Nonfiction

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.

About the Author: Julie Myerson is an author, critic and columnist. She has written for The Guardian, Harpers Bazaar, and the New York Times. She is the author of the novels Sleepwalking, The Touch, Me and the Fat Man, Laura Blundy, Something Might Happen, which was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction and memoirs Home: The Story of Everyone Who Ever Lived in our House, Not a Games Person, and The Lost Child. She lives in London with her family.