Kate Zambreno has invented a new form. It is a kind of absolute present, real life captured in closeup.
[To Write 's] expansion of narrative scope marks a fascinating shift in Zambreno’s corpus toward externality and a kind of communalism. Her writing has always been deeply interior, using personal (or authorial) experience to explore the past, whether on the madwomen of modernism or French New Wave cinema. What sets To Write apart from her past work might be the urgency with which it is rendered, knitting Guibert’s plague years into our immediate and actionable present.
To Write As If Already Dead just might be the first truly great book about the coronavirus pandemic
Paris Review Daily Staff Picks - Rhian Sasseen
This book is a tour de force. I was completely awestruck by the way Zambreno enacts the concept of the title, and by the way she writes the body, hers and Guibert’s. It is a moving performative act, a document of our time from the trenches, and a brilliant critical study.
Given its fragmented structure, intertextuality, quotations from and reflections on correspondences, and inclusion of the narrative of a pregnancy, the book feels like a companion to Drifts —another ‘library of the mind,’ this one encompassing texts on reading, writing, authorship, friendship, betrayal, the body, birth, and death.
Ploughshares - Rachael Nevins
In [To Write ], the first-person “I” appears uncomfortable, fractured, ghostly, footnote-like — not “I” as in Kate Zambreno, the published writer, but “I” as in a glazed persona, hovering more comfortably as fiction than as an endlessly verifiable biographical self. Here too, Zambreno and Guibert share similarities. As in the index, the paragraph, the appendix, the self is an illusionary fragment, a mode operating out of bodies in proximity to their deaths and disappearances, a formal condition revealing its most thrilling truths in the guise of fiction.
In her formally ambitious and genre blurring new book, Guggenheim Fellow Zambreno writes about trying (and failing) to write a critical study of Hervé Guibert’s To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life —as well as ruminating on themes like friendship, morality, literature, time, and memory.
The Millions' Most Anticipated
Zambreno examines what it means to write and to attempt to live a life of the mind in the midst of life's complexities. Wonderful, thought-provoking, and unexpected.
The Caffeinated Writer - Michelle Richmond
It’s a bit of a flex to publish a book as a parent of young children that takes as its central concern the difficulty of writing a book while parenting young children, but Zambreno’s approach is not just a flex, it’s a quiet revolution. By approaching the experience of motherhood with the same seriousness and rigor applied to Guibert and his narrative of friendship and ego and human suffering, To Write as if Already Dead becomes proof that sometimes the only solution to that problem turned over and over in so many motherhood/art books is to collapse the boundaries between what we think of as ‘work’ and what we consider to be ‘life.’
Electric Literature - Sara Fredman
[Zambreno] has some of [Guibert's] acidity, his charisma, his meditativeness, his improvisational grace. She has, too, his comfort with slipperiness, both in terms of subjectivity—is Guibert the "I" of his novels?—and of form . . . Despite its elliptical style, Zambreno’s book cultivates patience, a digressive but ruminative mode that goes beyond close reading of Guibert toward an actual embodiment of his voice.
4Columns - Jeremy Lybarger
In Kate Zambreno's To Write As If Already Dead, Hervé Guibert's voice is restored to the present through an act of transportation that left me slightly afraid of Zambreno's power. But then that's why you read her, and him: for a new awe of life.
Kate Zambreno stylizes a thrilling form of reading as writing and writing as reading, one that speaks to the overlapping crises of our contemporary moment in tones compelling, honest, and withering in all the right ways. No one thinks better and more carefully about the embodied practice of writing. She is the only person who could have written this book.
2021-02-20
This contemplative, rhetorically austere memoir is a kind of companion piece to Zambreno’s excellent 2020 novel, Drifts . That work of autofiction followed the author as she labored to meet a book deadline while navigating teaching gigs, her creative direction, and parenthood. Same story here: Zambreno has been commissioned to write a study of the French writer Hervé Guibert, whose 1990 novel, To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life , was a roman à clef about his friendship with philosopher Michel Foucault. The novel was controversial (and became a French bestseller) for disclosing that Foucault died of AIDS. Though Zambreno tries to stay on point, Guibert’s book mainly serves as a launchpad for more personal excursions she can’t set aside. Much of the first half of this book is focused on a friendship with a writer who wished to keep her identity obscure. Was their connection more authentic for being anonymous, Zambreno wonders, or a more distant connection of two artistic personas? In the second half, Zambreno focuses on life as a new mother consumed with thoughts about intimacy, relationships, and (of course) finishing the Guibert book. As the pandemic grew in scope, Zambreno’s sense of disillusionment and despair intensified, feelings she finds echoed in Guibert’s work. Drifts was digressive but possessed a lyricism, sense of humor, and passion that justified its fragmentary nature. By contrast, this book is meandering and chilly. Zambreno clings to Guibert’s book as a signifier of troubled friendships, first-person writing, and physical illness, but there’s little sense of resolution or coherence. That’s partly the point, of course. The author is frustrated by the way memoir is “supposed to be incredibly earnest and moral.” She wants to push back against that tradition, but the result is more an exercise in sangfroid than transgression.
A somber meta-memoir, rich in ideas but set at an emotional low boil.
Zambreno attempts to write a study of Hervé Guibert’s To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life , attacking it from two very different, very revealing angles.
Lit Hub's Astrology Book Club List - Emily Temple
Zambreno is a natural fit for this series, and Guibert a natural choice for her . . . she sees many resemblances between herself and her subject: the fretting about time, the shape of one’s book and one’s life, the body as focus, especially when subjected to medicalization. The real re-reading, though, comes with the absorption of this criticism/appreciation within the limits and chaos and dynamics of Zambreno’s own life. The physical and mental shocks of motherhood, deadlines and commitments, creative blocks – these are in fact the foundation, necessarily unstable, of Zambreno’s encounter with Guibert, and, inevitably, of our encounter with Zambreno.
Times Literary Supplement - Hal Jensen
A Books of the Year 2021 selection
[Zambreno’s work] is exploratory, experimental, and meandering; it has episodic qualities and repetitions that invoke dailiness. It exists in community, incorporating the words and ideas of friends. It engages with books and authors and artists. It’s deeply intellectual and deeply personal . . . This is a book that circles around its own subjects and is about the very act of circling. It’s a whirling, unsettled book that inspires whirling, unsettled thoughts.
Reading Indie - Rebecca Hussey
This book absorbed me so deeply I left part of myself inside it.
The White Review's Books of the Year - Sofia Samatar
There’s no one like Kate Zambreno at finding connections in the art she’s consumed and making the reader feel like they too are a brilliant critical theorist.
Kate Zambreno’s To Write As If Already Dead is portrait and self-portrait. It's a book about friendship, or friendships—famous, fictional, friends we’ve had and lost. More than this, it’s about what it means to feel kinship with a particular book and writer, and so it's really about reading, that intimacy and solitude. Here, as ever, Zambreno proves herself a brilliantly generous and ambitious reader, one capable of engaging a text so acutely that the line between self and art blurs. To Write As If Already Dead is gossipy and smart, angry and agile, doubling and doubled—and a serious pleasure to read.
Kate Zambreno’s latest book, To Write as if Already Dead , is a study of Guibert’s uncompromising novel. Galvanized by much the same 'survival energy,' the conversation vibrates with eerie coincidence: two writers amid the chaos of a pandemic, working against erasure.
Los Angeles Times - Jessica Ferri
Zambreno writes with breathtaking clarity while untangling refreshing, sometimes daunting, concepts.
The transgressive novelist and first significant memoirist of life with AIDS, Hervé Guibert was, by the time he died, expert at turning a book into a timebomb and vice versa. Thirty years later, against a backdrop of inequities exposed by the coronavirus public health crisis and amid her own ticking biology and professional precarity, Kate Zambreno considers the composite of guile and candor and care and betrayal that is high-stakes life-writing, itself perhaps a “virus that ‘preys on the human propensity to connect.’” The result is Zambreno’s most urgent and charged work since Heroines .
Not content to simply describe Guibert’s work, but instead digesting and inhabiting his methods to produce a discontinuous account of her own experience, Zambreno’s approach is a far cry from the neat comparisons of historical epidemics popular in mainstream media . . . To Write as if Already Dead , in its deep entanglement with its subject, expands the possibilities of adjacency and provides a powerful model for how we might recognize shared aims without collapsing differences.
Cleveland Review of Books - Emma Cohen
To Write As If Already Dead is highly attuned to the pleasures and possibilities of writing. [Zambreno] builds off Guibert to hint that while writing can take the form of companionship and solitude it can also be both and neither. Writing, she suggests, can offer privacy as well as communion. It can both mark the passage of time and obfuscate its progress. Writing can be a sketch, a failure, a confession, an expression and a negation of the self. Writing can come from the body, writing can replicate the texture of thought. Writing can be walking, a way of seeing, a physical space in itself. And for Zambreno as well as Guibert, writing can also serve as a missive of urgency.
BOMB Magazine - Julia Bosson
To Write As If Already Dead unfurls with a blazing urgency that intimates the precise conditions of its production. In so doing, it offers a series of revelatory meditations on Guibert’s novel that simultaneously draws the reader into Guibert’s project of writing against time—and Zambreno’s own.
Sarah Chihayan Literary History
[To Write as if Already Dead ] assert[s] a model of writing that is constantly aware of the body. Art criticism that pauses to breastfeed.
Astra Magazine - Nikki Shaner-Bradford
A fascinating, ambitious, unforgettable work.
To Write As If Already Dead is a wunderkammer of ghosts, friendships, and ailments that engages the discourse around fictional appropriation by formally inhabiting the dialogic relationships that arise when writers read other writers… and discover themselves in the text . . . It’s a harrowing pleasure to read Zambreno.
On the Seawall - Alina Stefanescu
To Write As If Already Dead is a book that questions the point of writing, and proves the point that we need writers to explain what the hell is going on inside and outside of them, how these things impact each other, all the jagged edges of being alive and dedicated to thinking about what that means. There’s also the honesty of pettiness that exists in all creative worlds, the points of comparison that are fair and unfair, that gives the text the hiss of gossip that provides instant intimacy. Reading all Zambreno feels like the jolt one gets from a surprise cut or burn in the kitchen, that sudden recognition that you’re in a body and the body can be hurt.
Refinery29 - Alicia Kennedy
To Write As If Already Dead unfurls with a blazing urgency that intimates the precise conditions of its production. In so doing, it offers a series of revelatory meditations on Guibert’s novel that simultaneously draws the reader into Guibert’s project of writing against time—and Zambreno’s own.
American Literary History - Sarah Chihaya
