Narcissism

A few reviews have come out of The Correspondence Artist. So far they’ve all been pretty positive, although one guy wasn’t crazy about the images, and another wasn’t crazy about the end. When I read these things, mostly I’m just thrilled that the person actually read the book. Then I feel a little bad for a minute if they express some reservation, but I get over it pretty quickly.

The person, for example, that didn’t like the ending so much said it seemed a little “narcissistic” because the narrator is more in love with her own fiction than she is with her actual lover. But, being a narcissist, I decided to take this as a compliment.

My narrator has the same tendency. She writes an e-mail to her lover in which she quotes a passage from Nietzsche on women writers:

“The complete woman perpetrates literature in the same way as she perpetrates a little sin: as an experiment, in passing, looking around to see if someone notices and so that someone may notice.”

She says she knows the general consensus is that Nietzsche was a misogynist, but she finds some of the things he says about women kind of charming and totally recognizable in relation to her own person.

This may also explain why she put up for so long with Santutxo’s weird gender politics (see pp. 127-130).

Speaking of gender politics, I’m reading from the book and talking about feminist autobiographical fiction with Linda Schlossberg and Carmelita Tropicana on the 22^nd. Please come! Information here.