, slowly swaddling us in quiet and darkness.” —BRIAN EVENSON

“Amid this stark environment, Gaudry’s gorgeous lyric voice guides us through.” —ASIAN AMERICAN LITERATURE FANS

“Molly Gaudry must have revised this gem of a novella over and over and over to get the wording, the rhythms, the images, etc. just so. . . . Not a word is out of place, nothing is missing, no extra words are added. Molly Gaudry has worked this section, and every other section in the book, to the very essence of what is necessary to capture her readers and not let them go.” —EMERGING WRITERS NETWORK

“[Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian] is famous for its poetic prose and unflinching violence, but there’s a void of femininity. . . . Enter Molly Gaudry. . . . [Her] prose, steeped in poetry as much as McCarthy’s, spirals upward, elevating and exploding. The creators and destroyers, the beautiful and the gory, and the mythical and contemporary all thrive in balance. To read Molly Gaudry is to read Angela Carter’s cutthroat narrative spoken through the hopelessly hopeful characters of Lydia Millet, all arranged in space with the care of an impressionist painter.” —HOBART

“We Take Me Apart is a dazzleflage of a book. The stuttering disrupted language of this cubist concoction disappears before your ears, sinks into your eyes. This aggressive dress camouflage reweaves Gertrude Stein’s rewoven grammar of worsted silk-screened gabardine into a fully ripped patois-ed pattern of stunning wonder.” —MICHAEL MARTONE

“Molly Gaudry’s We Take Me Apart works ‘thread into lace.’ . . . Especially vivid in this book-length work is the mother’s entrance and exit, where the ragged lines swell and turn sonnet-like with love.” —TERESE SVOBODA

“In Molly Gaudry’s We Take Me Apart, the ordinary becomes mythical, what may be autobiographical becomes a fable, and simple lines or sentences ring with ominous music. Even the empty space between the lines seems to resonate with invisible narrative. A stunning debut.” —RICHARD GARCIA

“White space, planes and planes of it. . . . We Take Me Apart is a novel’s answer to a room. . . . I read it three times . . . inhaling its perfume. . . . The scent is delicate and leaves a trace of itself. . . . The book details grace. . . it will haunt like a remembrance of fragrance or swoosh of hair or panoply of mother as tart then sweet and suddenly elusive as memories of one’s own.” —AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW

“Gaudry’s work implies that life, at its most essential, is the memory of love, hope, and the rooms it has occupied. . . . We Take Me Apart is an exercise in empathy for the reader. It is pure song and story. This book is a gift.” —[PANK]

Genres: Poetry, Fiction, Novels

100 pages

First published January 1, 2010

About the author

Molly Gaudry is the founder of Lit Pub and the author of the verse novel WE TAKE ME APART, which was a finalist for the Asian American Literary Award and shortlisted for the PEN/Osterweil. DESIRE: A HAUNTING, its sequel, and FIT INTO ME: A NOVEL: A MEMOIR, are further explorations of the same story world and characters. Molly holds master’s degrees in fiction and poetry from the University of Cincinnati and George Mason University, respectively, and a PhD in experimental prose from the University of Utah. An assistant professor at Stony Brook University, she teaches nonfiction and poetry in the BFA and MFA programs. Summers, she teaches fiction at the Yale Writers’ Workshop.

Reviews

[Nate D]

Compact and poetic (it's been called 'a novel in verse' but it reads more like prose granted typographic space to breath through short fragmentary lines and lack of punctuation), this tells an oblique life-story arc through its key events and broken bits of fairytale. Childhood, love, several stages of exile and work, a return to home too tend an ailing mother, all narrated from an uneasy present punctuated by the screams of 'the women down the hall'. I'll always snap up these tiny Mud Luscious Press novel(la)s (RIP, sadly) when I find them, each a concentrated and inventive work by an author I'm otherwise unfamiliar with. And I'll be on the lookout for more by Molly Gaudry now.

[Lori · Rating 4 out of 5]

Through the use of playfully dark language, Molly exposes us to the weight our relationships create within us - the heaviness of relationships gone bad, the pining for a relationship to be more or different than it is, and the pain their memories repeatedly inflict upon us.

Told from the perspective of a daughter as she grows up, leaves home with a lover, and returns again years later to care for her sick mother, we experience her underclass life as a fairy tale, one she is desperately trying to escape.

Not one word is wasted, yet within its sparseness is a depth many writers only hope to achieve.

[Wendy Babiak · Rating 5 out of 5]

This novella in free verse knocked my socks off. It's not often I wish I'd written something, but more than once reading this potent little book I found myself despairing that I would never write something like this. It charts the speaker's movement from childhood into adulthood, into and then out of a love relationship, her return home to take care of her mother as she wastes and then passes away, and then her adjustment to loss. Throughout there's a dreamy quality-- reinforced by a careful disregard for grammar: clauses pile up or interrupt each other, or interrupt themselves-- a reimagining of fairy tales, and a symbolic obsession with sustenance. It's even typographically beautiful and contradictory, each "chapter" beginning with a drop cap in script, juxtaposed with a Roman typeface for the text and no punctuation. White space is used to great advantage.

A feminine epic, this book is a treasure I'll return to. I can't recommend it highly enough.

[William · Rating 5 out of 5]

In We Take Me Apart, a novella in verse, Molly Gaudry tells an old story in a new way. It’s about mothers and daughters and kitchens. It’s about cooking and cleaning. It’s about home —— leaving and staying. It’s about stitching and unstitching (to borrow a phrase from Yeats). The voice and form are utterly unique. The images are quickly rendered in precise language.

Listen to Molly read from We Take Me Apart at Apostrophe Cast: (http://www.apostrophecast.com/authors...)

[Steven · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this the most when about halfway through I started reading it out loud, which made me appreciate the language, especially the call and response parts, all the more. Parts were also reminiscent of my favorite Virgina Woolf story "Kew Gardens" which I had also recently been reading. Although Gaudry's book is in verse, I think Woolf is an apt comparision.

[Kathy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful voice and arresting language to sink into. This is a book to be read slowly.

[Joe]

Another entry into the burgeoning no genre-genre which was maybe called Prose-poetry before but where current practitioners resist genre labels, the cauterization of being fit into a taxonomy. Whereas Edson's surrealist, mutating domestic spaces and inhabitants...Whereas Aase Berg's heavy metal clots of churning bodies in the fallout...Whereas Kim Gek Lin Short's book long transfiguring relationship narratives...Whereas Joyelle McSweeney gothic genre mashups...TWMA prosey style as lineated, employing directness & simplicity of image, an economy. Faint traces of fairy tale tropes holding it together in a loose narrative.

[Jason Jordan · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Story-wise, WTMA contains three characters: the protagonist daughter, her mother, & the daughter’s significant other. Though much of the book is in first person, it shifts to second when referring to the daughter’s love interest. Successful, too, is Gaudry’s adept use of voice, which changes as the main character grows older...."

Read the rest in the December 2009 issue of decomP .

[Stephanie Johnson · Rating 4 out of 5]

*We Take Me Apart* dazzles the senses and engages the emotions. With language that is both delicate and arresting and with a voice all her own, Gaudry knows how to hit readers square in the gut.

[Adam]

Molly Gaudry's writing always surprises me. I can't wait to see her words in book form.

[Winter Sophia Rose · Rating 5 out of 5]

Chilling, Poetic, Stunning & Breathtaking! I Truly Loved It!

[Benjamin Niespodziany · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wanted this book to be about 100 pages longer. A twisted fairy tale that unravels and becomes wonderfully unhinged. Beautiful, stunning, violent language and rhythm. The ending will haunt me forever.

[Cary Stough · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this while walking to the liquor store with the book in one hand and my phone in the other hand with gps on.

[Mayzie Sattler · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ugh okay I didn’t hate it

[Natalie · Rating 5 out of 5]

the title 'we take me apart' suggests a revisionist approach to perhaps a 'veiled' autobiography
by that i mean she stitches her own life/perspective into the fairytales that she takes apart
a pastiche of familiar but powerful fragments

my favourite part:

in a different version it was not three beautiful maidens but Mother & you & me in this version

as in all versions

happiness was her hoped for ever after
then i came along & in this version happiness was her hoped for ever after for me
but then you came along & in this version happiness was my hoped for ever after for us
but then you let & in this version happiness was my hoped for ever after for you
then Mother died & there was only me

[Edward Rathke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Molly Gaudry's free verse novella, We Take Me Apart, surprises and pulls the reader in new directions as she recounts the life of our narrator. Told in first person, it shifts to second at every mention of the man she loved.

It's a book about relationships, about what it means to be a daughter, what a mother can mean, and it attempts to answer or at least understand what love is between a man and a woman.

It's powerful and quick with language that bends and twists. The kind of words you can live in.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

The small size of this novella seems a bit misleading given the amount of beauty inside. I'm not sure what to call it, perhaps a novella in poem form, but it doesn't matter what to call it. The lines are almost chilling in how perfectly, how quickly, and with how few words such intense images are called up. The exact perfect words seem chosen with meticulous precision, exquisitely ordered. It really is a stunning book.

[J.I. · Rating 4 out of 5]

To read this book, and to reread it, is to be surprised. It is a fairy tale, and like all fairytales, it is short, and tells a story that feels so long and so known. It is a simple tale, but it feels as drawn out as it does rushed, with the lyric voice and the space of the lines making the reader understand "how soft it is within those loaves" or the heartbreak in an orange rind.

[Jamie Iredell · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this amazingly dense little book. Spooky at times in it's haunting domestic details. Sexy, too. This one sticks with you for a long time.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Elegant and eloquent are the words that come to mind. WE TAKE ME APART is an excellent example of what can be achieved in the space between fiction and poesy.

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book greatly. We Take Me Apart is humanity's grotesque and beautiful truth in verse.

[Betty F · Rating 3 out of 5]

What a story. The way this is written takes you on an emotional journey because Gaudry has a way with language that goes from 0 to 100 real quick. Yup.

[Erica · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gave me chills.