Autoportrait

by Jesse Ball

Overview

Nominated for the Chicago Review of Books Award

A work of unflinching honesty, Autoportrait is a hypnotic memoir of reflection, loss, and everyday joy from one of America's best contemporary novelists

Jesse Ball has produced fourteen acclaimed works of deeply empathetic absurdism in poetry and fiction. Now, he offers readers his first memoir, one that showcases his “humane curiosity” (James Wood) and invites the reader into a raw and personal account of love, grief, and memory. Inspired by the memoir Édouard Levé put to paper shortly before his death, Autoportrait is an extraordinarily frank and intimate work from one of America's most brilliant authors.

The subtle power of Ball's voice conjures the richness of everyday life. On each page, half-remembered moments are woven together with the joys and triumphs—and the mistakes and humiliations, too—that somehow tell us who we are, why we are here. Held at the same height as tragic accounts of illness or death are moments of startling beauty, banality, or humor: "I wake in the morning, I sit, I walk long distances. If there is somewhere to swim, I may swim. If I have a bicycle, I will ride it, especially to meet someone. There is no more preparing for me to do, other than preparing for death, and I do that by laughing. Not laughing at death, of course. Laughing at myself." 

An extraordinary memoir that reminds us what is possible and builds to the kind of power one might feel reading Anne Carson's Glass Essay, or Joe Brainard's I Remember. Autoportrait will leave you feeling utterly invigorated, inspired, and a little afraid.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781646221394
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	08/16/2022
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	140
File size:	215 KB

About the Author

JESSE BALL was born in New York. He is the author of sixteen books, and his works have been translated into more than a dozen languages. He is on the faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, has won the Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize for Fiction and was long-listed for the National Book Award. He was named one of Granta’s Best of Young Novelists, and has been a fellow of the NEA, Creative Capital, and the Guggenheim Foundation.

Editorial Reviews

05/09/2022

Modeled on French writer Édouard Levé’s work of the same title, this slender and innovative work from novelist Ball (Census) reflects on the vagaries of love, loss, and life in a single, unspooling paragraph. As he oscillates from one musing to the next without regard for chronology or resolution, Ball ruminates on having “no musical talent” (“when I try to play, my dogs howl until I stop”); his two marriages; his brother’s trip to the hospital in 1990 that rendered him quadriplegic; and a falling out with the proprietors of a favorite Chinese restaurant. Readers will not learn much about either wife, how his brother was injured, or the reason Ball and the restaurateurs parted ways. Though his writing implies a stream-of-consciousness approach, it may not be a coincidence that Ball, a self-identified absurdist, often recounts violence or tragedy, then swiftly changes the subject; a typical non sequitur: “Once, some years ago I was mean to my mother and she cried. I never wear watches.” While jarring, such punches mimic the ruthlessness of life. It’s a somewhat depressive affair, but Ball skillfully molds it into a rich self-portrait that evokes wonder at odd passions (cooking with strangely named spices, drawings of dead babies) and delightfully idiosyncratic opinions. Fans of Matias Viegener’s 2500 Random Things About Me Too should take note. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

Nominated for the Chicago Review of Books Award

"Both Mr. Ball and Levé are working in a tradition that falls under the rubric of 'life writing,' encompassing both memoir and the stranger territory known as autofiction. At the heart of each is the tension between experience and memory, or objectivity and subjectivity . . . These two Autoportraits push back against the familiar narrative arc in favor of something more conditional and authentic . . . More than merely an act of solipsism or ego, these works attempt to record nothing less than the operation of consciousness itself." —David L. Ulin, The Wall Street Journal

"[The] latest work from a gleeful absurdist . . . [A] scaldingly droll, unredacted personal inventory of likes, dislikes, body parts injured, pets formerly owned, and loved ones lost." —The New Yorker

"Slim but powerful . . . The collisions of severe, unvarnished facts start to build a larger idea about how we live—or how we fail to live fully . . . A brave book . . . There is strength in it, and cleverness and nearly unbearable honesty." —Nathan Deuel, Los Angeles Times

“Jesse Ball (“Census”) levels a steely gaze at the very concept of humanity in this three-part novel that introduces the lower-class “quads” and the rich “pats,” who treat those below them with impunity. When a group of pats conceals the grisly fate of a young quad girl behind an elaborate festival, you may start to wonder just how different this dystopian world is from our own.” —The Washington Post

"Jesse Ball’s Autoportrait, you might say, is all voice . . . Evocative and bright." —Christopher Borrelli, Chicago Tribune

"Autoportrait is an antidote to a genre that has become overly codified . . . Released from the contract of high-stakes tragedy, Ball provides an authentic look at what life is really like and offers the reader a way to encounter life outside the parameters that society, and narrative convention, would impose on it. If everything is equally important, then we must live life moment to moment, as if each portion of our day has the same opportunity for value as any other." —Steve Woodward, Star Tribune (Minneapolis)

"[Ball's] latest, Autoportrait, is his fastest and most revealing yet." —Cody Delistraty, WSJ. Magazine

"Autoportrait is the kind of book best read all at once, in a single sitting, during a lazy afternoon. The time spent reading the book becomes unusually full . . . Autoportrait immerses you deeply in another’s experience for a short while, then returns you back to yourself." —Adam Fleming Petty, Commonweal

"The pleasure, here, is in errancy and velocity . . . Ball’s text leans into cold wonder, flirting with a Francis Ponge-like poetry of the mundane and highlighting his predilection for the absurd, the diffuse, the simply odd . . . Much of the strange delight of reading this book is found in teasing out the precise nature of Ball’s writerly persona, variously warm and cold, aloof and sincere." —Bailey Trela, Frieze

"Deeply alive." —Carolyn Quimby, The Millions, A Most Anticipated Book of the Month

“Jesse Ball’s memoir, inspired by the memoir Édouard Levé wrote shortly before his death, has been called ‘frank and intimate’ but I imagine its greatest strength is the clear and somewhat unsettling way in which Ball—as he does in his many novels—is able to pinpoint the best and worst of everyday life, of the basic situation of simply being alive, and make it strange and slightly absurd.” —Emily Firetog, A Literary Hub Most Anticipated Book of the Year

"Ball turns the autobiography on its head . . . Ball makes compelling work of it, slabbing the matter of his life together like a Dadaist sculptor . . . An unconventional memoir that speaks to the power of elusiveness." —Library Journal

"Ball invites readers into a meditative engagement with the text and suggests that perhaps the best way to understand a person is to sift through their mental clutter. Koan-like moments hum throughout . . . A hypnotic personal reflection penned with clockwork discipline." —Kirkus Reviews

"Slender and innovative . . . A rich self-portrait that evokes wonder at odd passions (cooking with strangely named spices, drawings of dead babies) and delightfully idiosyncratic opinions." —Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

05/01/2022

Absurdist poet and novelist Ball (The Divers' Game) turns the autobiography on its head with his latest memoir. Following writer Édouard Levé's nontraditional take on personal narrative, Ball writes in a series of un-paragraphed, largely unrelated sentences. Ball explains that this approach "does not raise one fact above another but lets the facts stand together in a fruitless clump, like a life." Biographic traditionalists may find this technique disjointed (several passages read like random lists) but as a whole, Ball makes compelling work of it, slabbing the matter of his life together like a Dadaist sculptor. His writing is straightforward and conversational. Addressing the unconventional nature of his work, he writes, "I believe a text should be elusive…should overflow its borders, demonstrating the complicity of our consciousness with the coloring of our surroundings and the supposed sequentially of events." It is through this kind of text, Ball believes, that a reader becomes "conscious of the life they are living." Whether or not this belief is universal this memoir certainly paints a multilayered picture of the author and reminds readers that "we are always in the moment after something has happened." VERDICT An unconventional memoir that speaks to the power of elusiveness. Recommended.—Megan Duffy

Library Journal

Novelist and poet Jesse Ball seems to be completely honest in this memoir, so much so that he comes across as arrogant, neurotic, and, frankly, unpleasant. The structure of the audiobook is quite unusual, making it difficult for narrator James Patrick Cronin to develop characters in any of the usual ways. The text jumps around in seeming free association rather than a time-bound narrative, so all Cronin can do is follow along and speak clearly. In most cases, by the time he can start developing a scene, he is switching to the next one. However, he does so smoothly and seamlessly, jumping from one fragmentary anecdote to another as rapidly as the author’s mind. This is not an easy listen, but it is an interesting one. D.M.H. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine

SEPTEMBER 2022 - AudioFile

Novelist and poet Jesse Ball seems to be completely honest in this memoir, so much so that he comes across as arrogant, neurotic, and, frankly, unpleasant. The structure of the audiobook is quite unusual, making it difficult for narrator James Patrick Cronin to develop characters in any of the usual ways. The text jumps around in seeming free association rather than a time-bound narrative, so all Cronin can do is follow along and speak clearly. In most cases, by the time he can start developing a scene, he is switching to the next one. However, he does so smoothly and seamlessly, jumping from one fragmentary anecdote to another as rapidly as the author’s mind. This is not an easy listen, but it is an interesting one. D.M.H. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine

SEPTEMBER 2022 - AudioFile

2022-04-26
Expanding his surreal oeuvre of tricky fiction and poetry, Ball finally tackles autobiography in an unexpected stylistic shift.

While the author’s previous books challenge literary conventions in dreamy, riddling prose, this book plays it straight. With mechanical simplicity, Ball composes his self-portrait with terse, confessional fragments rattled off in a trancelike deadpan. They quickly jump among ideas and, without paragraph breaks, amass into a tower of personal facts and reflections—e.g., “One of my shoulders stands higher than the other. My left hand is quicker than my right, but weaker. When I played soccer for my high school, I scored goals with both feet.” Despite its rigidity, the narrative is enjoyably personable and curiously mundane. Ball invites readers into a meditative engagement with the text and suggests that perhaps the best way to understand a person is to sift through their mental clutter. Koan-like moments hum throughout: “I like the rain, but I don’t like for my things to be wet”; “I like to leave windows open, but am concerned about insects coming into rooms”; “I don’t like to cheat at games, but I am not incredibly angry when I discover other people have cheated.” Ball takes his cue from a book of the same name by Édouard Levé, a French writer and visual artist who notoriously took his own life 10 days after delivering the manuscript for a book called Suicide. Ball explains in the foreword that he admires how Levé’s Autoportrait approaches biography in a way that “does not raise one fact above another, but lets the facts stand together in a fruitless clump, like a life.” While Levé’s book is difficult and cathartic, Ball’s is gentler and more considerate of readers. “I think it is important,” he writes, “to read something and to take it entirely into your body and find yourself changed by its company.”

A hypnotic personal reflection penned with clockwork discipline.

Kirkus Reviews