Shulamith Firestone

It's so strange yesterday going to my therapist in Durham I carried with me Shulamith Firestone's Airless Spaces, her Semiotext(e) Native Agents book I have been reading this week. I sat at the cafe and ate a fruit cup, counting time before my appointment, and read her gem-like portraits of an institutionalized life, a book that reminds me at once of Anna Kavan's Asylum Piece and Suzanne Scanlon's upcoming Promising New Women. And I just heard re: Twitter that she died a couple of days ago, or a while ago, her body found in her apartment. She was someone who suffered, struggled tremendously. I'm not trying to write this to pretend any sort of psychic connection, but thinking of the process of reading and being read as some sort of communion. I mean. I guess I'm saying when I die I hope on the day I die there's a girl somewhere waiting for her therapist's appointment who happens to be reading and cherishing something I wrote. As I am going through that deathly process, my self rattled and hollowed out, I hope she is pausing on a line, not even aware that I am a sick worn body somewhere in the world, only aware of the body in the text and what it's communicating.

I guess I'm saying I'm not religious but I do believe in this.

O Fallen Angel

Just a brief notelet to announce that my first published work, the novella O Fallen Angel, is now available as an ebook through Dzanc's rEprint series. This was actually a work written after the bulk of Green Girl was. It won the "Undoing the Novel" contest through Lidia Yuknavitch's Chiasmus Press. You can still purchase it as a print book as well.

This is what Chris Kraus said about the book:

"Like Angela Carter's fairy tales, Kate Zambreno's O Fallen Angel deftly exposes the psychic brutality that lies underneath the smooth glassy surface of parable. Set in Midwestern America in approximately 2006, Zambreno's character/archetypes a Mommy who names her golden retriever after Scott Peterson's murdered wife Laci, a daughter who signs her suicide note with a smiley face and a doomed psychotic prophet are all agents and victims of disinformation, but this doesn't make their pain any less real. In Zambreno's SUV-era America, unhappiness doesn't exist because it can be broken down into treatable diagnostic codes. As she writes, Maggie wants to be free but she also wants to be loved and these are polar instincts, which is why she is bipolar, which is a malady of mood. A brilliant, hilarious debut." —Chris Kraus