What’s left of a person once they delve too deeply into their subject? Do we lose ourselves when we read someone else’s work? Are we another self altogether, now infected with the thoughts of the Other? Is it different for women? Widows? Artists? Does grief enhance or tear down our identity? All legitimate questions asked, albeit poorly adduced, by Lisa Tuttle’s My Death, a novella about a writer, widow, and fan.

The story follows a writer whose husband has died recently. At a loss for fictional inspiration, the protagonist has turned to the idea of writing a biography about a lost modernist named Helen Ralston. Don’t bother googling this person because she is fictional. A fact that drives much of the lethargic writing in this novella. The prose wears its influence on its sleeve. I was immediately reminded of W. G. Sebald’s novels with their half travelogue, half philosophical exploration, meanderings, and wonderings, and much to my surprise, I found Sebald mentioned three quarters through. However, the comparison is not flattering. Sebald chooses to explore the real history of real writers such as Conrad, while Tuttle chooses only partially formed glimpses of flat fictional characters. When Sebald stops to eat French fries at a McDonald’s in The Rings of Saturn, he subsequently has a run-in with a knife-wielding pimp. Whereas, with Tuttle, whose narrator often stops to tell you what she is eating, we get lines like this: “I bought a selection of interesting-looking gourmet salads from Marks and Spencer—ah, the luxuries of city life…,” or worse:

The crab cakes were, indeed, superb. They were served with a crunchy potato galette and a delicious mixture of seared red peppers and Spanish onion. My salad included rocket, watercress, baby spinach, and some other tasty and exotic leaves I couldn’t identify, all tossed in a subtle, herby balsamic dressing. When I exclaimed at it, Selwyn grinned and shook his head.

And this sort of NPR crowd-pleaser of a menu description doesn’t stop at food. We often see it in relation to sex, particularly in regard to a painting that serves as both a landscape and a nude. Our narrator finds herself quite embarrassed when viewing it and scrambles to explain that no, no, no, she was a woman of Freelove experience—it was not that she was a prude, only that this particular painting had more power in it. It’s never fully elucidated either, so the reader is left with her initial reaction to being warned herself:

I thought at first he was speaking of risk before I realized he meant the painting was risqué—did he mean it was a nude figure? But nudes had been common currency in fine art for a long time and surely were acceptable even in buttoned-down Calvinist Scotland?

I’m a bit shocked at the choice of including this novella with other NYRB Classics. Style aside, the book introduces many themes while failing to explore them outside of mood alone. My Death certainly has a mood about it. Yet, like many moody A24 horror films, I find myself feeling bored and a bit ripped off by the promise of thematic exploration and given little more than an Instagram post’s worth of content. Does Tuttle dive into the male-female writer juxtaposition and gender role consequences and effects on fame and longevity? Well, no, but she mentions that women aren’t treated as well as men sometimes. Does she take a novel approach to dealing with grief, particularly the grief of losing a husband as a middle-aged woman? No, not this either, but it certainly sets a tone for the opening. Does she explore how the thoughts and ideas of others, those we read and idealize, seep into our minds so permanently that our identity becomes watered down into a mishmash of personalities not easily compartmentalized? Of course not, but there is a folk horror twist in which bodies get swapped. That’s enough, right?

Not for me.

Brenden O’Dell lives in Northwest Portland, OR with his spousal equivalent and cat. When not working on his novel he can be found playing jazz keys in the window of his apartment. More of his work can be found in the Wake Review and Rubbertop Review.

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