Appendix Project: Talks and Essays

by Kate Zambreno

On the ongoing project of writing about grief; Zambreno's addendum to Book of Mutter.

‘I came up with the idea of writing these notes, or talks, out of a primary desire to not read from Book of Mutter, and instead to keep gesturing to its incompleteness and ongoingness, which connects, for me, to the fragmentary project of literature, and what I long for in writing.’
―from Appendix Project

Beginning on March 16, 2017, the fifteenth anniversary of her mother's death, Kate Zambreno gave a series of talks on and around the material in her Book of Mutter, which had just been published. Book of Mutter, a tender, disquieting meditation on the capacity of writing, photography, and memory to embrace the shadows while in the throes of grief, was composed over thirteen years. Many things Zambreno explored in the process of writing that book were left out. In Appendix Project, which was written much faster, during the first year of her daughter's life and in a state of exhausted “aphasic openness,” she picks up these threads.

Everything, in this state, is at once blurred and frozen in time. It's no coincidence that Appendix Project begins with a brilliant consideration of On Kawara's Today Series of 3,000 paintings that bear only the date. Investigating the ongoing project of writing about grief, Zambreno considers the nature of time, memory, the maternal, and death over the course of her daily life, and through her readings of other writers and artists. In Appendix Project, she comes close to the heart of writing itself.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Memoir, Art, Womens, Writing, Literary Criticism

200 pages, Paperback

First published March 29, 2019

About the author

Kate Zambreno is the author of the novels Green Girl (Harper Perennial) and O Fallen Angel (Harper Perennial). She is also the author of Heroines (Semiotext(e)'s Active Agents) and Book of Mutter (Semiotexte(e)'s Native Agents). A collection of talks and essays, The Appendix Project, is forthcoming from Semiotext(e) in April 2019, and a collection of stories and other writing, Screen Tests, is forthcoming from Harper Perennial in June 2019. She is at work on a novel, Drifts, and a study of Hervé Guibert. She teaches at Columbia University and Sarah Lawrence College.

Reviews

[archive ☄ · Rating 4 out of 5]

i read this book in a museum, on a train, on a bench at golden hour, cozied up in bed. half of its contents got jotted down in three different notebooks, whichever one i had on hand, the most striking of its ideas lingering long after the ink had dried,,, this book has gone everywhere with me over the course of the last three weeks, and it's altered my experience of them for the better, as the best kind of writing is meant to do,,, thank you kate!

[Nathália · Rating 5 out of 5]

::goosebumps::

[alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a recommendation from my tutor, read in the research phase for a creative nonfiction piece I'm working on.

It was interesting to read a book of appendices to another book altogether, one I've not (yet?) read. Almost constitutes my own readerly contribution to the "ongoing project" of grief, in a way; knowing The Book of Mutter is waiting for me, and that, by virtue of having read the two out of order, the project of my engagement with Zambreno's writing is incomplete

[Jente · Rating 4 out of 5]

Texts on Sebald

[Glen Helfand · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kate Zambreno's writing is rooted in the messiness of writing. This is not so say that her writing is rough, more that it exists in a swirl of daily life, emotion, and an academic adoration of art and literary criticism. The mix creates something surprisingly readable in its meta realness. "Appendix Project" is a series of lectures and essays that were invoked by the writing of Zambreno's novel, "Book of Mutter" (which I haven't read, though the points come through without that). It is a brave, perhaps myopic admission (but isn't that so much of writing?) to address what was cut from the book, what tangents she went on in the course of writing. These involve thinking through others, most notably Roland Barthes, On Kawara, Louise Bourgeois, etc. But also thinking through the filter of having a young child whose life is blossoming at the same time as the texts. It is noted in the early appendices that Zambreno was ambivalent about publishing them, a kind of self-reflexive way to get the reader to think about them critically. This makes sense, though what I found is that they were repetitive, each Appendix covers some of the same ground, looping back to similar anecdotes about her child and Barthes. This gave the book more of a feeling of an addendum, and a reminder that a writer's work is never done.

[Joseph Schreiber · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is, exactly what it is called and what it denies it will be until the author is almost finished writing it—an appendix to The Book of Mutter. Familiarity with the previous work will provide context for this collection of lectures and essays, but this really more a book about everything that book (or perhaps any book) does not contain—what was removed, what was never there. In this sense, Appendix Project is a book about writing, about grief, and about writing grief. My response to this work was of quite a different order than BoM, which did fuel many ideas for understanding my connection to my mother and her death, but felt to be of another order of experience. This collection, composed during the first year of Zambreno's daughter's life (tinged with the unexpected perspective that motherhood has granted her) was, for me, especially powerful. The meditations on writers and artists that swirl through this work are idiosyncratic and honest and wonderfully unformed and unstructured.
A few more thoughts about this book can be found here:https://roughghosts.com/2019/06/16/th...

[Sian Lile-Pastore · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this so much!
(Should have read Book of Mutter first)

[Shadib Bin · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Appendix Project by Kate Zambreno

Back in 2022, out of nowhere, I ordered Drifts by the same author. I loved the cover, and it was a photograph by Peter Hujar, a favorite artist of mine.

Drifts as a book was deeply meandering but had a steady thread along the whole thing. I read Book of Mutter - similarly felt that thread along the way - about grieving over her mother. Both books rank among some of my favorite books - I found an author I love - which isn’t easy.

The Appendix Project is supplementary to Book of Mutter. As you can imagine, it can be a frustrating read, because these are talks / essays that try to grapple with Book of Mutter as it was written over 10+ years, and Kate revisits all the things she kind of left from the book - and it’s her exploration - on why was she even interested to begin with, and what did she actually uncovered along the way, and it can all feel exhaustively long - but who can blame her? It’s 10 years of writing, re-writing that book to begin with - can you imagine what 10 years could really mean?

Kate stubbornly refused to really address Book of Mutter in its specificities, which then is a challenge for someone who is reading this after quite sometime since I completed reading BoM last fall. So I would recommend reading them chronologically if you want to make the most of it.

Just because this book was frustrating, doesn’t mean it doesn’t do exactly what it set out to do - appendices often include a lot of details that make the materials (at the forefront), a lot more rich. But we don’t always have the time and energy to explore it all - maybe the main material wasn’t that exciting to begin with, maybe time - we are short on it. Yet when we do, or I do get to sift through, it is a lot of wealth of information that at once can be daunting and a maze that’s worth further staying with and figuring out the answer.

What I loved about the book - is that I could see Kate is actually, genuinely trying to understand a lot of these literatures and artworks, to truly give it a shape - her thoughts, her curiosities, which can be very abstract but Kate convinced you - they are worthy of deep explorations. They can feel indulgent and misguided in the hand of someone less capable, but with Kate, you feel like you are beside her on her couch, observing as she is making sure Leonara is resting, books all over the apartment, and Kate just digging, digging, digging until she finds something. That something can be formless, can be true form, can be nothing, can be pretentious, but it all feels real - deeply real. What do I mean it’s real? It gets under your skin - you are left to reckon with it.

The key highlight for me in this book - Kate explores a lot of anger and deep sadness within Book of Mutter, yet with this, she focused on materials that inspired her along the way, or that she fell out of. I love when people can cut ties to their work, and explore things for how it is, vs. How we want them to be - the work that is. It gives space to just be with her research and thoughts around the work itself.

[Delia Rainey · Rating 5 out of 5]

the appendix is an extra organ in the body that is not used, and sometimes needs to be removed. for this book, these are all extra fragments and thoughts not used in Zambreno's previous book 'Book of Mutter' (about her mother's death, 15 years ago) + lectures given at schools. schools that will not hire Zambreno for professor positions, but she has always taught me so much. While analyzing work by Roland Barthes, Louise Bourgeois, Claudia Rankine, On Kawara, and others, Zambreno wonders with honest anxiety about how we are supposed to tell stories of our grief and the pain of others. interspersed throughout, we hear about her new role as a mother and the baby Leo ~ Leo appears and disappears, sleeping and awaking, as Zambreno is writing all of this in her small sleep-deprived intervals of the day and night. "writing grief is writing time. it is about how the past invades the present-tense, the day." I especially felt connected and emotional during the section on Chantal Akerman and her final film about her mother ~ the mundane banality of time passing, light moving and people coughing in rooms. thinking about a book of appendices as rooms. after the event of grief, the grief itself still lingers throughout the days, like someone whispering in another room, but we cannot see them ~ "narrating not only an event (the death of [her] mother) but a duration (the ongoingness of [her] solitude, without her.)" books are never complete. it would be dishonest to say so. the book lives on after publication, in conversations with friends and in our heads, and with works like this, Zambreno creates a new form, an afterthought genre. bc grief keeps bleeding through, and truth is endlessly appearing and disappearing.

[drippydots · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read Zambreno's Book of Mutter a few years ago. It's the type of book that I always enjoy reading, though I'm pressed to define or give a genre to that type of book. Riva Galchen's Little Labours, Heidi Julavits The Folded Clock, Sarah Manguso's Ongoingness and the more lyrical wanderings of Rebecca Solnit in A Field Guide to Getting Lost and The Faraway Nearby. There is a thread that wanders through all of these books but the beauty of them is in their tangents, in their ramblings. 

This book is a collection of talks Zambreno gave after Book of Mutter came out and they became a vessel for all of the pieces that didn't fit in the published book. This whole project points to the dissatisfaction of making art. How many fits and starts there are, how much is unfinished and unsaid in the final work.
Things can get so curated and edited down. We strive for perfection and control but underneath it all there is a mess, a tangle of ideas. The failed attempts and fragments that we are always trying to piece together. The rough edges we are trying to smooth out. Even though there is a "finished"' product, the work lives on, the ideas are never gone. How often do we indulge ourselves to continue to pull on these threads? How often do we allow ourselves to be imperfect, wandering, wondering, attempting to express what so often feels inexpressible?

While Zambreno's work might seem untidy, obsessive or repetitive, I find it fascinating, beautiful and brave. 

[Jacob Wren · Rating 5 out of 5]

A few sentences from Appendix Project:



…complaints about the invisibility of our new books, or the nature of their visibility, the alienating or non-event publishing can feel like.



For us there’s so much potential and energy in a project that is unfinished, so much to dream into, within all of our notes all the infinite possibility of literature, that is deflated by the actual books and the process of publishing. Or, beyond the question of publishing, our actual writing feels a shadow of what we could have written, and so it is in our next book that we can truly transcend.



…and instead to keep gesturing to its incompleteness and ongoingness, which connects, for me, to the fragmentary project of literature, and what I long for in writing.



Maybe what’s needed is to write with the awareness of being wrong. Can one’s wrongness be a source of compassion.

[Frankie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sometimes the promise of these experimental academia-adjacent autotheory works is more than the reality. It's lovely but it was better in my mind before I read it. Perhaps it's one of those 'write the book you want to read' situations, but I'm sure I'd be disappointed in my own attempts too. Which is kind of what the book is about anyway. How attempts to write can fail and leave remainders.

[erik moreno · Rating 5 out of 5]

What does it mean to write a ghost? What form does it take?

[🐴 🍖]

not too shabby!! a couple awkward lines at the beginning had me wondering what i had gotten myself into but as it delves more into e.g. how writing a book is in some ways the unwriting of all the other possible books it could have been (& how, as a result, finishing a writing project is as much cause for mourning as it is for celebration) i v much got into the proverbial groove. (funny too that the copy i read was an uncorrected proof... kind of a "ghostly double" in its own right)

[Kyla Doll · Rating 3 out of 5]

Originally, I gave this book 2-2.5 stars. But when I was drawn to reread it, it pulled me in a lot more.

[matty creen · Rating 2 out of 5]

sorry to say

…but I like sad and tormented Kate Zambreno more than academic and giving-speeches-at-schools Kate Zambreno. That’s probably ridiculous of me.