The books are not discrete episodes, they are all one thing, they are all one project. The books scoff at straight lines, reveal how any line can look straight if you’re zoomed too far in. Because the books are not a straight line. This trilogy feels more than a feminist recovery of narrative: it is a method through which the lives of women artists are reimagined and remade through the writer herself, a mode of hospitality in which lives coalesce and transform one another. I admire the wholeness and agility of these works very much. All three defy categorisation-history, essay, memoir, fiction. I’ve just re-read Suite for Barbara Loden by Nathalie Léger, translated by Cécile Menon and Natasha Lehrer, as well as the two forthcoming books that form a trilogy with that one: The White Dress, also translated by Lehrer, and Exposition, translated by Amanda Demarco. Léger’s vigorous work consistently satisfies, with ideas crystallizing with the clarity of a photograph. In Léger’s hands, desolation can reveal a woman in all her multiplicity-in her ugliness and abasement and determined self-destruction, seemingly ground down to the nubs of her sorrow, but ultimately emerging with a strange richness, full of haunted persistence, droll knowingness, untamed desires, and hardscrabble resilience. In the end, the most original performance here is Léger’s, and it is undeniably virtuosic. With mirrors and lenses, with echoes and silences, Léger’s books suggest that we may write and perform the stories of our lives, but our roles have also been written for us, and have already been performed by other women, whose experiences we may recognize as our own.
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