“Mixing family lore, historical events, and photographs, this autobiographical novel creates a portrait of the writer as a young woman…enlivening.” —New Yorker
“Compels the reader to appreciate bare-bones storytelling and minimalist scenes over warts-and-all portraiture and barnstorming set-pieces. Thoughts and deeds matter to Tuck, only the former are stunted and the latter elliptical, and it is up to us to make sense of them. ‘I hope my readers will read my work with imagination,’ Tuck said in a recent New York Times piece. For her work to pay dividends, there is no other way to read her . . . Tuck expertly fuses world history and four-generation family history, fact and fiction. She utilizes photographs, letters, and poetry and engages with and reflects on war, memory, and humanity. . . W.G. Sebald looms large over the page…What could have been a messy hodgepodge is instead a graceful ripple-effect, like watching a skimmed stone spawn one neat circle after another, only without any diminishment in size or force…After a fashion we stop questioning how much of what we are reading is memoir and how much of it isn’t, and simply surrender to the elegant, limpid prose of this, the most beguiling work of Lily Tuck’s career.” —Malcolm Forbes, The Millions
“Intriguing and intelligent . . . Tuck simultaneously creates a layered portrait of a family and the historical eras it lived through and questions the possibility of definitively capturing or summing up human lives . . . a high-wire act . . . exciting in its sweep, ambition, and conceptual intricacy.” —Priscilla Gilman, Boston Globe
“A mosaic of storytelling that is both poetic and absorbing . . . Tuck builds her story through compression, intensity and sometimes disorienting side trips. . . This recovery of fragments, for this author, involves a near alchemical process: Tuck inhabits the spacious realm of the imagination, shifting time zones and historic periods effortlessly, weaving memories and photographs, family stories and facts, as Liliane’s mesmerizing portrait emerges.” —Jane Ciabattari, NPR.com
“An evocative blend of memoir, history and fiction . . . On the surface, one might expect that the book’s title refers to Liliane’s feeling of being split in two by virtue of spending two very different childhoods, one with her father in Italy and one with her mother in New York and Maine. But again, that pivotal course with Paul de Man, which culminates the book, hints at a different meaning for the title, referring to ‘the writing ‘I’ and the written ‘I’.’ Is the writer identical to her subject? Or, by virtue of narrating her experience and everything that ripples out from it, is she creating a different version of herself? These kinds of provocative questions will preoccupy readers both while they immerse themselves in Liliane’s story and long afterwards.” —Bookreporter.com
“[An}exquisitely crafted narrative collage.” —Jane Ciabattari, BBC.com “Ten Books to read in September”
“Playful, buoyant prose and poignant scenes . . . that quicken the heart . . . In Tuck’s prose—lively, dizzy, happy—one gets a contagious sense of fun that she has transmuting life into words.” —Publishers Weekly (starred, boxed review)
“Special, provocative, unusual.” —Booklist (starred review)
“Beautiful and wildly intelligent.” —Margot Livesey
“With fierce elegance, Lily Tuck boldly dismantles genre boundaries while weaving a seamless narrative from the fragments of her early life. Tuck crosses her physical terrain with candor and psychological acuity. Fact, fiction, memoir, novel, prose, poetry—I’ve never read anything like it. An achingly intelligent work that is, in the words of Liliane’s professor Paul de Man, ‘an act of self-restoration.’” —Jamie Quatro
“A triumph of artistry and storytelling. An entirely engrossing novel that draws upon Lily Tuck’s amazing personal history. A brilliant blend of fact and fiction.” —Diane Johnson
Grove Press
