A manifesto reclaiming the wives and mistresses of literary modernism that inspired a
generation of writers and scholars reissued after more than a decade. I am beginning to
realize that taking the self out of our essays is a form of repression. Taking the self out
feels like obeying a gag order—pretending an objectivity where there is nothing objective about
the experience of confronting and engaging with and swooning over literature. On the last day
of December 2009 Kate Zambreno then an unpublished writer began a blog called Frances Farmer
Is My Sister arising from her obsession with literary modernism and her recent transplantation
to Akron Ohio where her partner held a university job. Widely reposted Zambreno's blog
became an outlet for her highly informed and passionate rants and melancholy portraits of the
fates of the modernist wives and mistresses reclaiming the traditionally pathologized
biographies of Vivienne Eliot Jane Bowles Jean Rhys and Zelda Fitzgerald: writers and
artists themselves who served as male writers' muses only to end their lives silenced erased
and institutionalized. Over the course of two years Frances Farmer Is My Sister helped create
a community of writers and devised a new feminist discourse of writing in the margins and
developing an alternative canon. In Heroines Zambreno extends the polemic begun on her blog
into a dazzling original work of literary scholarship. Combing theories that have dictated
what literature should be and who is allowed to write it—she traces the genesis of a cultural
template that consistently exiles feminine experience to the realm of the minor ” and diagnoses
women for transgressing social bounds. ANXIETY: When she experiences it it's pathological ”
writes Zambreno. When he does it's existential.” With Heroines Zambreno provided a model for
a newly subjectivized criticism prefiguring many group biographies and forms of autotheory and
hybrid memoirs that were to come in the years to follow. A book that has become its own canon
Heroines was named one of the 50 Books that define the past 5 Years in Literature by Flavorwire
an Essential Feminist Manifesto by Dazed and one of the 50 Greatest Books by Women in
Buzzfeed.
