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Nonfiction
A Novel
“Glitteringly painful.”—Rachel Cusk
“Powerful, and utterly compelling.”—Sarah Waters
This is definitely not a ghost story. But for a while after you’re gone, I see you everywhere. Every ragged young person sitting huddled on a pavement, every stretched-out body under cardboard in a shop doorway.
Two parents stand by powerlessly as their only child seems intent on destroying herself. As the mother—a novelist—attempts to understand her daughter, she finds herself revisiting her own uneasy, unresolved relationship with her mother. Weaving between childhoods past and present, laced with temptation and betrayal, Nonfiction: A Novel is an unflinching account of a mother, daughter, wife, and author reckoning with the world around her. But can a writer ever be trusted with the truth of her own story?
Clear-eyed, lacerating, and fearless, Julie Myerson’s Nonfiction: A Novel explores maternal love as an emotional foundation to both crave and fear. A hauntingly beautiful and deeply moving love letter from a mother to a daughter, this is a tale of damage and addiction, recovery and creativity, compassion and love.
Praise
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This glitteringly painful novel, so steady and clear in its analysis of addiction, creativity, and the factors that determine female and familial identity, is the book [Myerson] was intended to write, and she has elevated it into a template for the re-making of self by means of a transformative and radical honesty.
—Rachel Cusk
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Courageous, compassionate, and devastating.
—Andrew Solomon
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Myerson writes with devastating clarity about the most complex and troubling of emotions. Nonfiction is painful, powerful, and utterly compelling.
—Sarah Waters
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Searing and tragic and cleverly layered, this thought-provoking novel about mothers and daughters, guilt and responsibility, fiction and truth, took me to the dark interior of family relationships and left me heart-broken. Just wonderful.
—Claire Fuller
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In plain, unflinching sentences, Julie Myerson takes us right into a family’s broken heart. Nonfiction might be a novel, but it feels like the truth. A raw, urgent, and compulsive read.
—Rupert Thomson
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Nonfiction is compassionate, intelligent and bloody novel, where trust and love, motherhood and creativity crash and break on the rocks of addiction, treachery and confusion. Myerson’s combination of ferocity and tenderness is unique.
—Louisa Young
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Utterly compelling and painfully truthful.
—Polly Findlay
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This is such a compulsive read. Searingly honest and raw, Julie Myerson’s new novel cuts to the heart of emotions we might try to evade, because they’re just too overwhelming.
—Deborah Moggach
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I found it truly remarkable, simultaneously honest and tricksy, deeply emotional and cunningly constructed, like having a magician explain an unbelievable trick even as she astonishes you with it. She manages to speak with heartbreaking clarity about the damage of addiction within a family and at the same time to examine the rights and responsibilities of the professional writer of fiction to her subject matter, herself and her readers. . . . I was moved and dazzled in equal measure.
—Olivia Hetreed
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