Marginalia: An Autobiography

“What does it mean to dissolve into one’s text?” Naomi Washer asks in Marginalia: An Autobiography. Comprised of a decade’s worth of notes made in the margins of other writers’ books, collected and arranged into an original work, Marginalia accumulates into an essay that interrogates both its own form and its author’s sense of self. From her own readings of writers like Kate Zambreno, Roland Barthes, Maggie Nelson, and Robert Walser, among countless others, Washer arrives at an uncanny redi...