Published in 2022
240 pages
Julie Myerson is the author of nine novels, including the internationally bestselling Something Might Happen, and three works of nonfiction. As a critic and columnist, she has written for many newspapers including The Guardian, Financial Times, Harper’s Bazaar, and the New York Times.
What is this book about?
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 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.