Teresa Carmody

Three novellas, Teresa Carmody's Today Must Be Sunday, Kim Chinquee’s I Thought of England, and Allison Pitinii Davis’s Business, unique in style and narrative, deal with longing, loneliness, fear, and the relationships their characters make, and break, on their way to something like peace, if not happiness. Entering and abandoning social contracts and expectations across the country in the pursuit of the somewhat ethereal notion of contentment, these stories highlight the struggles of women across American cultural eras, armed only with their ability to think and to act. These three novellas describe the harrowing, soul-rattling actions and choices made by women in the pursuit of defining their lives.

Teresa Carmody has been writing a character named Marie for over a decade and across a series of unrelated books. A Healthy Interest in the Lives of Others follows Marie through 25 years and 11 linked autofictions about community, friendship, writing, labor, and gossip. In this novel-in-stories, Marie is a temporary packager, a sexual assault crises worker, a learner and a seeker, a friend and a wife, a writing student, but most of all a writer. She studies everything from books and trash to her own queerness and non-human animals. She notes how humans survive by taking in each other's looks, gestures, and language, and her curiosity takes her into the lives of others, embodied in stories that become a form of gossip. Among a lineage of constraint-based and experimental writers, Carmody, whose lived life uncannily resembles Marie's fictional one, weaves an artist's coming of age that is also a meditation on how we make and unmake each other.

Sexually curious and intellectually adventurous, adolescent Marie begins journaling about her life in Western Michigan's Bible Belt during the rise of the Christian Right. Over the span of many years, her writing becomes a meditation on the ways in which language makes, unmakes, and remakes us. In The Reconception of Marie, Marie's many voices coalesce in a reimagined bild ngsroman, where coming-of-age becomes coming-into-awareness, a spiritual quest navigated with humor, fervency, and the multivalency of queer grace.

Maison Femme: A Fiction Teresa Carmody, text Vanessa Place, images