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Lisa Tuttle's My Death: A Romance of the Archive that Leads Nowhere

Writer's picture: LeliaLelia

This book is ordinary and otherworldly. Initially the narrator’s voice struck me as almost dully ordinary, with an everywoman quality, not unlike the voice in my own head when I haven’t dressed it up to entertain myself or others. As I read I realized this effect was intentional. Identities merge in this book — the narrator’s with Helen Ralston’s, with Tuttle’s, and with ours. The narrator’s plain vanilla inner voice blends easily into our own, so we begin to participate in the strange blurring of identity.


In the introduction Amy Gentry places My Death in an informal trilogy of Tuttle stories that explore “existing as a woman writer in the company of men.” Since the male characters are either dead or play minor parts to get the story going, I found this book to be much more about women writing in the company of women. All three women, the narrator, Helen and her daughter, are writers. How does writing a woman’s life, reading a woman’s life, writing our own lives teach us about ourselves and others? This is a question typical of what Gentry calls the “romance of the archive” subgenre (a category I’d never heard of but am intrigued by).


Gentry suggests that the search for identity is the core desire of Tuttle’s protagonists and this story explores the uncanny and potentially unproductive ruts this desire can lead us into. While I found the book engaging, the fantasy elements seemed, in the end, a cheap trick that left the deeper themes nowhere to go.


One of those themes is the way art—in this case a painting and books—can serve as a door to realms and perceptions that we can’t access through purely rational means. Rather than explore these inexplicable experiences that are very much possible in everyday life, Tuttle explains the inexplicable with a fantasy twist. According to Masterclass, fantasy “features magical and supernatural elements that do not exist in the real world.” Art as a gateway to the unconscious does exist in the real world and would have served as a far more engaging arena for exploration.

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