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Green Girl

by Kate Zambreno (Goodreads Author)

3.45 of 5 stars 3.45 · rating details · 316 ratings · 63 reviews

Green Girl is The Bell Jar for today—an existential novel about Ruth, a young American in London, kin to Jean Seberg gamines and contemporary celebutantes. Ruth works a string of meaningless jobs: perfume spritzer at a department store she calls Horrids, clothes-folder, and a shopgirl at a sex shop. Ruth is looked at constantly—something she craves and abhors. She is follo...more

Paperback, 251 pages

Published October 10th 2011 by Emergency Press

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2012 Tournament of Books

16th out of 17 books — 236 voters

Books I Want to Read 2013

6th out of 36 books — 7 voters

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Mar 11, 2012 Mariel rated it 3 of 5 stars Recommends it for: I broke my glass balloon

Recommended to Mariel by: Farren and M. Kitchell

There's a film star from the golden age of Hollywood that never leaves her house anymore. I think it's Lauren Bacall, but there's a chance I'm wrong about this. I'm pretty sure it's Bacall because I know this actress was awarded the San Sebastián International Film Festival life time achievement award and Bacall definitely got that. It's not important who it is. The point is that this person wants to preserve her celluloid beauty in the eyes of those who participate in that whole beauty is in th...more

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Oct 04, 2011 M. rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2011, fiction, own

Recently, I have become an alien. I have left the zone of complacency I’ve existed in for the last 7 years. I threw away or sold 75% of my belongings, put all of my books but ~30 into storage, and moved from a small town in northern Illinois to California. Upon moving I had neither job nor living situation lined up. As of being here a month I am still crashing on floors and unemployed (a footnote here could soften the blow of these words by indicating that I move into a sublet next month & h...more

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Apr 17, 2013 Dan added it

Shelves: 2012

i wanted to like this. i've read several interviews with zambreno, and i'm sad to say that i like the way she talks about her writing more than i liked this book itself. she's clearly influenced by certain "new narrative" writers that i already admire (chris kraus and dodie bellamy come to mind), and she's attempting to stretch the boundaries of the bildungsroman to include more room for women's desires/emotions, as well as a larger intellectual scope and greater sense of formal adventure. all o...more i wanted to like this. i've read several interviews with zambreno, and i'm sad to say that i like the way she talks about her writing more than i liked this book itself. she's clearly influenced by certain "new narrative" writers that i already admire (chris kraus and dodie bellamy come to mind), and she's attempting to stretch the boundaries of the bildungsroman to include more room for women's desires/emotions, as well as a larger intellectual scope and greater sense of formal adventure. all of which sounds great, but it doesn't quite come together for me.

as far as i can tell, green girl moves in three directions. at first, it seems like a fairly straightforward coming of age story. we meet ruth, an american in london who is unsure of what she wants from the world or what it wants from her. zambreno sketches a familiar millenial hipster type - obsessed with the fashions of the french new wave, bohemian but apolitical, entitled but broke, an oil and water mixture of drama and apathy. the boring, narrative-friendly part of me thinks this is the strongest aspect of the novel. at the least, it feels the most effortless. secondly, ruth is posited and contextualized in relation to some vaguely outsider-ish place in literature. green girl has been compared to clarice lispector's hour of the star (hell, that's part of the reason i read it), and there's an effort to align the character's inner state with lispector's uncanny knack for emptiness. but the parameters of the story are too familiar, and the devices of zambreno's prose are too obviously manipulative. finally, there's a kind of inter-textual "god's-eye-view" to the narrative - a writerly voice drops in from time to time, making ruth seem like an actress in a movie or a doll in a doll house. zambreno has the beginnings of some interesting ideas about how women's psyches and bodies are manipulated by this - both from the writer and reader's perspective - but they never quite elongate into something of real inquiry.

to make matters worse, the novel features a series of quotes from literature and theoretical sources that seem calculated to elevate the novel's more conventional observations. an example: ruth finishes a shift at the "horrids" department store (yes, this is a book with bad puns in it), and we're subsequently treated to an excerpt from walter benjamin's arcades project. the citations come from interesting sources (camera lucida, lispector, jean-luc godard), but they also read like an MFA program checklist and add little insight to the narrative itself.

that said, i'll probably still check out her next project, which sounds a bit more academic and theoretical. i want to read more books like this, i guess... i like the premise of zambreno's project thus far, i'm just not convinced by the follow-through at this point.

p.s. having read some of the negative reviews of this book on goodreads, can i add that my hesitations have *zero* to do with the focus on confused twentysomethings? i feel like there's a tendency among people my age (i'm 36) to dismiss things that happened to us a decade back as frivolous drama-queen stuff that we went through prior to buying homes or raising families or whatever. i think this is bullshit. real emotions happen all throughout life - i had them at age 8, and i'm sure i'll have them at age 78 if i make it that far. there's something disingenuous about the way we dismiss them in hindsight, especially when we hide behind the boring veneer of adulthood. for all my reservations about green girl, this is NOT a problem that this book has. in that regard, i wish there were more like it.(less)

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Nov 06, 2012 Drew rated it 2 of 5 stars

This book should have been subtitled "Youth Is Wasted on the Young." The only reason I gave it two stars instead of one is because it did capture that blank slate quality of my early 20s when I was wandering around, waiting for my life to start. Oh, gosh, it's not just me, what a relief!

But, other than that, the best thing about this book was its generous use of white space.

For me, if an author is going to throw grammar and punctuation to the winds, they must be highly skilled or it's just anno...more

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Sep 05, 2012 Jesi Brubaker rated it 4 of 5 stars

At first I thought this was the typical tale of a girl coming of age in the modern world. I could see this girl from afar and say yeah I did that, or something like that and gee, that girl is really stupid and making stupid choices and why doesn't she hurry up and get smart and grow up. Then as I continued to read that girl was sitting next to me, she wasn't so far from where I was and I didn't think she was necessarily stupid but more naive but still making stupid choices. Finally, right at the...more

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Mar 14, 2012 christa rated it 4 of 5 stars

If you’re like me, your 20s are packed in a triple taped box and hiding in the dingiest attic corner of your brain beneath garbage bags filled with clothes for Goodwill and that easel you bought the day you decided (in your 20s!) that maybe you were a painter.

This was not my shining-est decade. If I wasn’t the grand master world champion of compartmentalizing, I would be in a constant state of cringing shame over things said, did, that blond phase and people wronged. Luckily, that thing calm-lo...more If you’re like me, your 20s are packed in a triple taped box and hiding in the dingiest attic corner of your brain beneath garbage bags filled with clothes for Goodwill and that easel you bought the day you decided (in your 20s!) that maybe you were a painter.

This was not my shining-est decade. If I wasn’t the grand master world champion of compartmentalizing, I would be in a constant state of cringing shame over things said, did, that blond phase and people wronged. Luckily, that thing calm-looking, even-keeled 30-somethings say about their “30s being so great, so much better than their 20s,” etc. isn’t the bullshit a 20-something might believe it to be. It is so true that it is almost purple.

I see smart 20-somethings. They have informed opinions and interesting hobbies and a whole satchel of sharp life skills. That wasn’t me, though, and it isn’t the young woman in the lead role of Kate Zambreno’s keep-it-coming-on-the-cringe novel “Green Girl.” Ruth is young with a dead mother and an old relationship in her craw. She’s living in London and working as a perfume spritzer, poorly pimping a scent called “Desire.” She works with a gaggle of bitches who gossip about how she smiles too much and she has one friend, an Australian named Agnes with a hair trigger on her hair dye finger. Ruth might quit. She has that tendency to just leave a job mid-shift or not show up the next day. She might fall for Ollie, the resident heartthrob who is giving her the eye and she might bang a bartender in the basement of a bar seemingly because here she is in the basement and now their clothes have come off.

For the entire book, Ruth is in a mood. She’s fragile. She’s bored. She needs attention but doesn’t want attention. She’s barely conscious and she’s malleable.

Sometimes she is the star of her own movie, sometimes she is a character in that movie just saying lines. Speaking of movies, they are at the center of this book. Ruth and Agnes are like Siskel and Ebert in the depths of their film catalogues, if Siskel and Ebert only critiqued at surface level: Edie Sedgwick’s hair or Ingrid Bergman’s character in “Gaslight.”

Not much happens in this book beyond walks to work and home from work, interactions with coworkers and a threesome that is more like a two-and-a-half-some. It’s told from the perspective of an unnamed narrator who is seemingly watching young Ruth from a safe place. Like, maybe, Ruth in her 30s. This narrator makes rare commentary and when she does, she isn’t coddling Ruth or making excuses for her behavior but she also isn’t spitting over her actions or lack thereof. It’s a little bit like scientific poetry and “Look what she’s going to do now” with a head shake. She seems to just wish for Ruth to move beyond this phase and maybe the knowledge that she does.

“I want to choke these youngsters just to hear them make a sound not banal or repeated or well-behaved. If I choked Ruth she would make a squeaking sound, like a rubber doll. But I won’t choke Ruth why would I choke her I love her. If I did choke her it would be in a loving way, like the poster of the Heimlich maneuver you see hung up in school cafeterias and auto shops, the two faceless figures doubled over together in a violent embrace. I would choke her to get at her insides.”

I have a hunch this book could be enjoyed by people who are 22 or 32, but that both would take something different from it. The 22 year old would see the angst and the struggle and maybe say “That’s me.” The 36 year old might see the angst, squirm at its familiarity, and say “That was me.” (I can’t lie. There are complete sentences in this book that I have stuffed into that attic in the brain under those clothes. Most creepily when Ruth is walking and feels like someone is going to come up behind her and stab her). I also have a hunch that some people couldn’t enjoy this book. They would see this girl with her soft fontanel and find her exhausting -- like the sneering party companions of her much-older lover treat her. To me this feels like Zambreno’s unflinching look straight into the muck and guts of an ugly period of time in Ruth’s life. It feels really honest. (less)

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Feb 08, 2012 Gina rated it 5 of 5 stars

maybe you grew up, like me, reading a million different narratives about what it felt like to be angry and young and male (and usually white.) maybe, like me, you also read nancy drew and sweet valley high and anne of green gables, young women with nerve and pluck but also mostly young women whose problems were solved at the end of each book. and then as i got older, it was sylvia plath and carson mccullers and jean rhys and maya angelou, and and. i've never stopped being hungry for narratives w...more

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Nov 15, 2011 Kristen rated it 5 of 5 stars

Kate Zambreno's Green Girl is a startling attempt to reach the interior of the girl. The girl wants to be fancy. No, she wants to be annihilated.

An anxious and confused narrator, reminiscent of Carole Maso's Vanessa, negotiates the city, haunted by the memory of a brutal lover. (is that language too dramatic?) Ruth lives in London, in a hostel of girls. Ruth is a shopgirl. She feels alienated. She talks about her digestive distress.

This is the kind of book that acts, subtly but pervasively, on...more

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Apr 09, 2013 Sian Lile-Pastore rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction, five-star-books, ahh-these-are-my-favourites

I loved this despite myself. Once I started it I was just really eager to read more and hated moments when I couldn't read it (y'kno work, watching charmed with my husband - the usual) and felt a little lost when it was over (even tho the ending is pretty abrupt and not wildly satisfying).

I was in the middle of this when we started re-watching the L Word, and the main character (Ruth) in the book reminded me a little of Jenny in season one.. if that helps any.

I had a couple of issues with this.....more

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Apr 30, 2012 Jessie rated it 3 of 5 stars

Although I'm only getting around to reviewing it now, this was my final book for the 2012 ToB - I couldn't QUITE make it to the end - finished with 15 of 16. And actually, I thought I'd HAAAATE this book, with it's vaguely damaged but vacuous somewhat entitled millenial protagonist, but somewhere along the way, I turned out to really rather like it. The author's relationship with the protagonist - by turns maternal, violent, voyeuristic, and out of control - was an interesting metaphor - the aut...more

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May 30, 2012 Scott Kennedy rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: review, favorites

A devasting prose-poem on the lack of identity that can infect one's early 20s. I loved it. Worth reading for the narrative voice alone. Also, I should mention that I had no intention of actually reading this book when I did. But glancing at the first few pages sucked me right in and then I couldn't stop. This is not a book to read for plot; it has little. But it captures and evokes an experience perfectly. As a reader in my 40s, this is a book to savor, remembering what it was like to be so unf...more

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Nov 29, 2011 Rb rated it 5 of 5 stars

Reading Kate Zambreno's Green Girl was like hearing a voice whispering through to my very bones. How often I have been the green girl—performing lines; dressing up; searching for the one who will hear my stories of loss and longing. Carrying her notebook as “protective shield”, the green girl is what friends and I used to call "gauzy" girls, when vulnerable wasn't word enough. This isn't the attractive vulnerability of a Hollywood starlet; the green girl is the open space in all of us, the space...more

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Aug 31, 2012 Olga rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

I'm ambivalent about this book. On the one hand, I kept feeling like I was rereading Clarice Lispector's The Hour of the Star, but without the moments of sharp loveliness that makes me love that novella despite its flaws. Instead, there are department stores, alcohol, sex, many quotations (including a few from THotS), and even more self-indulgence. However, all of this adds up to a faithful rendering of a certain kind of femininity, femininity as existence for surface, with all the contradiction...more

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Nov 11, 2012 Kirat Kaur rated it 4 of 5 stars

Green Girl is a lucid, disjointed novel about a young American woman named Ruth living in London and working in a department store she calls Horrids. In some ways, Ruth is very much like many young women in their early 20s – lacking in confidence, unambitious, lost, dazed and confused. However, it becomes clear pretty quickly that she is also recovering from some kind of trauma, possibly from a previously abusive boyfriend, but we are never told the full back story.

Zambreno’s protagonist, the gr...more Green Girl is a lucid, disjointed novel about a young American woman named Ruth living in London and working in a department store she calls Horrids. In some ways, Ruth is very much like many young women in their early 20s – lacking in confidence, unambitious, lost, dazed and confused. However, it becomes clear pretty quickly that she is also recovering from some kind of trauma, possibly from a previously abusive boyfriend, but we are never told the full back story.

Zambreno’s protagonist, the green girl, deals with the stresses of her crappy job as a department store perfume salesgirl by going outside herself. I never thought of work in that way before: work as trauma, dissociation as a coping mechanism for paid productive work under capitalism. Paid labour is always degrading, always reducing us to unthinking bots and judging us on our relative usefulness to the economy. Why is that not generally seen as traumatic?

Zambreno discusses the commodification of scent, through the green girl who sells a perfume called Desire at Horrids (probably a thinly-veiled reference to Harrods). Nothing about Ruth’s working conditions is desirous, but she is compelled to lure women with “fairy tale drivel” and “poisonous romance narratives”. Connections are made between a woman’s identity, her effect on men and her scent, all neatly packaged in a round glass bottle and paid for with a Visa.

At the heart of the narrative is Ruth’s love-hate relationship with the male gaze. It is brought to our attention again and again how she, sometimes walking down the streets of London alone, sometimes with her flatmate Agnes, is constantly the subject of male attention. She hates that men watch her all the time, but also likes the attention, but also doesn’t want it. Through her characters Zambreno brings to the fore the ease with which some women play their roles in public, even if it means being subjected to harassment, coercion and abuse along the way.

Green Girl is a thought-provoking piece of writing that may not provide answers or a neat conclusion, but that is precisely its charm.(less)

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Nov 22, 2011 Richard Thomas rated it 5 of 5 stars

THIS REVIEW WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AT THE NERVOUS BREAKDOWN.

In Kate Zambreno’s hallucinatory and disjointed Green Girl (Emergency Press), we are lured into the world of Ruth, a young American girl lost and damaged in London. Following this ingénue into her dark musings, the echoes of voices fill the page—Ruth, HIM, her mother, the author, and the silver screen flickering in the distance. It is a hypnotic read—the duality of Ruth—her good side and her darkness, the need to behave and the need t...more

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Oct 17, 2012 Melissa rated it 3 of 5 stars

Like most of the other reviewers of this book, I’m at the age where I have to roll my eyes at stories about white girls in their 20s trying to “find themselves”. That being said, I managed to still enjoy this book for what it was.

The “green girl” is 20-something Ruth. Ruth is living in London, dealing with the death of her mother and trying to get over her great love referred to only as HIM. Her way of dealing is the typical drinking, recreational drug use and sex with men she meets in bars. In...more

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Feb 15, 2012 Sherri rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: tournament-of-books-2012, adult-fiction

This was just blah to me and very strange, and I guess, unique. The book opens with a quotation from the Book of Ruth, and the green girl protagonist is named Ruth, so I think the author gives birth in the first paragraphs of this book. ("the pull, the blood, the cry...the agony of becoming...now I must name her. Ruth...") I'm not sure I understood it completely, but I think the author was the first person "I" frequently observing Ruth, her creation, who never fully "becomes," even at the end of...more

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Jan 02, 2013 Keri rated it 4 of 5 stars

I am so happy I stumbled upon this novel. I read Zambreno's "Green Girl" very quickly. I couldn't put her thoughts down.

Something that felt both well-researched and unfinished were the quotations in between chapters. I'm glad they are there because she chose many great excerpts from films, novels, and songs, but they didn't always tie well together with the chapter or interlink with each other.

Also, even though I couldn't put this book down, the end felt so abrupt. I didn't feel the anticlimax...more I am so happy I stumbled upon this novel. I read Zambreno's "Green Girl" very quickly. I couldn't put her thoughts down.

Something that felt both well-researched and unfinished were the quotations in between chapters. I'm glad they are there because she chose many great excerpts from films, novels, and songs, but they didn't always tie well together with the chapter or interlink with each other.

Also, even though I couldn't put this book down, the end felt so abrupt. I didn't feel the anticlimax came down like it should have, or that there was an obvious climax in the novel itself.

However, I'm very touched by and fond of Zambreno's novel. Her usage of color imagery, the cage, critique on capitalism, blunt sexuality, and feeling like an outsider in a foreign country are all motifs that Zambreno explores. This novel navigates the added stress of living in a foreign country on top of stumbling through your twenties.

Most of all, Zambreno beautifully captures the disposable quality of relationships, places, identities, money, friendships, etc. Zambreno fights to explore what it means to not be a muse, and if you have to reach outside of the bounds of socially constructed beauty to exist as a person and not just a woman.

Ruth experiments with her behavior towards men, struggling to find the ideal relationship in which she can exist as a person without being destroyed by her partner's male gaze. She is haunted by HIM, unable to sustain a loving relationship with a man she emasculates, and flees to a sexually unfulfilling relationship in order to experiment for the hell of it.

Ruth's struggle in financial independence is hauntingly familiar as well. She takes on numerous disposable jobs, as equal disposable as the men she dates. She sells a celebrity's perfume called "Desire", wondering what being desired and desiring someone else really constitutes. At the end of the novel Ruth is stuck paying for rent by folding clothes in a department store. The novel ultimately ends with Ruth desiring to disappear, unable to break free from the cage of being a 20-something woman in another country.

I'm very excited to read more of Zambreno's work.(less)

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Feb 16, 2012 Ms.P rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2012, british-setting, dark, e-book

It did improve, somewhat, but not by much.

I will say that I think the writing style was interesting.

I keep changing my review. I guess I've had time to think about this book. I realized that it reminded me of The Artificial Silk Girl by Irmgard Keun. Even the titles are similar. That book is also the story of a young woman struggling to find her identity in a careless world, only it takes place in Berlin in the interwar years. I wonder if Zambreno was trying to evoke Artificial Silk Girl in thi...more

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Feb 11, 2012 Dianah rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: t-o-b-2012, literature, unowned, quotes

A study in disaffected youth, Green Girl is awash in the apathy and angst of today's directionless twenty-somethings. Ruth, a young, beautiful American working as a "shopgirl" in London, wanders aimlessly from job to job and man to man. She sees her life as meaningless, and can articulate only that she needs attention. Casting about in a swirl of drugs, sex and alcohol, she is aware, but only slightly, of the vast amount of loss she has endured. With a dead mother and an ex-boyfriend (to whom sh...more

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Nov 12, 2012 Kb rated it 3 of 5 stars

I wasn't a green girl (in fact, there's a certain freedom to them that I envy) but the book did capture the pressures of being female in the 21st century and the constant display (even if you really, really don't want to be displayed). Somehow Zambreno conjured up the horror I feel anytime I have to go shopping - the feeling of not doing it right, of being judged.

If I ever met Ruth, I don't think I'd like her, but I love what Zambreno did with the language and the deeper themes of consumer socie...more

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Aug 09, 2012 Jennifer rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: lapl

Ugh. I was so prepared to LOVE The Bell Jar and look down upon every other copycat that came after it...and then I read this book right afterwards; its quirky, hip, modern update as a generational comparative. So prepared to hate it and devote my undying love to The Bell Jar. Sorry to disappoint, but Green Girl pays homage to (roasted peanuts anyone?), and goes beyond The Bell Jar. On top of all of its artistic greatness, I'm on my pathetic literary/Wayne's World knees chanting, "I'm not worthy,...more

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Mar 11, 2013 Jen rated it 5 of 5 stars

There is more to this book than any synopsis or character description could possibly tell you. So much craft, brutally beautiful imagery and language, a narrator that makes me think of Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" (if you read the ending of the poem as the apotheosis of the writer -- Kate Zambreno('s narrator) "hath drunk the milk of paradise"), lovely symbolism. The haters have misunderstood, I think. This type of youthful depression, dislocation, isolation, disconnect -- it's so beautifully done h...more

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Apr 30, 2012 Kathy rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: t-o-b-2012, 2012

Having read and been mesmerized by Janice Galloway’s The Trick is to Keep Breathing years ago, Green Girl doesn’t really stand a chance by comparison. But, Green Girl is still impressive. Struggling on the verge of a nervous breakdown after her mother’s death and the end of harmful (literally) relationship, Ruth is self-destructive and confused and nearly incapable of living in society. A beautiful young girl, she has both an intense desire to be looked at and approved of and yet is scared by an...more

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Mar 22, 2012 Drew rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: tob12, bookclub

A difficult book to discuss. I spent over 1000 words at RB trying to sum up my thoughts and come to a ratings consensus. Mostly, I just feel numb - like when listening to "Avalanche" by Ryan Adams and wanting to just, exactly as that song's protagonist does: "fall apart in the avalanche, fade out like a dance, crawl back into bed when it's over." It is a book about the existential sadness - depression barely describes it - that strikes twentysomethings when faced with a world that just doesn't w...more

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Mar 16, 2012 Beverly rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2012, british, tournament

I put this on the 'read' shelf, but I only read about 75 of its short pages. I take this book to be a case study of clinical depression, and perhaps some other form of mental dysfunction such as a personality disorder. As such, it lacks much universal appeal. If you read some other Goodreads reviews of this, my theory is borne out because some readers are tending to project their own shit onto this story. As a novel,this one is pretty stupid. So how did this get into the tournament?

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Mar 26, 2013 Jordan Larson rated it 4 of 5 stars

The endless repetition of empty days and empty lives somehow doesn't drag, but actually transforms the reader and the character with its trance. Incredibly biting (yet not didactic) exploration of consumer society, youth, and the continual existential crisis of girlhood. I liked picking up the threads that led to Heroines; the quotes, language, and the meta-narrative Zambreno used to inject herself and her writing of the novel into the novel itself.

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Aug 02, 2012 Amy rated it 1 of 5 stars

Kate Durbin, might I have a word with you? Remember when you wrote a review for Kate Zambreno's book Green Girl and compared the heroine to Esther Greenwood of The Bell Jar?

Having the protagonist be on her own in a big city does not make this The Bell Jar, Part 2: Breakfast at Horrid's (Ruth's oh-so-sly name for her Famous British Department Store employer). Creating a character who does nothing but sleep late, try on clothes, and watch new wave films with her chatty, trashy roommate does not m...more

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Apr 10, 2012 Anina Ertel rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: adult-fiction

All the descriptions say it's like a modern day Bell Jar. I forgot that I didn't really like the Bell Jar. I just don't think that I would have understood the whole "annihilation of the female self" thing without someone else saying it first. Or maybe it hit me over the head too much. To me it was melodramatic.

I did like this, and I did read the whole thing. My review is that this is for girls who liked Weetzie Bat in high school and are now grown ups who can read depressing books with rough se...more

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Feb 17, 2013 Sofia Samatar rated it 5 of 5 stars

Pretty, alienated shopgirl in London. A narrator who watches her in a way that is both compassionate and vaguely creepy, like Lispector's narrator in The Hour of the Star. This book is angry and musical and marvelous and dead. Dead in a deliberate way, like Ruth, the main character, who is trying so hard to live and keeps doing it wrong. I loved it.

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About Kate Zambreno

I am the author of two novels, O Fallen Angel (Chiasmus Press) and Green Girl (Emergency press). Heroines, a collection of essays inspired by the women of modernism, will be published by Semiotext(e)'s Active Agents imprint in Fall 2012. Currently I reside in Carrboro, North Carolina, with my partner John and my puppy Genet.

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