Nonfiction: A Novel

by Julie Myerson

Overview

"Raw-nerved and plangent."—The New Yorker

"Entrancing."—ELLE, A Best Book of 2024 

“Glitteringly painful.”—Rachel Cusk

This is definitely not a ghost story. But for a while after you’re gone, I see you everywhere. Every ragged young person sitting huddled on a pavement, every stretched-out body under cardboard in a shop doorway.

Two parents stand by powerlessly as their only child seems intent on destroying herself. As the mother—a novelist—attempts to understand her daughter, she finds herself revisiting her own uneasy, unresolved relationship with her mother. Weaving between childhoods past and present, laced with temptation and betrayal, Nonfiction: A Novel is an unflinching account of a mother, daughter, wife, and author reckoning with the world around her. But can a writer ever be trusted with the truth of her own story?

Clear-eyed, lacerating, and fearless, Julie Myerson’s Nonfiction: A Novel explores maternal love as an emotional foundation to both crave and fear. A hauntingly beautiful and deeply moving love letter from a mother to a daughter, this is a tale of damage and addiction, recovery and creativity, compassion and love.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781959030317
Publisher:	Tin House Books
Publication date:	01/02/2024
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	84,972
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Julie Myerson is the author of ten novels, including the bestselling Something Might Happen and The Stopped Heart, and three works of nonfiction, including Home: The Story of Everyone Who Ever Lived in Our House and The Lost Child. As a critic and columnist, she has written for many newspapers including The Guardian, the FT, Harper’s Bazaar and the New York Times, and she was a regular guest on BBC TV's Newsnight Review. She lives in London with her family.

Editorial Reviews

12/04/2023

In the fiercely intelligent latest from Myerson (The Lost Child), an unnamed middle-aged novelist considers her daughter, a young woman long in the throes of drug addiction. Rather than tell a straightforward tale of familial devastation, the narrator addresses her daughter directly (“There’s a night—I think this is the middle of June—when we lock you in the house”) and questions her and her husband’s middle-class parenting choices, as well as the ways she herself was raised and whether it’s honest and worthwhile to write about a family’s pain. The harrowing story of her daughter, who’s been in and out of rehab and now lives on the street, includes accounts of sex in exchange for drugs (“It doesn’t matter how much it hurts or frightens you, or what the consequences are, as long as they promise to fix you up”). It’s interspersed with other narratives, some of which are more effective than others. Highlights include the narrator’s startling and potent examination of the nature of infidelity while she carries on an emotional affair with a former lover. Less effective are her remembrances of her late mother, a cruel and unpredictable woman with whom she lost touch, which pale in comparison to the urgent material on parenting and art. While the dreariness of the subject matter might be exhausting for some, it is never overwrought on the page. Myerson’s narrative is focused and powerful. Agent: Karolina Sutton, CAA. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

"I found it truly remarkable, simultaneously honest and tricksy, deeply emotional and cunningly constructed, like having a magician explain an unbelievable trick even as she astonishes you with it. She manages to speak with heartbreaking clarity about the damage of addiction within a family and at the same time to examine the rights and responsibilities of the professional writer of fiction to her subject matter, herself and her readers. . . . I was moved and dazzled in equal measure."

Olivia Hetreed

"Blistering. . . . reading this book felt like being haunted by yourself, by your daughter, by your mother — by all the versions of yourself and those your love, and all the stories you will and won’t be able to tell about them."

Powell's

"Searing and tragic and cleverly layered, this thought-provoking novel about mothers and daughters, guilt and responsibility, fiction and truth, took me to the dark interior of family relationships and left me heart-broken. Just wonderful."

Claire Fuller

"Entrancing. . . . [A] gutting feat of love."

A Best Book of 2024 ELLE

"Courageous, compassionate, and devastating."

Andrew Solomon

"Nonfiction is compassionate, intelligent and bloody novel, where trust and love, motherhood and creativity crash and break on the rocks of addiction, treachery and confusion. Myerson's combination of ferocity and tenderness is unique."

Louisa Young

"A tale of art, addiction, and the ties that bind mothers and daughters, Nonfiction promises to devastate."

A Most Anticipated Book of 2024 The Millions

"Myerson writes with devastating clarity about the most complex and troubling of emotions. Nonfiction is painful, powerful, and utterly compelling."

Sarah Waters

"Raw-nerved and plangent. . . . a sustained meditation on the trials of family, marriage, and creativity."

The New Yorker

"Haunting. . . . vibrant. . . . realistic and heartbreaking. . . [a] high-wire act."

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

"Affecting. . . . poignant."

The Atlantic

"Utterly compelling and painfully truthful."

Polly Findlay

"This is such a compulsive read. Searingly honest and raw, Julie Myerson's new novel cuts to the heart of emotions we might try to evade, because they're just too overwhelming."

Deborah Moggach

"A psychological, moving novel that takes to task the very nature of storytelling."

A Best Book of January NYLON

"A heartbreaking family tale and a strong piece of writing. It examines marriage, fidelity, motherhood, the creative impulse and addiction, all with a keen eye and a delicate heart."

Book Reporter

"Julie Myerson’s Nonfiction is a magic trick of a novel in which every gut-punch lands and every playful gesture delights. A tour-de-force of concentration and tone, it’s also a masterclass in the existential ransom that is motherhood."

Joshua Ferris

"In plain, unflinching sentences, Julie Myerson takes us right into a family's broken heart. Nonfiction might be a novel, but it feels like the truth. A raw, urgent, and compulsive read."

Rupert Thomson

"This glitteringly painful novel, so steady and clear in its analysis of addiction, creativity, and the factors that determine female and familial identity, is the book [Myerson] was intended to write, and she has elevated it into a template for the re-making of self by means of a transformative and radical honesty."

Rachel Cusk

"Urgent. . . . I couldn’t stop reading it."

A Most Anticipated Book of 2024 LitHub

"Raw-nerved and plangent. . . . a sustained meditation on the trials of family, marriage, and creativity."

The New Yorker

"Entrancing. . . . [A] gutting feat of love."

Best Books of 2024 ELLE

2023-10-07
An English writer’s life descends into chaos as her daughter develops a drug addiction.

“There’s a night—I think this is the middle of June—when we lock you in the house,” begins Myerson’s winkingly titled novel. The “you” addressed throughout is the protagonist’s daughter; through Myerson’s intercutting narratives, we see the daughter as a bright, friendly child, later to turn violent, withdrawn, and unpredictable in the throes of IV drug use. The narrator also tells the story of her relationship with her own cruel mother, whose cold and critical demeanor finally ends in an estrangement that lasts until the older woman dies. (The narrator is barred from her funeral.) Squeezed between the dual pressures of being mother to a difficult child, and daughter to a difficult mother, the narrator begins to question everything she believes about family life as well as everything she knows about writing, attempting to mentor a young writer while trying to keep her life from collapsing. Finally, there is the “he”—a man in the narrator’s past who swoops in and offers a tempting (and self-sabotaging) reprieve. Myerson has already published a memoir that looked frankly at her son’s addiction (The Lost Child: A Mother’s Story, 2013), which was a source of controversy in the U.K. (The novel’s opening sentence is one of dozens of close parallels between fictional and real events.) To title the novel Nonfiction feels less like a middle finger to critics and more like self-flagellation. The narrator is a bottomless well of self-pity, the book pressing an old bruise by imaginatively unspooling what was surely a real-life nightmare into a full-blown artistic obsession. On the one hand, this can make for emotionally claustrophobic reading; on the other, it feels, ultimately, like the truth.

Both confounding and compelling.

Kirkus Reviews