(June upon asking Henry for a divorce: ‘Now you have the last chapter for your fucking book.’) While the girls are called vamps, there is something vampiric about him. Delighted, in fact, until it feels like a violation to always be drawn from. Nadja asks Breton to write a novel about her, June Miller wanted Anais to write one about her. The actresses are okay at first with being his raw material. Indeed, the second each of these wives/muses proved to be too “difficult” to handle, their husbands cast them out into mental institutions or traded them in for a less “emotional” replacement–their story no longer useful, merely used up. It’s being trapped as the character in someone else’s novel.” Zambreno also explores the emotional damage wrought on all of the muses rendered as characters, glibly noting, “Perhaps Madame Bovary’s disease is not boredom. One of the phrases Zambreno frequently repeats throughout the novel regarding the way female writers were supposed to act is: “SUPPRESS EVERYTHING SUPPRESSIBLE,” an acknowledgement of how women were (and are) expected to deal with their creative leanings. And this is one of the points Zambreno makes so well throughout the entire novel: a man who is irrational is a genius, while a woman who is irrational is hysterical and/or insane.

From Vivienne Eliot and Zelda Fitzgerald to Virginia Woolf and Jean Rhys, Zambreno tells the story of how each woman struggled not only to write, but to not be deemed crazy by their husbands specifically and society in general. It is an unusual work not just because it is a blend of non-fiction and memoir, but because it highlights, for the first time ever, an entirely new perspective on the wives of “great men” writers who also had authorial ambitions of their own. And Heroines serves to reach even higher than her original mark. Kate Zambreno’s previous novel, Green Girl, set the bar high for the relatively new author.

Heroines by Kate Zambreno