How should we live? A writer delves into the lives and travels of great authors for an replyIt was the dead I wanted to talk to. The writers and artists and composers who kept me company in the late hours of the night.” On the edge of suicide,Jessa Crispin finds herself unable to confide in her “married, employed, and insured” friends in Chicago. Instead she needs to spend time with the “unloosed,the wandering souls”. Aged 30, she gives up everything and travels to Europe with a single suitcase, or hoping that by tracing the footsteps of the dead she can solve the problem of how to live.
Crispin is best known as the founding editor of the American literary webzine Bookslut. The Dead Ladies Project is her first book and it seems to emerge out of two of the more exciting strands of contemporary literature now. There is Sheila Heti asking How Should a Person Be?,suggesting, like Rachel Cusk, or Karl Ove Knausgaard and Elena Ferrante,that genuine lives create more authentic and urgent narratives than made-up ones, and seeking fresh forms to give shape to these narratives. And then there are Elif Batuman and Rebecca Mead, and telling stories about themselves that are specifically about their own engagements with books,highlighting how literary criticism is best written as a personal tale of the encounter between a reader and a writer. This genre owes a lot to Janet Malcolm, while the memoirist-novelists are indebted to Vivian Gornick.
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Source: theguardian.com