Mother, daughter, wife, lover, writer, teacher: in Nonfiction: A Novel, Julie Myerson's protagonist processes and navigates these disparate roles, doing her best to exorcise her traumas of the past to champion a more holistic present and future. Myerson's haunting and lyrical prose is astoundingly adept at turning the pain of the protagonist's experiences into poetry of the human condition that glimmers in a ghostly way.
Myerson (The Stopped Heart) does not shy away from intense themes: addiction, homelessness, infidelity, emotional abuse, suicide. These could be too much for readers to chew through, but as the protagonist puts it when speaking to her writing student, "Plots are overrated, nothing like as necessary as everyone thinks they are." Myerson follows her own advice, crafting characters that are three-dimensional, damaged, hopeful, self-righteous, and so much more. This drives readers to continue wanting to experience the cast of characters as they unfold across the page. In describing the protagonist's mother, Myerson writes: "My mother always entered every room like it was a competition." With one sentence--and she masterfully does this with so many--she creates a human whom readers have known at one time or another and, thus, engenders empathy for them.
In a story of a mother losing her daughter to drugs, a wife witnessing her marriage fall apart, a writer finding her voice, a teacher trying to impart truth, and a daughter rooting through the corpse that is her relationship with her mother, Myerson allows readers into the morgue--and they can't help but want to stay. --Dominic Charles Howarth, book manager, Book + Bottle