AT THE TIME of her disappearance at age fifty-four, Ula Frost was already a mystery.
Dear Reader,
Thank you so much for joining me in these annotations of Self-Portrait with Nothing. I love reading annotations of other writers’ books, and I’m thrilled to share these behind-the-scenes notes in gratitude to you for reading.
This book had many seeds, and mystery is at the heart of all of them. For my entire life, people have been telling me they know someone who looks like me, or they saw my twin at the grocery store—I’m fully convinced there are doppelgängers of me all over the place.
The allure of many multiverse stories is getting a glimpse of those doppelgängers—versions of a character living a different life—but in reality, we can never know how we or our lives would be different if we’d made different choices, and thinking about those possibilities (or obsessing over them, as Pepper does) can be a true thief of joy.
Ula Frost is a mystery at the beginning of the book and in some ways remains so at the end, because parents, like other versions of our selves, are often impossible to know fully. It’s both the seduction and the frustration of the unknowable that I wanted to explore in this book.
Konstantin and 16 other people liked this
