Summoning the ghosts from chalk-circle outlines to point bloody fingers at the guilty, to the husbands and doctors who suppressed their words, suppressed them under the guise of the still young and reckless science of psychoanalysis. It’s a crime-scene analysis, detective witchcraft, forensic meditation. (The movement of the tail gives it away as it slides into the apple-green grass.) Now it’s a work of literary analysis and historiography tracking down the shadow lives of Jean Rhys and Zelda Fitzgerald in the pages of Stop Smiling magazine and the Rain Taxi Review.
“Heroines” then falls into the newly burgeoning tradition of literary-history-as-memoir, joining such recent texts as Alison Bechdel’s “Are You My Mother?” and Grant Morrison’s “Supergods.” (The chameleon shifts, climbs down from the exposed tree root and sets foot on a slab of cracked dirty granite.) The author of the novels “Green Girl” and “O Fallen Angel” began the work that became “Heroines” in 2009 as the blog “Frances Farmer is My Sister,” drawing together parallels between her own lives as a writer, a woman, and a woman writer. But just as the eponymous lizard disguises itself to blend into the patterns of tree bark and rock face, so too does Kate Zambreno’s first volume of nonfiction masquerade in a number of patterns and motifs. The word to describe “Heroines” is “chameleonic.” You know there’s a book in your field of vision, you hold its spine in your hands and caress the pages.
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