Sick History: On Kate Zambreno’s “To Write as if Already Dead”
Kate Zambreno | To Write as if Already Dead | Columbia University Press | 2021 | 158 Pages
As COVID-19 cases have spiked, plateaued, ebbed, and resurged over the past few years, a steady stream of articles has been published with titles such as “They Know What a Pandemic Is” and “History Repeats Itself,” each attempting to find a precedent in a prior crisis and extract lessons for the present. In the summer of 2022, they have been joined by pieces lengthening the chain of associations “from AIDS to Covid to Monkeypox.”
In a sense, the throughline between these outbreaks is easy to identify. Regardless of the molecular structure or mechanisms of transmission, viruses are circulating through a world in which risk and care are distributed unequally. Particularly within the United States, these diseases impact most fiercely those who are already the most disenfranchised, a group that Steven Thrasher has termed “the viral underclass.” As Sarah Schulman wrote in her essay “The Same Problem on Repeat” for The New York Review, “the three viruses that to my mind are now at the center of American life have different histories and consequences, but HIV, Covid-19, and monkeypox share a tragic fact: their prevention and treatment are neither equally nor effectively distributed to everyone who needs them.”
Perhaps this type of structural analysis is all that’s needed. Simple messaging can be a useful organizing tactic. We could say that the multiple health crises shaping our present moment should be thought of together to the extent that they jointly reveal the failures of our public infrastructure or the failures of imagination for dismantling destructive racial and class hierarchies. There are differences, complications, but at their core, these viruses are simply showing us, over and over, what needs to change.
But while the scale of a pandemic requires us to assess these viruses at the level of the populace, focusing solely on the institutions that manage populations seems to miss something, too. What is the embodied experience of carrying HIV, COVID, or monkeypox? Anger at structural inequity is an essential response, but what do we do with the other feelings circulating within and between epidemics? What of confusion, exhaustion, boredom, or despair?
Countless pandemic diaries have attempted to record these ambivalent stirrings, but few are as rich, or as far-reaching, as Kate Zambreno’s To Write as if Already Dead. Written at least in part during the early days of the COVID pandemic and published in 2021, the first half of the book, described as a novella, traces the growing intimacy and eventual dissolution of a friendship developed through literary blogs. The second half (presented by the publishers as straightforward non-fiction), is full of fragmentary vignettes that describe Zambreno’s attempts to navigate various illnesses, an unexpected pregnancy, the increasing ubiquity of COVID-19, and the crisis ordinary of contingent employment.
Stretching across the sections is an abiding dedication to the life and work of Hervé Guibert, an author known for his autofictional accounts of living with and dying from HIV/AIDS. Descriptions of her sticky, chaotic existence with a young child are intertwined with close readings of Guibert’s novel To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, and at times their experiences seem to echo one another. While Guibert’s narrator in To the Friend describes an “inhuman…monstrous fatigue,” Zambreno admits that her “fatigue and nausea have absented [her] of all personality.” For both, the fatigue that attends bodily ailments is all-consuming, to the point of moving them beyond the human. What’s more, like Guibert’s narrator, who writes in his notebook with increasing ferocity as his illness progresses, for Zambreno “the only way I can exist within this borderless state of worry, the velocity of my panic, is by writing in my notebook.” Across decades and circumstance, Zambreno and Guibert grapple with related categories of feeling and turn to shared tools to navigate their destabilized existence.
Zambreno is cognizant of the risks of comparison. For all of the moments of congruity between herself and Guibert, she insists that she is not attempting to claim a simple equivalence. “I don’t want to state that my exhaustion approximates or even comes close to mirroring that of an AIDS patient,” she writes, “I want only to describe my exhausted body at work, writing in a room, while contemplating the exhaustion and illness of another body, writing in a room.”
Two exhausted bodies writing in their rooms. The apparent simplicity of this dynamic—Zambreno describing herself while thinking about Guibert—belies a far more intertwined relationship. When Zambreno is diagnosed with shingles, an illness also contracted by Guibert’s narrator, she registers their shared ailment as a “mirroring,” a form of “bodily possession.” Hardly a purely conceptual and contemplative relationship, the recurrence of shingles across two bodies and roughly three decades suggests a more visceral bond.
This fleshy relationship makes for compelling reading, but it also points towards Zambreno’s broader sensibility, an appreciation for embodied experience that might even be understood as a political stance. Without succumbing to the pressure to romanticize illness as a revelatory experience, Zambreno takes seriously the possibility of vulnerable experience as a site of knowledge production. In one scene, she holds her breath for an echocardiogram only to find herself thinking about Guibert and the author that so fascinated him, Thomas Bernhard. It is the tension in her lungs that conjures thoughts of this Austrian novelist who had tuberculosis, a respiratory disease, and ruminations on the two author’s fascinations with their own deaths are accompanied by descriptions of the cold slime on her chest. It seems that, for Zambreno, critical thought isn’t a route of escape from her sick, medicalized body. On the contrary, embodied experience, mundane or chaotic as it may be, is what catalyzes abstract analysis.
Physically and intellectually possessed as she is, Zambreno also establishes a formal twinning between Guibert’s work and her own. Like Guibert reiterating the monotony of medical bureaucracy through a litany of blood draws and anxious reports of his fluctuating T-cell counts, Zambreno insistently repeats certain scenes: doctor’s appointments, the daily tasks of caring for a young child, nervous tabulations of when her health insurance will kick in and how much it will cover. Both authors express peaks of panic through sentences that unspool over the course of paragraphs. And, just as Guibert’s novel progresses through a series of non-chronological vignettes, the second half of To Write as if Already Dead is made up of resolutely nonlinear fragments.
Fragmentation and knotty chronologies may be the natural consequence of both authors writing through illness. In her essay articulating a definition of crip time, Ellen Samuels reminds us that “disability and illness have the power to extract us from linear, progressive time with its normative life stages and cast us into a wormhole of backward and forward acceleration, jerky stops and starts, tedious intervals and abrupt endings.” Zambreno herself echoes this sentiment, acknowledging that “a work that accumulates out of an exhausted life, out of the narrative momentum of survival energy, is by its nature fragmented, coming in starts and stops, manifested out of any available time.” But, even as it is useful to recognize the ways in which both Guibert and Zambreno’s works may be shaped by crip time, the similarities between their works go beyond a coincidence of experience—they are the result of Zambreno’s direct engagement with Guibert’s literary methods.
In To the Friend, Guibert describes his novel as “a work of imitative fiction that is actually a kind of essay on Thomas Bernhard.” Given Zambreno’s tendency to take on Guibert’s accelerating sentences, repetition, and fragmented structures, we might characterize her own work as an exercise in imitative history, understanding the work of a past author by mirroring his formal tools. Though perhaps imitative isn’t quite right. Zambreno doesn’t appear to be observing and re-performing Guibert’s methods. Instead, she is reading and reading, getting deeper into Guibert’s work until she begins to inhabit its structures, until her sense of her own experience is molded by Guibert’s cadences. This seems less an act of mimicry than of love, to the extent that being consumed and transformed can be said to be one of love’s symptoms.
In his essay “Nietzche, Genealogy, History,” Michel Foucault wrote that “history becomes ‘effective’ to the degree that it introduces discontinuity into our very being.” Promoting proximity rather than distance on the part of the historian, and turning towards the nervous system, the body, and energies as useful archives, Foucault seems to be endorsing a relationship to the past shared by Zambreno. Not content to simply describe Guibert’s work, but instead digesting and inhabiting his methods to produce a discontinuous account of her own experience, Zambreno’s approach is a far cry from the neat comparisons of historical epidemics popular in mainstream media.
Of course, Zambreno’s deep entanglement with the formal structures of her subject is not the only way to responsibly engage with disparate experiences. Books like The Undying by Anne Boyer and Ill Feelings by Alice Hattrick also turn careful (and fruitful) attention to sick figures from history in order to understand their own illnesses, even if past and present aren’t quite as enmeshed as in To Write as if Already Dead. And it’s true that this method of prolonged, intimate engagement is not one that can be neatly instrumentalized. It’s unlikely to be turned into a model that could be smoothly adopted for thought or action. But it does offer us one meaty example of how AIDS and COVID might be understood to exist in some relation.
While Zambreno’s focus typically remains firmly rooted in the flux of daily experience rather than the political significance of her narration, she does occasionally pause to grapple with “the question of activism and writing.” At one point, she wonders why she is choosing to study Guibert, an at-times problematic figure who has been critiqued for being too solipsistic, rather than a more straightforwardly praiseworthy figure like the artist and ACT-UP activist David Wojnarowicz. In attempting to answer this question for herself, she reflects that Guibert “offers himself up as an instrument, rewriting the loss of identity under the medical gaze, under the homophobic gaze… There is a refusal to be shamed, to be private or modest…or when the shame does creep in, a refusal to be stopped from writing through this shame.”
If there is a politics to be found in Guibert’s work, it is that of visibility in the face of taboo, the insistence on dwelling on bodies and emotions that dominant society would prefer remain hidden. This visibility is powerful in its ability to work against stigma, but also because it opens up the possibility of solidarity built through shared or adjacent experience—a foundational tenet of strategies like consciousness-raising. Guibert’s account of the indignities of a capitalistic and homophobic medical system, one that insists upon unequal access to treatment, may, through intimate recognition, prompt others to critique and mobilize against this same system.
For an issue as entrenched and wide-ranging as the production of a viral underclass (not to mention contingent employment, undervalued care work, or any of the other structural inequities laid bare in Zambreno’s text), it seems that the scale of solidarity must grow—it will require us to think across crises in at times messy ways, supplementing pointed anger with felt affinity. To Write as if Already Dead, in its deep entanglement with its subject, expands the possibilities of adjacency and provides a powerful model for how we might recognize shared aims without collapsing differences.