But nonetheless their marriage inducts her into a “union of forgotten or erased wives,” she writes. Zambreno marries an academic whom she portrays as enormously supportive and patient. In Zambreno’s telling, any of these women might be her twin sister, her mirror image, and in Heroines, her first book of nonfiction, she toggles back and forth between her life and theirs to explain why. But she is especially attuned to the “mad wives,” as she calls them, the muses and amanuenses of treacherous visionaries, “these women often marginalized in the modernist memory project”: Zelda Fitzgerald, Viv Eliot, Jane Bowles, the spouses of celebrated authors F. Zambreno claims many more of the marginalized, cast-off, or otherwise fallen women of twentieth-century Anglophone culture as her sisters, including Jean Rhys and Sylvia Plath (Zambreno’s 2011 novel, Green Girl, paid direct homage to Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight and Plath’s The Bell Jar).

The book is an outgrowth of her blog Frances Farmer Is My Sister, named for the actress whose career collapsed in the early 1940s as a result of her alcoholism and erratic behavior. To defy that gag order, presumably in place and unchallenged at least since the dawn of the New Criticism, Zambreno has written Heroines, a blend of memoir, literary criticism, and manifesto. “Taking the self out feels like obeying a gag order-pretending an objectivity where there is nothing objective about the experience of confronting and engaging with and swooning over literature.” “I am beginning to realize that taking the self out of our essays is a form of repression,” Kate Zambreno writes in Heroines.

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