It is with gilded trumpets and celestial harps we should announce that finally (finally!) Kate Zambreno’s books are being published in the UK. A long-time cult literary figure, Zambreno has been your favourite writer’s favourite writer for years now.
One of the progenitors of that ever-controversial mode of writing known as autofiction, it was upon the publication of her now-classic nonfiction work Heroines in 2012 that Zambreno suddenly found her name mentioned in the same breath as Maggie Nelson, Eileen Myles and Sheila Heti.
Her latest book, The Light Room, which is subtitled On Art and Care was published in the US last year and is being put out by Corsair in the UK, marking the first time Zambreno has been published here. A perfect example of Zambreno’s trademark mix of memoir and essay, The Light Room focuses on those dark lockdown months when she entered into full isolation from society with her husband, her newborn baby and her young daughter.
Zambreno’s style is reminiscent of synapses snapping. At any point, she’ll observe an object or be reading a book and it’ll cause a domino effect in her thinking that leads us into an exploration of some aspect of art and culture. For example, at one point she observes a dinosaur calendar in a museum gift shop which causes her brain to snap to a similar calendar that she knows was used by the artist David Wojnarowicz in 1989, a few years before he lost his life to Aids.
This begins a whole section whereby Wojnarowicz’s life and art are meditated upon, interspersed with observations of Zambreno’s current life situation, raising small children through a pandemic. Elsewhere,
Zambreno reflects on the life and work of the Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg whose work has seen a huge revival over the past few years.
These are but a few of the artists who Zambreno examines in The Light Room but it gives an impression of her style. She is one of those writers whose breadth of knowledge is almost staggering. Thank goodness she is open to sharing that with us.
