To Write as if Already Dead

A Books of the Year 2021 selection * The White Review * Kate Zambreno has invented a new form. It is a kind of absolute present, real life captured in closeup. -- Annie Ernaux 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 Guiberts. It is a moving performative act, a document of our time from the trenches, and a brilliant critical study. -- Moyra Davey, author of <i>Index Cards: Selected Essays</i> The transgressive novelist and first significant memoirist of life with AIDS, Herv 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 Zambrenos most urgent and charged work since Heroines. -- Brian Blanchfield, author of <i>Proxies: Essays Near Knowing</i> Kate Zambrenos To Write As If Already Dead is portrait and self-portrait. It's a book about friendship, or friendshipsfamous, fictional, friends weve had and lost. More than this, its 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 doubledand a serious pleasure to read. -- Danielle Dutton, author of <i>Margaret the First</i> 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. -- Amy Hollywood, author of <i>Acute Melancholia and Other Essays</i> In Kate Zambreno's To Write As If Already Dead, Herv 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. -- Andrew Durbin, author of <i>Skyland</i> In this clever hybrid work, Zambreno interrogates her fascination with French writer and photographer Herv Guibert . . . A cascading meditation on what makes writing possible and necessary. * Publishers Weekly * A fascinating, ambitious, unforgettable work. * Literary Hub * To Write As If Already Dead just might be the first truly great book about the coronavirus pandemic -- Rhian Sasseen * Paris Review Daily Staff Picks * Kate Zambrenos latest book, To Write as if Already Dead, is a study of Guiberts 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. -- Jessica Ferri * Los Angeles Times * [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 subjectivityis Guibert the "I" of his novels?and of form . . . Despite its elliptical style, Zambrenos book cultivates patience, a digressive but ruminative mode that goes beyond close reading of Guibert toward an actual embodiment of his voice. -- Jeremy Lybarger * 4Columns * Theres no one like Kate Zambreno at finding connections in the art shes consumed and making the reader fe

Kate Zambreno is the author of many acclaimed books, including Drifts (2020), Appendix Project (2019), Screen Tests (2019), Book of Mutter (2017), and Heroines (2012). Her writing has appeared in the Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She teaches in the graduate nonfiction program at Columbia University and is the Strachan Donnelley Chair in Environmental Writing at Sarah Lawrence College. She is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Nonfiction.

Part I. Disappearance Part II. To Write as if Already Dead Acknowledgments Notes