how would Handke respond? (Lacey -- Repetti)

 someone posted this so I can't resist pasting up a closing segment just to see how it flies 

I might suggest  for him, hmm, well, what have I been doing for the past fifty years?  breakthrough, backthrough, breakbefore 

If the writing of fiction is a treatment, what else could that treatment be but a cathartic, a purgative? The things purged in Lacey’s writing are not only strong emotions but also—and more often—ideas, images, phrases associated with those emotions that previously had a merely private and inchoate existence. Their significance remains uninterrogated until they appear on the page, written by her own hand but coming as if from elsewhere. The drama of the memoir side is most palpable in the moments when these purgings happen without conscious effort or warning—when we catch the author surprising herself, when she describes how the act of putting a particular idea, phrase, or feeling in the head, mouth, or body of a character allows her to suddenly recognize that that very thing has always been present in herself, concealed or disavowed. The fiction, likewise, is deepened and intensified upon rereading (like a Möbius strip, you have to go all the way around twice to complete the circuit), when we are compelled to imagine Lacey writing the text and arriving at such moments of spontaneous insight.

This constant return to the scene of writing—this demand that we grasp the text not just as a written thing (this being the demand of classical postmodernism, with its delight in self-reflexive textual play) but also as a writing, as the product of a writer struggling with her material, encoding that struggle into the text itself, and producing some unaccountable hybridity in excess of the “real”—is Lacey’s great breakthrough. Coupled with that is the refusal of the conflation of the person writing (the author-as-mere-author) with the act of writing itself. To write is to pass the material of one’s life through an inscrutable matrix that somehow defies the laws of physics by yielding something more than what went in. In this mysterious sense, something happens when a person writes that is profoundly impersonal. If there is a primal scene of contemporary autofiction, it is this passage through writing from the merely personal to the impersonal—and Lacey has pointed the way there precisely by refusing to write a properly autofictional work.

LARB CONTRIBUTOR

Jon Repetti is a writer and critic living in New York City. He has a PhD from Princeton University and works in publishing.

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