There Is a Freedom to Being Kept Outside: The Millions Interviews Kate Zambreno
Kate Zambreno’s To Write as if Already Dead is, in part, a study of writer/photographer Hervé Guibert’s To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life. Guibert’s book, published in French in 1990, is a thinly veiled autobiographical narrative about AIDS, following the protagonist from his discovery that he has the illness through an increasingly severe decline. Michel Foucault features in the book as “Muzil,” a friend who is also suffering from AIDS; so does French actress Isabelle Adjani, as “Marine.” The book made Guibert a celebrity. Zambreno reads it in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic and her own medical suffering.
But that’s just the seed of this complex, daring new book. She has written it, Zambreno says, for a contract: her family needs money, she is pregnant with another baby, and her temporary teaching positions lack necessary benefits. Yet the book, which Kirkus describes as a “meta-memoir,” escapes her original grasp. In doing so, it expands, delightfully, to take in a host of other concerns, including literary friendship—and betrayal—motherhood, the pandemic, Black Lives Matter protests, and the brutal shortcomings of our healthcare system.
This interview was conducted over email, shortly after Zambreno was awarded a 2021 Guggenheim in nonfiction. I was finishing up a brutal semester of teaching, and apologetically sent her my questions weeks late. She, doubtless also finishing up her semester, plus dealing with, well, winning the Guggenheim, nevertheless amazed me with a response sent less than 24 hours later, elaborating thoughtfully and carefully on each in my long list of questions.
The Millions: To begin, could you talk a little about the decision to write this book in the immediate present tense? I’m referring here to your literal tense, but also, of course, the inclusion of extremely recent events like Covid-19 and the Black Lives Matter uprising. Everyone has heard the advice to wait before writing about an experience, and there was also a hasty wave of pandemic literature published early on, in which, as you observe in the book, “Every writer with a byline publishes a coronavirus diary, even if they are never sick, especially then.” Were you at all unsure about ending the book on a necessarily unresolved subject—a pandemic and political movement still being felt in profound ways around the country and world?
The book is, which has the vertiginous thrust of the novel being circled around, . Guibert’s novel, documenting his AIDS diagnosis as well as the death of his friend Muzil, based on his neighbor and intimate , has as its frame the actual diagnosis but goes back in time to situate a chronology of his body and the portrait of various friendships and fallings out. Likewise, the second half of my study attempts to figure out how time works in Guibert’s book, and how narrative works in a sick body, and does so by adopting Guibert’s methods. As soon as I set about the project to write a date, as Guibert does, and attempt to move forward in a calendrical way, to write a diary at least as a frame, then it becomes a conceptual work about time, which was as well, in different modes. I couldn’t ignore the pandemic, and the twinning feeling of it, as I was writing of the AIDS crisis, I couldn’t ignore being in New York during the summer of protests, because that was the frame I had chosen for my book, to proceed forward in time. Plus thinking of Guibert became a way for me to think through the often-paralyzing intensity of the current moment. I feel lucky that I had a project like this to work on—for a couple hours a day it was another way to feel active, alive.
