I started to read Kate Zambreno in my late twenties, after the end of a long relationship, while living in Brooklyn. My youth was a little bit backwards, and you’ll know about this if you’ve read On Eating: I was in a long-term relationship and living a more or less suburban life in my early twenties, and I started to drink and go dancing and wear crop tops at 27. This lifestyle more or less lasted until the pandemic: Seven years of true youth, into my mid-thirties. I’m 40 now, and I’d like to bring dancing back into the equation.

Which is all to say, for the better part of my pleasurable but precarious adulthood, I’ve been reading Zambreno’s books. I started with Green Girl, moved onto Heroines, and from there, I’ve kept up with each successive publication as they’ve been published: Book of Mutter, Appendix Project, Drifts, The Light Room, To Write As If Already Dead, Tone (co-written with Sofia Samatar), Animal Stories, and now Foam.

Zambreno’s work, which Annie Ernaux has called “a new form,” has—at risk of being corny—foamy boundaries, and that is what I’ve always liked about it. Between fiction and nonfiction, between success and precarity, between personhood and motherhood. 

In Foam, that porous softness becomes the atmosphere and threatens to choke the narrator. The book begins after they’ve given birth a second time and are poorly tended to in the hospital, and then the narrator has to go right back to work: There’s no maternity leave, no financial breathing space for it. Something I like about the honesty regarding material conditions in Zambreno’s work is how it reminds the reader that much intellectual labor (especially in these days of adjunct labor making up 40% of teachers in higher education) does not always come with wealth and protections.

While the subject matter might often be quotidian—successive characters named Eva who drain her in various ways, apartment horrors, adjuncting absurdities—there is an ambient terror that sits on the work, that comes into focus and dissipates depending on what’s happening. More blurry the less the narrator is actually working and thinking as a writer, more sharp when writing about the art of Eva Hesse and others.

I’m excited to talk about this book and other work, as well as the conditions of being a writer perceived as successful, what that even means nowadays, on Sunday at 2 p.m. EST over Zoom. All paid subscribers can find the link at the bottom of this email, and you’ll also get a link to the final video. Anyone else can purchase a ticket for $5.