A fragmented, lyrical essay on memory, identity, mourning, and the mother.Writing is how I attempt to repair myself, stitching back former selves, sentences. When I am brave enough I am never brave enough I unravel the tapestry of my life, my childhood.—from Book of MutterComposed over thirteen years, Kate Zambreno''s Book of Mutter is a tender and disquieting meditation on the ability of writing, photography, and memory to embrace shadows while in the throes—and dead calm—of griefBook of Mutter is both primal and sculpted, shaped by the author''s searching, indexical impulse to inventory family apocrypha in the wake of her mother''s death. The text spirals out into a fractured anatomy of melancholy that includes critical reflections on the likes of Roland Barthes, Louise Bourgeois, Henry Darger, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Peter Handke, and others.Zambreno has modeled the book''s formless form on Bourgeois''s Cells sculptures—at once channeling the volatility of autobiography, pain, and ch