Book of Mutter

Published by Semiotext(e) in 2017.

Published in Dorothee Elmiger’s German translation at AKI Verlag, where Ann-Kathryn Doerig also made this film in support of it. In November 2023, the book was featured on the German television program Druckfrisch.

Available in Spanish at La uÑa RoTa Ediciones, translated by Violeta Gil and Carlos Rod.

Buy at your independent bookstore

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 Mutter

Composed 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 grief. Book 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 childhood, yet hemmed by a solemn sense of entering ritualistic or sacred space.

Neither memoir, essay, nor poetry, Book of Mutter is an uncategorizable text that draws upon a repertoire of genres to write into and against silence. It is a haunted text, an accumulative archive of myth and memory that seeks its own undoing, driven by crossed desires to resurrect and exorcise the past. Zambreno weaves a complex web of associations, relics, and references, elevating the prosaic scrapbook into a strange and intimate postmortem/postmodern theater.

"Is it memoir? Poetry? Art criticism? Who cares. So many of my favorite books skirt the question entirely. And in this case, the form -- full of gaps and silences, moments of self-questioning and self-revision, and a collage-like layering of confession, memory, and literary, cultural, and art criticism -- makes perfect and urgent sense. There's something both anarchic and incredibly sculptured about Kate Zambreno's Book of Mutter that gets at the excoriating labor of its undertaking. Part elegy, part inquiry, part archive, part primal scream, this book plumbs the irreducible complexity, eccentricity and unfathomable depth of those women's lives whose surfaces (like photographs) seem so misleadingly accessible." — Suzanne Buffam

"Kate Zambreno's Book of Mutter is an intense, original, and fiercely intelligent work. Eschewing the smooth narration of the conventional memoir and its false confidence in the past as a fixed record of truths, Zambreno interrogates her memories of her mother. She circles and prods the pains and pleasures of her child-self. She investigates images and texts, recalled from life and from books, to create a complex web of associations around a woman who has been dead for years, but who lives on as both a secret and a wound. Book of Mutter is that rare text, which dares to face the immense power of the mother." — Siri Hustvedt

"Book of Mutter is an invasive text. Kate Zambreno's deep attentiveness opens new ways of seeing the work of art in time. Both a tribute to past lives and a philosophy of the present, Book of Mutter is magnetic, heartrending, and visionary." — Sofia Samatar

"'Thinking back through her mothers,' to paraphrase Woolf among them, Zambreno invokes a pantheon of stars: Lincoln, Stein, Leduc, Bourgeois, Sexton, Plath, Akerman, Carson. The parts of Book of Mutter that truly hooked me, and form the bulk of the text, are the passages about Zambreno's own mother, a woman of mysterious origins, a chain-smoking beauty who died young, in this remembrance composed over thirteen years. Barthes's mother fixation figures here, as does, somewhat cryptically, the eccentric, Henry Darger, but both are resolved quite spectacularly and surprisingly as Book of Mutter edges toward closure. It is Zambreno's ear and eye for the sounds and textures of the maternal that most captivate: the rumble of mirrored closet doors on tracks; the snap of a handbag filled with nicotine scented tissues; the collection of silver Clinique lipsticks; the memory of a woman who cleaned incessantly and whose chief deathbed worry centered on the corrosion of those standards of hygiene when, finally, the child, Kate, becomes mother to her mother, one of the many." — Moyra Davey

“The composition of this book requires the reader to participate in constructing links, noticing patterns, and making meaning; it is what Barthes would call a 'writerly text,' welcoming the reader into its many entrances and possibilities. Zambreno's work is an exercise in semiotics, a study of meaning-making, for things that seem intimate, foundational, and basic to being human: history, memory, mother, mourning.” — Publishers Weekly, (starred review)

“Above all, Book of Mutter is a work of tone; it expresses a failure to transcend grief, written from a place of guilt and shame, in halting and inarticulate gestures...Writing may not change anything, may not heal or even console—but, like Bourgeois's Cells, it creates a space in which formlessness, pain and chaos are enclosed and held like holy relics in a church.” — Jenny Hendrix, Times Literary Supplement

“The book is relentless in its search for meaning and its simultaneous refusal of simplistic acts of closure. Even its structure seems designed to reflect pain intermittently avoided and confronted. Zambreno places her memories into a kind of assemblage piece, where the form shifts with its underlying emotions.” — Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Bookforum

“Book of Mutter is ultimately a self-consciously unsentimental yet deeply moving book. The distance of its aesthetic styling belies an intense vulnerability and love that emerges through a number of affecting details: her father's handwriting continuing her mother's gardening journal, memories of 'fraught yet tangy' meatloaf, a cream-colored dress with flowers that almost pains the narrator to mention. In a craft lecture reproduced in Semiotext(e)'s magazine Animal Shelter, Zambreno writes, 'All I want is a literature both tender and grotesque.' With Book of Mutter, she finds it.” — Alexander Pines, BOMB Magazine

“Among its many concerns—the death of her mother, grief, autobiography, photography, memory—are the conventions of book-making itself: It seems as invested in unforming itself as it is in forming itself, and the result exists outside of any of the familiar expectations of genre.” — T. Clutch Fleischmann, The Brooklyn Rail

“The slim book of bristling fragments is heavy but moves swiftly, as if laid down in one long fever dream.” — Nate Lippens, Queen Mob's Tea House

“As with all her books, Zambreno's sharp and stylish intellectual masonry, her careful gathering of evidence, is a kind of (intentionally) incomplete catharsis. She collects anecdotes like novelist David Markson, but unlike him—he of the impersonal (and emotionally devastating) story—she builds an altar to her own past, these anecdotes both personal and yes, sometimes political.” — Amber Sparks, The Fanzine

“Barthes, Handke, Louise Bourgeois join the chorus of citations scattered like waymarks through this mournful, fragmentary text, which dwells around, without answering – as though the attempt were the only answer possible—the question, which in the text is posed without a question mark: 'What does it mean to write what is not there. To write an absence.'“ — Adrian Nathan West, Review 31

“Mutter is unapologetically intellectual, and unapologetically bodily. But while this reader enjoys an intertextual puzzle as much as the next, I found the most compelling threads within Mutter were those bearing witness to the ordinary; sites of lament and also startling beauty.” — The Lifted Brow

“Kate Zambreno's Book of Mutter is an elegy, an archive, a palimpsest of fragmented memory...It's as if the book's language has broken with the weight of sorrow.” — Anne Yoder, The Millions

“The distance of its aesthetic styling belies an intense vulnerability and love that emerges through a number of affecting details: her father's handwriting continuing her mother's gardening journal, memories of 'fraught yet tangy' meatloaf, a cream-colored dress with flowers that almost pains the narrator to mention.” — Claire Marie Healy, Another Magazine