In her most innovative book yet, Molly Gaudry embarks on a search for belonging amid loss, framing her memoir around a fictional narrative featuring the tea house woman—a character who appeared first as bride-to-be and then as widow in her earlier books. As Gaudry grapples with traumatic brain injury, family secrets, repressed memories, and the job market in her essays, the tea house woman goes on a parallel quest of identity and desire. Gaudry also delves into literature as guide and comfort, using the words of authors as wide-ranging as Sappho, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Marguerite Duras, and José Saramago to form yet another text within a text. Artfully braided into a hybrid-genre tour de force, the many strands of Fit Into Me: A Novel: A Memoir ask: to what extent can fiction reveal more about an author than nonfiction?
As the tea house woman manages a mercurial lover, a family business, and caring for her dying father during the winter holidays, Gaudry, too, reflects on some of her own challenges: relearning, post-skating injury, to read and write while in the midst of earning a PhD; questioning her loneliness, desires, and ability to connect; wondering what it would be like if her biological brother flew in from Korea to inform her that their father has died; and navigating her identity as a transnational adoptee. Each essay in Fit Into Me, the memoir, is a testament to resilience, and as those true stories merge with Fit Into Me, the novel, they reveal how literature can become a lifeline that guides us back to ourselves.
Molly Gaudry is the author of the verse novel We Take Me Apart, which was a finalist for the Asian American Literary Award and shortlisted for the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry. Desire: A Haunting, its sequel, and Fit Into Me: A Novel: A Memoir, are further explorations of the same storyworld and characters. Molly is the founder of The Lit Pub and holds master's degrees in fiction and poetry from the University of Cincinnati and George Mason University, respectively, and a PhD in experimental prose from the University of Utah. An assistant professor at Stony Brook University, she teaches nonfiction and poetry in the MFA and BFA programs. In the summers, she teaches fiction at the Yale Writers' Workshop.
"In an intoxicating fusion of speculative nonfiction, magical storytelling, and literary appropriation with the harrowing account of her own miraculous transformations after brain injury, Molly Gaudry exposes the illimitable unknowability of her astonishing selves, the endless potential for reinvention, and the strange gifts of isolation and fracture. This heart-cracking narrative is a wildly imaginative exploration of what it means to navigate a lifetime of mystery and trauma with passion and joy, curiosity and humor." — Melanie Rae Thon, author of The Voice of the River
"Molly Gaudry's Fit Into Me is the kind of revolutionary memoir that changes you as you read it. This book is audacious, intelligent, complicated, layered, deconstructive, human, heartbreaking, allusive, and deeply moving. This is the memoir we all needed growing up as writers searching for a home. This is the memoir we will bring with us as we continue searching." — Jackson Bliss, author of Dream Pop Origami
"In Fit Into Me: A Novel: A Memoir, Molly Gaudry weaves her varied subjects—post-concussion syndrome, adoption, creative process, and desire, among others—into a groundbreaking, polyphonic book that pulses with both potential and kinetic energy. The book juxtaposes the forms of literary criticism, novel, lyric essay, and speculative nonfiction to interrogate both itself and the very idea of narrative. Its gaps and overlaps allow us to get closer to 'see[ing] oneself clearly.' Fit Into Me shows us that the fabric between our genres—and worlds—is permeable; it is one of the most formally exciting books I've ever read." — Jami Nakamura Lin, author of The Night Parade: A Speculative Memoir
"A haunted, erotic, complex, brilliant post-genre love affair with the various blisses of language, with reading and writing and re-righting texts and selves that read and write and re-right us, restore and sustain us, Molly Gaudry's Fit Into Me is ultimately about how we are all in a certain sense orphans living in rented words and worlds and whirls. More proof Gaudry possesses one of the most exhilarating innovative imaginations in the contemporary literary landscape." — Lance Olsen, author of Absolute Away
"The memoir's vivid descriptions of brain injury experiences are stirring, as is the section in which Gaudry explores her identity as a transnational adoptee via a speculative essay in which she imagines her half-brother returning from Korea to inform her of her father's death. By blurring the lines between fiction and memoir, even within the sections most recognizable as nonfiction, the book further stretches genre conventions and makes a compelling case for hybridity and multiplicity. As the book progresses, the two narratives interact and blur, fracturing any static sense of narrative in favor of a more nuanced understanding of authorship and storytelling." — Bella Moses, Foreword Review
