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To Write as if Already Dead
To Write As If Already Dead circles around Kate Zambreno's failed attempts to write a study of Hervé Guibert's To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life. In this diaristic, transgressive work, the first in a cycle written in the years preceding his death, Guibert documents with speed and intensity his diagnosis and disintegration from AIDS and elegizes a character based on Michel Foucault.
The first half of To Write As If Already Dead is a novella in the mode of a detective story, searching after the mysterious disappearance of an online friendship after an intense dialogue on anonymity, names, language, and connection. The second half, a notebook documenting the doubled history of two bodies amid another historical plague, continues the meditation on friendship, solitude, time, mortality, precarity, art, and literature.
Throughout this rigorous, mischievous, thrilling not-quite study, Guibert lingers as a ghost companion. Zambreno, who has been pushing the boundaries of literary form for a decade, investigates his methods by adopting them, offering a keen sense of the energy and confessional force of Guibert's work, an ode to his slippery, scarcely classifiable genre. The book asks, as Foucault once did, "What is an author?" Zambreno infuses this question with new urgency, exploring it through the anxieties of the internet age, the ethics of friendship, and "the facts of the body" illness, pregnancy, and death.
The first half of To Write As If Already Dead is a novella in the mode of a detective story, searching after the mysterious disappearance of an online friendship after an intense dialogue on anonymity, names, language, and connection. The second half, a notebook documenting the doubled history of two bodies amid another historical plague, continues the meditation on friendship, solitude, time, mortality, precarity, art, and literature.
Throughout this rigorous, mischievous, thrilling not-quite study, Guibert lingers as a ghost companion. Zambreno, who has been pushing the boundaries of literary form for a decade, investigates his methods by adopting them, offering a keen sense of the energy and confessional force of Guibert's work, an ode to his slippery, scarcely classifiable genre. The book asks, as Foucault once did, "What is an author?" Zambreno infuses this question with new urgency, exploring it through the anxieties of the internet age, the ethics of friendship, and "the facts of the body" illness, pregnancy, and death.
176 pages, Paperback
First published June 8, 2021
38 people are currently reading
1821 people want to read
About the author
Kate Zambreno
27 books774 followersKate 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.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 57 reviews
December 15, 2021
Kate Zambreno’s latest project takes the form of a memoir that exists in conversation with Guibert’s groundbreaking To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life. Just as Guibert wrote in earnest as a man condemned to death with AIDS, Zambreno writes with urgency as she navigates the dehumanizing American health insurance system in the midst of a complicated pregnancy and the COVID-19 pandemic. Although it may suffer by comparison to Guibert’s shocking original, this is nevertheless an excellent meta-memoir that doesn’t shy away from the horrors and sense of erasure experienced within the health care system.
August 30, 2021
What an astonishing book - part novella, part memoir, part Hervé Guibert study, and then, suddenly, the pandemic smashes its way in - keeps getting better as it goes.
March 16, 2024
كتاب مرهق وممتع بشكل مفاجئ. الترجمة ممتازة.
November 4, 2021
Commissioned for a series on rereading favourite texts Zambreno found herself trying to produce something that would cover her health insurance and pay her rent while existing in a world that’s increasingly the stuff of nightmares. Zambreno’s desperately trying to figure out how to juggle her commitments with her late pregnancy marked by escalating ill-health, a precarious job, financial anxieties, the labour of motherhood and finally the Covid crisis. Yet the obstacles that delay and dog her ability to write also enable an unanticipated dialogue with her choice: Herve Guibert’s To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life. Guibert’s novel which treads a fine line between truth and fiction becomes a means for Zambreno to articulate her own predicament. She expresses this first in the shape of a novella with a version of herself as narrator. This narrator recalls a research trip to France to develop her project, funded on a shoestring it’s derailed by the demands of caring for her young child. But it sets off a chain of associations about writing, its relationship to capitalism, and to other forms of labour. It returns her in her mind to a time when her work wasn’t so inextricably tied to processes of commodification but seemed somehow freer and purer, and then to a formative online friendship with another author communicating through an assumed identity - a friendship that demanded yet another kind of emotional labour and posed crucial questions about authorship and identity.
These questions feed into the remainder of Zambreno’s unorthodox study, a more direct approach to discussing and critiquing Herve Guibert’s ground-breaking narrative. When composing his piece Guibert talked about the ghost of novelist Thomas Bernhard invading his thoughts, as Zambreno’s haunted by Guibert. Guibert’s autofiction was published in 1990 when Guibert was close to dying from AIDS-related illnesses. It’s a scorching, bitter, witty depiction of a deeply-homophobic time. A time of silence when the shame associated with an AIDS diagnosis was almost worst than the prospect of suffering in isolation or dying alone. It’s also, like Zambreno’s novella, a chronicle of an ill-fated friendship between authors, this time embodied by Muzil a thinly-veiled stand-in for prominent French philosopher Michel Foucault.
Guibert’s book’s no activist call to arms or saintly account of graciously coming to terms with death, it’s a no holds barred diatribe, writing as if already dead Guibert feels a freedom to say what usually can’t be said, he crosses every ethical boundary, he flouts every rule of discretion. Something that fascinates, and sometimes appals, Zambreno, already called out by friends who saw themselves in her novel Drifts; and painfully aware of the constraints on what she can and cannot reveal because of the need to make money; project the required image to cling onto her fragile position as part-time academic; and cajole editors constantly reminding her that her publications don’t cut it as far as sales potential’s concerned. What might it be like if she too could write as if already dead?
But her connection to Guibert doesn’t end there, there’s the shared experience of grappling with seemingly indifferent health systems, Zambreno’s struggling with sporadic health insurance, constantly deferring her body’s needs, denying her own illness because it’s unaffordable. She doesn’t claim her health problems are equivalent to Guibert, dying from the ravages of a devastating disease. But there’s an affinity, a vital link between reader and writer, a way in which his words speak directly to her needs and feelings.
I’m not sure Zambreno’s way of representing Guibert’s text always succeeds but I still found it hard to disengage from. Although I’ve been reading it alongside Guibert, so the intermingling of ideas represented in the Zambreno’s accompanied by the literal mixing of their sentences in my head. I’m not sure what it would be like to tackle this without any knowledge of or interaction with Guibert’s prose. But I think the earlier short fiction contains enough of Zambreno’s usual preoccupations with dailiness, the mundane, the flow and rhythm of personal experience to appeal to anyone who likes her style. Her sections bound up in analysing Guibert are perhaps less fluid, they sometimes stutter, stall and sometimes Zambreno’s own frustrations are too dominant. Nor am I completely comfortable with all of the suggested comparisons between Guibert and Zambreno’s situations. There’s a very real sense in which the two are incomparable. Yet I still found this worth investing time in, and it was invaluable in helping me interpret my own reactions to reading Guibert.
These questions feed into the remainder of Zambreno’s unorthodox study, a more direct approach to discussing and critiquing Herve Guibert’s ground-breaking narrative. When composing his piece Guibert talked about the ghost of novelist Thomas Bernhard invading his thoughts, as Zambreno’s haunted by Guibert. Guibert’s autofiction was published in 1990 when Guibert was close to dying from AIDS-related illnesses. It’s a scorching, bitter, witty depiction of a deeply-homophobic time. A time of silence when the shame associated with an AIDS diagnosis was almost worst than the prospect of suffering in isolation or dying alone. It’s also, like Zambreno’s novella, a chronicle of an ill-fated friendship between authors, this time embodied by Muzil a thinly-veiled stand-in for prominent French philosopher Michel Foucault.
Guibert’s book’s no activist call to arms or saintly account of graciously coming to terms with death, it’s a no holds barred diatribe, writing as if already dead Guibert feels a freedom to say what usually can’t be said, he crosses every ethical boundary, he flouts every rule of discretion. Something that fascinates, and sometimes appals, Zambreno, already called out by friends who saw themselves in her novel Drifts; and painfully aware of the constraints on what she can and cannot reveal because of the need to make money; project the required image to cling onto her fragile position as part-time academic; and cajole editors constantly reminding her that her publications don’t cut it as far as sales potential’s concerned. What might it be like if she too could write as if already dead?
But her connection to Guibert doesn’t end there, there’s the shared experience of grappling with seemingly indifferent health systems, Zambreno’s struggling with sporadic health insurance, constantly deferring her body’s needs, denying her own illness because it’s unaffordable. She doesn’t claim her health problems are equivalent to Guibert, dying from the ravages of a devastating disease. But there’s an affinity, a vital link between reader and writer, a way in which his words speak directly to her needs and feelings.
I’m not sure Zambreno’s way of representing Guibert’s text always succeeds but I still found it hard to disengage from. Although I’ve been reading it alongside Guibert, so the intermingling of ideas represented in the Zambreno’s accompanied by the literal mixing of their sentences in my head. I’m not sure what it would be like to tackle this without any knowledge of or interaction with Guibert’s prose. But I think the earlier short fiction contains enough of Zambreno’s usual preoccupations with dailiness, the mundane, the flow and rhythm of personal experience to appeal to anyone who likes her style. Her sections bound up in analysing Guibert are perhaps less fluid, they sometimes stutter, stall and sometimes Zambreno’s own frustrations are too dominant. Nor am I completely comfortable with all of the suggested comparisons between Guibert and Zambreno’s situations. There’s a very real sense in which the two are incomparable. Yet I still found this worth investing time in, and it was invaluable in helping me interpret my own reactions to reading Guibert.
October 16, 2023
"أن تكتب كما لو كنت ميتًا" هي مذكرات للكاتبة الأمريكية كيت زمبرينو ، صدرت في العام2020 والتي تستكشف من خلالها العلاقة بين الكتابة والموت، بالاعتماد على تجربتها الخاصة ككاتبة وقارئة.
تفكر زمبرينو في الطرق التي يمكن للموت من خلالها أن يُعلم الكتابة ويشكلها، وكيف يمكن للكتابة أن تساعدنا على التصالح مع الموت.
الكتاب مقسم إلى قسمين. في الجزء الأول، يناقش زمبرينو الطرق التي تأثر بها الكتاب بالموت. تستشهد بأمثلة لكتاب كتبوا عن تجاربهم الخاصة مع الموت، ك هيرفي غيبير، - اشتغلت في دراسة عن هيرفي غيبير وأدبه -" إلى الصديق الذي لم ينقذ حياتي" -روايته التي تؤرخ تشخيصه بالإيدز في تسلسل زمني.
بالإضافة إلى كتاب كتبوا عن الموت بطريقة أكثر خيالية. ك رولان بارت "موت المؤلف. " وتناقش أيضًا الطرق التي يمكن أن يكون بها الموت مصدرًا للخوف والإبداع للكتاب، هيرفي غيبير نموذجاً. إذ أخذ حيزاً كبيراً من مادة هذا الكتاب.
وعن رسائلها لصديقتها صوفيا حول قراءاتهم. ومراسلاتها مع أليكس سوزوكي .
ووضعها الصحي وحملها الثاني ما شكل تحدياً لها في العمل والكتابة بانتظام. إضافة إلى دخول وباء كوفيد19 وما أثاره من هلع في جسدها وفكرها.
في الجزء الثاني من الكتاب، تتأمل زمبرينو في علاقتها بالموت. تكتب عن وفاة والدتها، وكذلك عن وفاة أصدقاء وأحباء آخرين. وتناقش أيضًا تجاربها الخاصة في الكتابة عن الموت، والطرق التي ساعدتها بها الكتابة على التأقلم مع الخسارة.
وعن تأثير الصورة- البورتريه- في كتابتها عن الموت أو فكرتها وما توحي به عن ذلك. ك بورتريه مابلثورب. سرد هيرفي غيبير الوصفي لتفسخ جسد ميشيل فوكو على فراش موته اثر إصابته بالإيدز. والذي كتب عنه في روايته " إلى الصديق الذي لم ينقذ حياتي" تحت اسم موزيل. " عن النزعة السادية المازوخية الجنسية لدى فوكو" والذي كان بمثابة بورتريه مفصل لأيام صديقه الأخيرة، وكان وصفه الكتابي له أشبه بلوحة جاك لوي ديفيد" موت سقراط": لوحة أيام موزيل الأخيرة.
وكذا بورتريه كاندي دارلنغ على فراش موتها الذي التقطه بيتر هوجار. وما أثار كل ذلك في ذهنها من أفكار عديدة عن فكرة الموت والكتابة وعلاقتهما معاً.
September 28, 2022
brilliant meditation on obsession, mortality, the body, illness, fidelity, pregnancy and maternity, and overall honesty
i can’t wait to read more of her work
i can’t wait to read more of her work
March 4, 2024
Chunks of this remind me of Sebald, and would be even more so if Zambreno had reproduced Guibert's photos and other paintings that she referred to in the text. But it's much more visceral of course, with the constant specter of Guibert's AIDS books, and the onset of COVID and Black Lives Matter. I'm old enough to remember reading and loving Guibert's books in the AIDS years, and should probably revisit a few of them. While the reminders here were definitely intense, Zambreno also pointed out that some of these texts were a little problematic, with Guibert's privileged position and self-obsession.
In any case, this was an excellent palette cleanser after the disappointment of the new Kelly Link, and I just about jumped when it namechecked Renee Gladman, since I was about to start The Activist. (No, I did not plan to read 3 women writers to start Women's History Month, just happened that way.)
In any case, this was an excellent palette cleanser after the disappointment of the new Kelly Link, and I just about jumped when it namechecked Renee Gladman, since I was about to start The Activist. (No, I did not plan to read 3 women writers to start Women's History Month, just happened that way.)
October 14, 2022
I wrote about this book here: https://readingindie.substack.com/p/t...
February 21, 2021
It is difficult to live an intellectual life while literally attached to an infant, a truth the author discovers while simultaneously breastfeeding and preparing for a panel in a bathroom stall abroad. Zambreno writes beautifully of the universal struggle - how does one make art while caring for a family and for oneself? - in this spacious mediation on reading, literature, and friendship. Central to the story is the author's former online friendship with a mercurial poet/novelist from San Francisco. (I read this part with great interest, scouring the internet for clues, as Zambreno and Alex Suzuki-the alias for the friend-spent a lot of time on Readerville, a community in which I was also active while living in San Francisco during the same years.)
Undertaken at a time when the author is struggling to write a different book, for which she is on contract - a study of Herve Guibert's To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life - To Write As If Already Dead explores the friction between writing and making a living, along with the disruptions of the body. While revisiting Guibert's chronicle of his life (and death) with AIDS, Zambreno is contending with shingles and other mysterious illnesses.
I read the book not long after returning from two years in Paris, a city that is central to Guibert's work. Had I not read To Write As If Already Dead, I would not have read Guibert, and reading Guibert was a joy. Books speak to each other across genre and geography, just as authors speak to each other and to readers across time, so I am always fascinated by the way certain books come to you at the moment in your life when they are most relevant. We rode out the first year of the Covid19 pandemic in Paris, where Guibert was caught in the turmoil of an earlier, equally deadly virus. His work is interesting to read at this moment in history.
With references to the works and lives of the likes of Baudelaire and Foucault, and a deep dive into Guibert, Zambreno examines what it means to write and to attempt to live a life of the mind in the midst of life's complexities.
Undertaken at a time when the author is struggling to write a different book, for which she is on contract - a study of Herve Guibert's To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life - To Write As If Already Dead explores the friction between writing and making a living, along with the disruptions of the body. While revisiting Guibert's chronicle of his life (and death) with AIDS, Zambreno is contending with shingles and other mysterious illnesses.
I read the book not long after returning from two years in Paris, a city that is central to Guibert's work. Had I not read To Write As If Already Dead, I would not have read Guibert, and reading Guibert was a joy. Books speak to each other across genre and geography, just as authors speak to each other and to readers across time, so I am always fascinated by the way certain books come to you at the moment in your life when they are most relevant. We rode out the first year of the Covid19 pandemic in Paris, where Guibert was caught in the turmoil of an earlier, equally deadly virus. His work is interesting to read at this moment in history.
With references to the works and lives of the likes of Baudelaire and Foucault, and a deep dive into Guibert, Zambreno examines what it means to write and to attempt to live a life of the mind in the midst of life's complexities.
January 31, 2021
“Still, at the end of all of this, I don’t know why, when I speak about writing, I am speaking about death. Since childbirth especially, when I realized I could die, realized my mortality and vulnerability. That a body could be stopped at any time. I still haven’t answered one of my questions hovering over all of this. How does writing change, once one knows that one is going to die? In my notebook I have written down this quote from Kathy Acker: ‘I’m no superstar shit and never will be. If anything, I’m what happens after death, which is writing.’”
A really phenomenal book; an engagement with Herve Guibert worthy of him.
A really phenomenal book; an engagement with Herve Guibert worthy of him.
June 13, 2022
O legítimo "romance contemporâneo" de qualidade, com a leveza, a mescla entre ensaio pessoal e narrativa, a proximidade com as artes plásticas etc.
October 21, 2022
So I totally get why this type of genre-blurring memoiristic literary criticism wouldn't work for someone, but it sure does for me. Why not render explicit that we think through topics like art, aesthetics, philosophy, & ethics not just through our lived experiences, but also how we are encountering them at a specific moment in time? The connections & contrasts Zambreno draws between herself & Guibert are unexpected, insightful &, yes, occasionally frustrating too—but that's exactly what's so endlessly intriguing.
"What is the space of literature for, if not as a scratching pad for our irritants?"
"What is the space of literature for, if not as a scratching pad for our irritants?"
January 18, 2022
17 january 2022: rarely if ever not thinking about this book <3
25 july 2021: as always, as ever – absolutely stunning!!! i've been waiting a year for this book and it exceeded every expectation. my notebook is swollen with quotes drawn from its pages.... can't wait to read it over and over again while i wait patiently (or not so patiently 😇) for whatever brilliant book is in store for us next <3
25 july 2021: as always, as ever – absolutely stunning!!! i've been waiting a year for this book and it exceeded every expectation. my notebook is swollen with quotes drawn from its pages.... can't wait to read it over and over again while i wait patiently (or not so patiently 😇) for whatever brilliant book is in store for us next <3
September 1, 2021
About ten years ago, Zambreno and I shared a friendship that was conducted entirely through online correspondence. It was a meaningful experience for me, one that I learned a lot from, and although I was caught off guard at first I do feel moved by her novelized account of this friendship in the first part of her book. It seems she has in part memorialized my kindness from that period with the kindness of her prose and I feel particularly moved by that; it is a good way to be remembered.
Zambreno never expected me to find her book and I never expected to be writing this, but a handful of accidents threw me in the path of the book so here I am. I debated whether to even write this response at all because I didn’t want to take up space or disrupt the frame of this book discussion with my presence, but some situations are just made to exceed the arbitrary constraints we call genre. Besides, I don’t think Zambreno would mind the gamesmanship quality of watching one of her fictional characters step out of her book to offer commentary on it.
What I want to say is this: I remember feeling delighted, inspired, exhilarated, and at times terrified during my correspondence with Zambreno. I’ve often wondered why this last feeling, and for a long time I thought it had to do with being around her marvelous, prodigious intelligence (which was certainly intimidating) and her literary ambition (which was certainly daunting). Both these things were major but they still didn’t add up to a justification of the sublime chill that would sometimes come over me without warning during our communications. Now I realize that it was because she was driven always at every moment by a total life commitment to the project of literature, this total commitment meaning that she was prepared to lay down her life for the work of writing and if necessary, to die for it. This was apparent to me as a reader of the feverish, exuberant blog she kept at the time, and I think it must also be apparent to the readers of her books today. It’s a quality that cannot but inspire awe and admiration and occasional moments of sheer terror.
So no wonder her identification with Guibert, a writer condemned prematurely to write against and towards the most implacable deadline of all.
During my time around Zambreno, I would on occasion feel not only the sublime fear mentioned earlier, but also a more pressing one for her health and well-being because already then she was driving herself to work with such urgency and intensity that could only jeopardize her precarious physical condition. The pathologist Xavier Bichat, who was a key influence behind Foucault’s thinking on illness and medicine, is best known for positing that the living body is in a constant condition of fending off death. Death is not a distant point in the future that the body eventually arrives at but a fellow traveler alongside life itself, a haunting, almost intimate presence that surrounds life and the tissues of the body at all times. I imagine Zambreno knows and understands this well.
I often thought of Bichat’s formulation while participating in the online community (connective communal tissue of bloggers writing against the surrounding silence) of a decade ago that Zambreno alludes to in her Acknowledgments, and I thought of it again while reading her book as a whole.
Writers often feel most productive and at home in that liminal space between life and death where existence is evanescent and thus also protean, able to assume whatever shape or form can be imagined or written. This book seems to be a double exploration of how this space is both necessary and problematic for writers in various ways. Paradoxically, the very conditions that spur the output of writing can also be the same conditions that threaten the existence of the writers themselves.
Or as Zambreno succinctly puts it with her piercing wit:
“It is more unusual to stay a writer despite lack of status or outward success, to sacrifice sanity, sleep, positive well-being, health, to instead dwell in a life that is one of almost constant paranoia, oscillating between horror at invisibility and nausea at visibility.” (36)
Part one of the book is a meditation on a certain escape fantasy that asks if it’s possible for writers to write (to each other, to readers) without also having to meet the often mortifying obligations of being a public author in the mortal-material world. To what extent can writers live and sustain social connections in a liminal, quasi-utopian, online space composed solely of words? When this space vanishes, do the writers and relationships cease to exist? Did one ever truly connect with another person, or just with one’s own feelings around the writings of another person? The book doesn’t offer any conclusive answers, but let’s just say that I can relate to the asking.
The reflective, elegiac tone of part one gives way abruptly to the sped-up, present-day urgency of part two, in which Zambreno struggles to meet several concurrent deadlines -- the completion of her book on Guibert and the birth of her second child -- while simultaneously grappling with the hard economic, professional, social, and medical realities of being a contract intellectual worker and parent with precarious health in the midst of a surging pandemic. The study on Guibert quickly exceeds its prescribed academic frame and merges with Zambreno’s own enactment of living and writing in the body of a writer under material duress. Time is foreshortened and the text gets spliced into titled micro-sections reflecting the ADHD condition of trying to pack precious writing sessions into the 15 to 30-minute intervals of free time remaining after the essential survival activities of life have eaten up their lion’s share of the clock and banking account. The overwhelming feeling, even as Zambreno punches out flash passages of incisive prose, is one of a near-constant pitched battle with bodily fatigue and exhaustion. The soft tissues of Bichat come to mind again. There are reasons why authors have such a troubled relationship with publishing deadlines and other looming lines of death and mortality.
Zambreno never expected me to find her book and I never expected to be writing this, but a handful of accidents threw me in the path of the book so here I am. I debated whether to even write this response at all because I didn’t want to take up space or disrupt the frame of this book discussion with my presence, but some situations are just made to exceed the arbitrary constraints we call genre. Besides, I don’t think Zambreno would mind the gamesmanship quality of watching one of her fictional characters step out of her book to offer commentary on it.
What I want to say is this: I remember feeling delighted, inspired, exhilarated, and at times terrified during my correspondence with Zambreno. I’ve often wondered why this last feeling, and for a long time I thought it had to do with being around her marvelous, prodigious intelligence (which was certainly intimidating) and her literary ambition (which was certainly daunting). Both these things were major but they still didn’t add up to a justification of the sublime chill that would sometimes come over me without warning during our communications. Now I realize that it was because she was driven always at every moment by a total life commitment to the project of literature, this total commitment meaning that she was prepared to lay down her life for the work of writing and if necessary, to die for it. This was apparent to me as a reader of the feverish, exuberant blog she kept at the time, and I think it must also be apparent to the readers of her books today. It’s a quality that cannot but inspire awe and admiration and occasional moments of sheer terror.
So no wonder her identification with Guibert, a writer condemned prematurely to write against and towards the most implacable deadline of all.
During my time around Zambreno, I would on occasion feel not only the sublime fear mentioned earlier, but also a more pressing one for her health and well-being because already then she was driving herself to work with such urgency and intensity that could only jeopardize her precarious physical condition. The pathologist Xavier Bichat, who was a key influence behind Foucault’s thinking on illness and medicine, is best known for positing that the living body is in a constant condition of fending off death. Death is not a distant point in the future that the body eventually arrives at but a fellow traveler alongside life itself, a haunting, almost intimate presence that surrounds life and the tissues of the body at all times. I imagine Zambreno knows and understands this well.
I often thought of Bichat’s formulation while participating in the online community (connective communal tissue of bloggers writing against the surrounding silence) of a decade ago that Zambreno alludes to in her Acknowledgments, and I thought of it again while reading her book as a whole.
Writers often feel most productive and at home in that liminal space between life and death where existence is evanescent and thus also protean, able to assume whatever shape or form can be imagined or written. This book seems to be a double exploration of how this space is both necessary and problematic for writers in various ways. Paradoxically, the very conditions that spur the output of writing can also be the same conditions that threaten the existence of the writers themselves.
Or as Zambreno succinctly puts it with her piercing wit:
“It is more unusual to stay a writer despite lack of status or outward success, to sacrifice sanity, sleep, positive well-being, health, to instead dwell in a life that is one of almost constant paranoia, oscillating between horror at invisibility and nausea at visibility.” (36)
Part one of the book is a meditation on a certain escape fantasy that asks if it’s possible for writers to write (to each other, to readers) without also having to meet the often mortifying obligations of being a public author in the mortal-material world. To what extent can writers live and sustain social connections in a liminal, quasi-utopian, online space composed solely of words? When this space vanishes, do the writers and relationships cease to exist? Did one ever truly connect with another person, or just with one’s own feelings around the writings of another person? The book doesn’t offer any conclusive answers, but let’s just say that I can relate to the asking.
The reflective, elegiac tone of part one gives way abruptly to the sped-up, present-day urgency of part two, in which Zambreno struggles to meet several concurrent deadlines -- the completion of her book on Guibert and the birth of her second child -- while simultaneously grappling with the hard economic, professional, social, and medical realities of being a contract intellectual worker and parent with precarious health in the midst of a surging pandemic. The study on Guibert quickly exceeds its prescribed academic frame and merges with Zambreno’s own enactment of living and writing in the body of a writer under material duress. Time is foreshortened and the text gets spliced into titled micro-sections reflecting the ADHD condition of trying to pack precious writing sessions into the 15 to 30-minute intervals of free time remaining after the essential survival activities of life have eaten up their lion’s share of the clock and banking account. The overwhelming feeling, even as Zambreno punches out flash passages of incisive prose, is one of a near-constant pitched battle with bodily fatigue and exhaustion. The soft tissues of Bichat come to mind again. There are reasons why authors have such a troubled relationship with publishing deadlines and other looming lines of death and mortality.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
February 3, 2021
2 stars — for the author’s efforts
At the risk of outing myself as a total philistine when it comes to literature (which I don’t believe I am), I mostly (well, more than mostly, nearly totally) disliked this book. The author strikes me as a whining mother, who never seems able to grasp happiness no matter what she is doing. Plus that, she’s nearly always suffering from some physical malady (general malaise, shingles, you name it). But, then, is this book supposed to be about her … or is supposed to be about the French photographer/author Herve Guibert. Guibert died in 1991 of AIDS.
The book is written in two parts. The first part is the story of Guibert told in a roundabout way. There is nothing straight forward about this book. It’s almost like a cross between the stream of consciousness of James Joyce and a personal memoir along the lines of Styron’s “Darkness Visible.” Yes, it’s that depressing. So, Part 1 goes into mostly irrelevant (to me) details of Guibert’s life alongside the Zambreno’s life with her husband and daughter (3-year old Leo). She is struggling to complete her book about Guibert and engages in an online “relationship” with an anonymous author. This “relationship” takes up a good part of Part 1. Most of Part 1 struck me as a lofty discourse about writing, the meaning of authorship, etc., written in an esoteric manner that makes it difficult grasp — not all good literature needs to be difficult to grasp!! In fact, it seems to me that the opposite should be true. In any case, this book, at least through Part 1 did very little to engage me and I just wished for it to be finished. In fact, in Part II her editor writes to her after her submittal of a draft, “Brilliant but don’t have larger vision to publish it, etc. Need to make certain numbers.” Yep, I agree.
The second part of the book was, for me, more engaging. It relates the story of Guibert’s last year and his encounters with medical professionals, friends, acquaintances, etc. But I found myself wondering throughout, as the story took side trips to the various encounters the author had with doctors, etc. during her difficult pregnancy, a bout with shingles, etc. I understand, I think, that the purpose was for the author to immerse herself in Guibert’s life and thereby better understand and appreciate him. But it didn’t work for me … at all … I just wanted to be done with the book. I continually found myself thinking, “Why don’t I just read Guibert?” Any of the additional facts Zambreno added about his life can be found on the internet. I got tired of Zambreno repeatedly talking about her Uber-expensive “shitty” health insurance that was the only reason she continued in her adjunct professor role. OK, I get that too … but it doesn’t need to be hammered into the reader’s head. It’s this repeated whining and complaining throughout the book that, in the end, just sent me over the top leaving no sympathy for the author and just thinking … go see a therapist, get a life, quite bitching about everything, it must be miserable to be you.
At the risk of outing myself as a total philistine when it comes to literature (which I don’t believe I am), I mostly (well, more than mostly, nearly totally) disliked this book. The author strikes me as a whining mother, who never seems able to grasp happiness no matter what she is doing. Plus that, she’s nearly always suffering from some physical malady (general malaise, shingles, you name it). But, then, is this book supposed to be about her … or is supposed to be about the French photographer/author Herve Guibert. Guibert died in 1991 of AIDS.
The book is written in two parts. The first part is the story of Guibert told in a roundabout way. There is nothing straight forward about this book. It’s almost like a cross between the stream of consciousness of James Joyce and a personal memoir along the lines of Styron’s “Darkness Visible.” Yes, it’s that depressing. So, Part 1 goes into mostly irrelevant (to me) details of Guibert’s life alongside the Zambreno’s life with her husband and daughter (3-year old Leo). She is struggling to complete her book about Guibert and engages in an online “relationship” with an anonymous author. This “relationship” takes up a good part of Part 1. Most of Part 1 struck me as a lofty discourse about writing, the meaning of authorship, etc., written in an esoteric manner that makes it difficult grasp — not all good literature needs to be difficult to grasp!! In fact, it seems to me that the opposite should be true. In any case, this book, at least through Part 1 did very little to engage me and I just wished for it to be finished. In fact, in Part II her editor writes to her after her submittal of a draft, “Brilliant but don’t have larger vision to publish it, etc. Need to make certain numbers.” Yep, I agree.
The second part of the book was, for me, more engaging. It relates the story of Guibert’s last year and his encounters with medical professionals, friends, acquaintances, etc. But I found myself wondering throughout, as the story took side trips to the various encounters the author had with doctors, etc. during her difficult pregnancy, a bout with shingles, etc. I understand, I think, that the purpose was for the author to immerse herself in Guibert’s life and thereby better understand and appreciate him. But it didn’t work for me … at all … I just wanted to be done with the book. I continually found myself thinking, “Why don’t I just read Guibert?” Any of the additional facts Zambreno added about his life can be found on the internet. I got tired of Zambreno repeatedly talking about her Uber-expensive “shitty” health insurance that was the only reason she continued in her adjunct professor role. OK, I get that too … but it doesn’t need to be hammered into the reader’s head. It’s this repeated whining and complaining throughout the book that, in the end, just sent me over the top leaving no sympathy for the author and just thinking … go see a therapist, get a life, quite bitching about everything, it must be miserable to be you.
November 20, 2023
تشدني اختيارات هذه الدار بانتقاءتها المتميزة وكما أسلف الكتاب في مقدمته فان هذه بأنه لا يعترف او ينتمي الى قوالب التصنيف الأدبي الجامدة
في طيات الكتاب عرض ثقافي رائع لتلك الجوائح التي تفاجئ المواهب العالية من خلال اقترابها من الموت وكيف تجعل منهم أشخاص أخر في طريقة سردهم وطريقة الأداء التي تسيطر عليهم زززمن أجمل الكتب التي تقرأ
في طيات الكتاب عرض ثقافي رائع لتلك الجوائح التي تفاجئ المواهب العالية من خلال اقترابها من الموت وكيف تجعل منهم أشخاص أخر في طريقة سردهم وطريقة الأداء التي تسيطر عليهم زززمن أجمل الكتب التي تقرأ
August 24, 2023
Wonderful book. Deeply engaged with Guibert’s life and work. Everything I’ve read from this Columbia University Press series Rereadings has been fantastic.
February 28, 2025
تتقاطع في هذا الكتاب سرديتان، الكاتبة عن نفسها والكاتبة عن الدراسة الأدبية التي تحاول كتابتها عن كاتب فرنسي اسمه هيرفي غيبير. أحببت جدًا جزء الكاتبة عن نفسها، عن صداقات الكُتّاب في زمن الإنترنت والنوادي الثقافية وتحزباتها، عن محاولتها الكتابة مع المرض ومع الحمل ومع ضغط المهنة وتأمين لقمة العيش، وعن ثيمة المرض والكتابة في أيام كوفيد وتداعيات كل ذلك عليها. الصدق والتكشف اللذان تكتب بهما يجعل قراءة هذه الأجزاء مؤثرة وحميمية، وهذه الحقائق الحياتية والإنسانية بدون أغلفة هي ما يجعل للقراءة معنى في عيني.
السردية الثانية في الكتاب عن دراستها لغيبير لم تعجبني، ربما يعود ذلك لأنني لا أعرفه ولا أهتم بمعرفته، وموضوع مثليّته وتطرقها له كثيرًا نفّرني من قراءة بعض الصفحات.
أخيرًا، كانت الترجمة متعة إضافية في هذا الكتاب.
السردية الثانية في الكتاب عن دراستها لغيبير لم تعجبني، ربما يعود ذلك لأنني لا أعرفه ولا أهتم بمعرفته، وموضوع مثليّته وتطرقها له كثيرًا نفّرني من قراءة بعض الصفحات.
أخيرًا، كانت الترجمة متعة إضافية في هذا الكتاب.
November 13, 2021
I, too, love Hervè Guibert and am critical of his failures as a human being and I also hate having a body. I don’t know what else to say except that i’m a simp for this woman and she’s writing about one of. Y favorite writers. Also what happened to her friendship with Alex Suzuki? Whenever I finish a Zambreno work I’m just filled with Want
February 6, 2021
I have been a Kate Zambreno fan since I read GREEN GIRL and found the expat experience so eerily similar to mine, I knew I would read whatever else she had written. After DRIFTS came out during 2020, I assumed it would be a while since we got a new book. Incorrect. TO WRITE AS IF ALREADY DEAD was started pre-COVID but has been contextualised in the pandemic which, frustratingly, makes it incredibly relevant and incredibly tiresome.
Zambreno writes what is often described by others as auto-fiction, although rarely does a writer of this genre describe their work this way. In TO WRITE AS IF ALREADY DEAD, Kate has a young child and is pregnant and finds herself researching the French writer and photographer Herve Guibert. Zambreno frequently describes and assess her life in relation to other artists but I think this time I was covid-exhuasted and reading a women go on and on about being pregnant and how difficult that is, when I know in DRIFTS her ambivalence towards being a mother ran rampant throughout the book, was tedious.
I found myself reflecting on my own experiences often but was pulled back into a 2020 pandemic world which, look, maybe I am just not ready to fully explore. Regardless, Zamrbeno is always worth reading, even if this one didn't hit the spot like the previous books mentioned and the stunning SCREEN TESTS.
Thanks to Net Galley, Columbia University Press and Kate Zambreno for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.
Zambreno writes what is often described by others as auto-fiction, although rarely does a writer of this genre describe their work this way. In TO WRITE AS IF ALREADY DEAD, Kate has a young child and is pregnant and finds herself researching the French writer and photographer Herve Guibert. Zambreno frequently describes and assess her life in relation to other artists but I think this time I was covid-exhuasted and reading a women go on and on about being pregnant and how difficult that is, when I know in DRIFTS her ambivalence towards being a mother ran rampant throughout the book, was tedious.
I found myself reflecting on my own experiences often but was pulled back into a 2020 pandemic world which, look, maybe I am just not ready to fully explore. Regardless, Zamrbeno is always worth reading, even if this one didn't hit the spot like the previous books mentioned and the stunning SCREEN TESTS.
Thanks to Net Galley, Columbia University Press and Kate Zambreno for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.
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June 14, 2022horrid. zambreno took on a project and it seems like discovered she had no desire to write said project. both parts feel as if tugged from a place of hatred; she whines, she moans, everything is bad and spliced in are summaries of guibert that illuminate little, Wikipedia summaries, interviews redescribed, dates scattered that give a skeleton of a biography— one that is so unnecessary in light of the wealth of autobiography that guibert himself produced. and her sentences drag on with such tedium! plodding! always there is a body, her body, in pain! endless complaints and I understand, pregnancy is painful, but to write of it in parallel to the death of Guibert, of AIDS does not feel real, again, illuminates little.
she detests being alive and eats so many eggs and her friends write her emails and and she doesn’t want to write this book and I do not want to read about it.
to quote jackson, “You cannot write About The Body with any self-seriousness. It is always bad and gross.”
she detests being alive and eats so many eggs and her friends write her emails and and she doesn’t want to write this book and I do not want to read about it.
to quote jackson, “You cannot write About The Body with any self-seriousness. It is always bad and gross.”
May 1, 2022
Always a pleasure to spend time with Zamberno's thinking. Love her approach to this rereadings series
July 22, 2021
I found comfort in this strange book—part memoir, part literary criticism, part novella, part diary? Not sure what to call it but breathtaking. It made me excited about writers and writing again, after feeling very blah for a few months.
February 25, 2023
Всё ещё круто!
Двигатель истории не только книга Эрве Гибера "Другу, который не спас мне жизнь", но и рефлексия (а это было и в Drifts) над уязвимостью собственного тела перед лицом эпидемии и социальной незащищённости, привилегиями, дружбой, материнством и (не)возможностью письма внутри этих нарративов.
Ну и немного неймдроппинга: Эрве Гибер, Мишель Фуко, Шарль Бодлер, Мойра Дейви, Дэвид Войнарович, Питер Худжар, Ив Кософски Седжвик, Роберт Мэпплторп, Софи Калль, Мэтью Линдон, Сьюзен Сонтаг и другие.
Двигатель истории не только книга Эрве Гибера "Другу, который не спас мне жизнь", но и рефлексия (а это было и в Drifts) над уязвимостью собственного тела перед лицом эпидемии и социальной незащищённости, привилегиями, дружбой, материнством и (не)возможностью письма внутри этих нарративов.
Ну и немного неймдроппинга: Эрве Гибер, Мишель Фуко, Шарль Бодлер, Мойра Дейви, Дэвид Войнарович, Питер Худжар, Ив Кософски Седжвик, Роберт Мэпплторп, Софи Калль, Мэтью Линдон, Сьюзен Сонтаг и другие.
July 7, 2022
the four is generous but the three is harsh
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April 2, 2024ما المضمون؟
لم أجده
...............................................
تتمة مراجعة الكتاب على مدونتي:
((( همى الغيث )))
https://www.hma-algaith.com/%d8%a3%d9...
لم أجده
...............................................
تتمة مراجعة الكتاب على مدونتي:
((( همى الغيث )))
https://www.hma-algaith.com/%d8%a3%d9...
January 8, 2022
The coincidence of the narrator’s health worries and similar themes in Guibert’s work does not a study make. Though I understand the structure was meant as an homage to Guibert, I couldn’t help but feel the form took precedence over the content. It really did just feel like Zambreno was racing towards a deadline and simply didn’t have the time or space to really investigate her subject. I craved insight. This was a miss for me.
November 20, 2024
Kate Zambreno is one of my favorite writers. I am inspired by her combo of memoir and subjective criticism on art and literature. To Write as if Already Dead presents itself in this style talking about Hervé Guibert Hervé Guibert's diary-like novel of his final months with AIDS, To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, and the challenges of his friendship with Muzil (Michel Foucault); then I learn from the inside cover both books are considered fiction. She talks about her second pregnancy during the pandemic alongside her comments on Hervé Guibert. One can't help but recall the horrors of the eighties while, at the same time, revisiting our pointless responses to COVID: washing vegetables, masking in the park, shortages and hospital crowding and so many deaths. All the sad and scary stuff we went through and I wonder what is store for us now.
Her notes are abundant and spark links to writers new to me like Sofia Samatar Bhanu Kapil, Renee Gladman, Chantal Akerman, Kate Briggs, Hélène Cixous, Suzanne Scanlon as well as artists and photographers.
Kate Zambreno also writes and teaches through the pandemic and my interest was piqued not only by what she was reading and writing, her interest in fragments and diaries, and what she assigned her students. Rainer Maria Rilke, Franz Kafka, Roland BarthesBarthes, Robert Walser, and W G SEBALD.
Her notes are abundant and spark links to writers new to me like Sofia Samatar Bhanu Kapil, Renee Gladman, Chantal Akerman, Kate Briggs, Hélène Cixous, Suzanne Scanlon as well as artists and photographers.
Kate Zambreno also writes and teaches through the pandemic and my interest was piqued not only by what she was reading and writing, her interest in fragments and diaries, and what she assigned her students. Rainer Maria Rilke, Franz Kafka, Roland BarthesBarthes, Robert Walser, and W G SEBALD.
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