Captivating Freshness: A Review of Molly Gaudry’s Fit Into Me: A Novel: A Memoir
Molly Gaudry both raises and answers the question, “How do the narratives of our own lives fit into the fictional ones we impose meaning upon?” in her latest work, Fit Into Me: A Novel: A Memoir, new from Rose Metal Press in December.
Gaudry is the author of the verse novel We Take Me Apart, which was a finalist for the Asian American Literary Award and shortlisted for the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry, and Desire: A Haunting. She’s the founder of The Lit Pub and is an assistant professor at Stony Brook University, she teaches nonfiction and poetry in the MFA and BFA programs.
After seven years of apparent silence, Gaudry has returned to the literary scene, bearing what might be one of this generation’s most ambitious experiments with narrative. Despite the current rise in auto-fiction, the focus on under-represented voices in literature, and a receptiveness on the part of audiences to experimental forms of storytelling, Gaudry’s Fit Into Me: A Novel: A Memoir manages to simultaneously encompass and buck the trends. The book contains a freshness that, although daunting, captivates its audience.
The title of the book could be meant to be taken literally—the writer telling her readers exactly what to expect—but it might also be a command, one issued by Gaudry to the writers behind the many texts she incorporates into the book. The writer has slipped many quotations between the table of contents and the acknowledgement page. These pages also house Gaudry’s personal essays, which work to sketch out her relationship with writing and her approach to the craft—borne first from her love of books, fostered during her time in graduate school, then transformed in the face of a disability that alters her everyday life and, in turn, her relationship with literature.
Gaudry also weaves or embroiders upon a fictional world, one she spent her career authoring in her previous life as a writer. The fragments of stories (both fictional and not-strictly-fictional) combine to create a confessional or a novel-dropped-inside-a-memoir. Although the confessional components of the book contain a certain type of rawness, there is a limit to what can be known. Gaudry’s confessions are told from a distance, as if even the writer cannot access the finer details that assemble her story.
Still, her writing is honest and Gaudry herself is the first to recognize the absurdity of dropping a novel in the middle of her memoir. She describes this narrative strategy as akin to adoption, referencing her own background as an adopted Korean American: “but adoption drops you into the story after it has started. It’s like reading a book with the first few pages missing.”
In this moment, Gaudry is also referencing Jeanette Winterson, who compared adoption to knowing only a chunk of the plot. Winterson is not the only writer Gaudry references, of course. About a third of Gaudry’s half-memoir-half-novel, pays homage to the writers who are not just her literary influences but also the influencers behind her conception of the world. Like all writers, Gaudry is a reader first, a fact which rationalizes her method of copying-and-pasting the words of others in to her own work, isolating these fragments from their original contexts.
The new context to which Gaudry assigns these quotations works to transpose their meaning—now as an understanding of Gaudry’s experiences. The preponderance of excerpts in the book should be understood too as representing the idea that we cannot escape our own subjectivities in our interpretations of literature (works of literature also infect our understandings of ourselves and the world around us) but Gaudry’s use and reliance upon on other writers’ words to stage her argument kept me from fully connecting with her work.
Gaudry’s own writing is confined to fragments that describe her experiences and those are buried through the process of interspersion with other texts and her own fictional narratives. As a writer whose first encounter with Gaudry as a writer is with this book, I found that my impression of her didn’t change through my experience of the text; it was as though I’d come to know her only through the words of others.
To be fair, this seems to be Gaudry’s interest as a writer—the words of others. Her own writing about writing or learning to navigate the world after becoming disabled or her identity as a transnational adoptee remain on-the-surface reports; they’re retellings of events, but the writer has omitted the experience, the emotions that come with them. In the place of that material, Gaudry has substituted the writing of others’. I cant help but notice the irony of a memoir/novel that recognizes the writer’s ability to create an affective experience for readers, but simultaneously depends upon the work of others to transmit her thoughts.
I want to be clear that I respect—admire—the inventiveness of the form Gaudry has created, both as a means of defying genre convention and interrogating the relationship between nonfictional narratives and those that have been fabricated. I was drawn, especially, to her chapter dedicated to her experience as a Korean adoptee, reconciling with her biological family, though that’s perhaps because I am empathetic to her feelings as a Chinese adoptee myself. Or maybe I was drawn to those passages because her writing becomes particularly fleshed out when she meditates on her identity as an Asian dropped into America and as an American displaced in Asia.
And, overall, I think Gaudry has accomplished her intentions for this project. She answers her thesis; I’ll give her that. But after having read her novel fit into a memoir, I’m left with more questions. If the novel were separated from the memoir, could it stand as it is by itself? Could the memoir? When is a personal essay no longer personal? What will Gaudry’s boundary-breaking form of narrative present for the future of literature? Though, for now, I’ll end on this note: while Gaudry may not be writing for everyone, she is a writer who challenges the notion, “there is nothing new under the sun,” through her creation of something novel—and something memoir—out of what’s already there.