To coincide with the release of author and critic Kate Zambreno’s new book, The Light Room, Corsair is republishing her cult classic, Heroines, which was first published in the US over a decade ago. This review discusses both books.
“Heroines” is a book full of “turgid, sticky confessions,” a “bulimic” manifesto of what Jamie Hood describes in the book’s introduction as “the chaotic, sad girl and her unclassifiable art of being too much.”
Zambreno, whose writings became known through her earlier blog Frances Farmer Is my Friend, was a pioneer of autotheory and the hybrid memoir genre. Heroines is a polemic that examines the pathologization of “mad” women and the oppression of literary wives and lovers such as Vivien(ne) Eliot, Zelda Fitzgerald, and Jean Rhys (though much of the text deals with fictional female characters by male authors, notably Emma Bovary).
The prose is voracious and performative. “My way of reading is masturbatory,” she writes. “Sometimes I feel guilty when I see my greased fingers buried in library books.” The author seems to simultaneously criticize and propagate the hypothesis that “a woman is nature, violence and instability.”
In The Light Room, Zambreno changes the angle of the lens. When she talks about art as a means of external observation, she is no longer in selfie mode
But while Heroines is a book of feverish nighttime wanderings, The Light Room reads more like a meditation in the semi-dark. Set during the pandemic, Zambreno, now a mother of two young children, reflects on motherhood and caregiving. Her prose is balanced and again embellished by literary criticism, including discussions of the works of Joseph Cornell and Natalia Ginzburg.
Zambreno discusses an essay about a writer who “didn’t want to be a mother because she didn’t want to be a landscape.” Herein lies the main difference between the two texts: in The Light Room, Zambreno changes the angle of the lens. She discusses art as a means of looking outward, and is no longer in selfie mode, where she uses the stories of literary wives to tell her own story.
In the final part of The Light Room, Zambreno switches to third-person narration, giving universality to the themes of “the dizziness of early motherhood, the exhaustion and despair and the little joys.” The labor of love and the love in our labor.
Both books end with a desire for change. “We exaggerate the importance of what we can do alone,” Zambreno quotes theorist Silvia Federici in The Light Room. “Fuck you,” she writes at the end of Heroines, “the objective correlate. Fuck the canon. Fuck the boys with their big books.”
