Book of Mutter

A fragmented, lyrical essay on memory, identity, mourning, and the mother.

Book of Mutter is a tender and disquieting meditation on the ability of writing, photography, and memory to embrace shadows while in the throes—and dead calm—of grief. Neither memoir, essay, nor poetry, it is an uncategorisable text that draws upon a repertoire of genres to write into and against silence.

'Kate Zambreno’s Appendix Project and Book of Mutter are meditations on grief, motherhood, and memory alongside and through Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida and Mourning Diary. These are also books about reading and seeing. To enter them is to be in the company of a writer with a tremendous capacity and gift for questioning, thinking, and feeling. These are extraordinary works.' – Christina Sharpe

Book of Mutter is a tender and disquieting meditation on the ability of writing, photography, and memory to embrace shadows while in the throes—and dead calm—of grief. Neither memoir, essay, nor poetry, it is an uncategorisable text that draws upon a repertoire of genres to write into and against silence. Zambreno weaves a complex web of associations, relics, and references, elevating the prosaic scrapbook into a strange and intimate postmortem/postmodern theatre.