Reviewed by Emily Webber

Once you choose up Molly Gaudry’s Match Into Me, A Novel: A Memoir (and also you most positively ought to), you’ll have sure expectations moving into identical to I did. Put together for them to be smashed in the easiest way doable.

I anticipated it to be like Erika Stern’s genre-blending e book, Frontier, which I learn and beloved final 12 months. In that e book, Stern shares her expertise of giving beginning and, in alternating chapters, tells a fictional ghost story a couple of girl who dies throughout childbirth within the Wild West.

However Match Into Me (Rose Steel Press; Dec. 2025), as an alternative of presenting two separate narratives — one memoir and one novel — seamlessly merges fiction and nonfiction, in addition to a glance into Gaudry’s writing course of. The result’s a novel mix: it’s half memoir a couple of author dealing with a gentle traumatic mind harm, half in regards to the technique of writing a novel, and half how a author is influenced by different literary works. All this whereas incorporating the fictional story of the tea home girl, a personality who appeared in Gaudry’s earlier books, Need and We Take Me Aside.

The tea home girl inherits the household tea home when her mom dies, earlier than anticipated, earlier than she’s even had the possibility to discover different needs. The tea home girl’s story unfolds over Christmas and into New Yr’s as she works, takes care of her aged father, and navigates a risky relationship together with her lover. Gaudry reveals how she makes use of phrase lists from different literary works as prompts, as she has accomplished together with her different books. For Match Into Me she lower up and chosen phrases from Anne Carson’s translation of Sappho, If Not, Winter. Gaudry presents the glossary on the web page, adopted by the piece of fiction with the phrases used recognized in all caps.

It didn’t matter what number of instances her father instructed her she didn’t must proceed her mom’s (and grandmother’s and GREAT-grandmother’s and great-great grandmother’s) WORK if she didn’t need to, that it was okay to forge her personal path in life. And but, guilt, obligation, obligation—these at all times took over. Maybe it had been ingrained in her too early that she would inherit the tea home, that it was hers, that every one of it was for her and her personal CHILDREN, all of it might sooner or later be theirs.  

Gaudry’s personal story explores related themes of identification and want, particularly coming to phrases with how her thoughts and physique have modified after her head harm. On the web page, she reveals how the harm adjustments each her studying and writing course of. She’s additionally coping with a dismal job market, sophisticated relationships, and exploring her identification as an adoptee from Korea. In the direction of the top of Match Into Me fiction bleeds into her personal story with a complete part the place she imagines her brother from Korea coming to inform her that her organic dad is lifeless. In the long run, we all know this doesn’t occur, and we’re left to marvel if her organic dad is even who her household says he is. With fiction and nonfiction interwoven on the web page, it turns into clear how sure matters are simpler to discover by way of fiction—particularly those who carry important emotional weight or contain questions the author can not reply immediately about themselves.

There’s one other layer to this e book with footnotes on many pages and surprisingly they had been a favourite a part of my studying of Match Into Me. Gaudry merges passages from literary works into her textual content, drawing on writers similar to Marguerite Duras, Roberto Bolaño, Weike Wang, and Margaret Atwood. She doesn’t use citation marks to keep away from taking the reader out of the textual content, as an alternative utilizing footnotes as quotation. To do that over 100 instances, and the sentences match so completely, is a tremendous effort. Any reader and author will perceive the impact—what we learn, the works we love, turn out to be one with our voice and form how we inform our tales.

Gaudry additionally makes use of the footnotes for prolonged asides that turn out to be total tales in their very own proper. One footnote tells the backstory of a minor character, Nell, a buddy of the tea home girl, and how Gaudry created the character partly based mostly on a girl who lived upstairs from her. It is a complete offshoot from the primary textual content and filled with explicit particulars on Gaudry’s characters and actual acquaintances, which might weigh all the pieces down, however as an alternative turns into a lovely meditation on character, reminiscence, and private tales.

Throughout Molly Gaudry’s Match Into Me are the holes in our lives made by grief, altering self, concern, and the unknown. Additionally, what we fill them with—the reality, tales made up, tales given to us, and even the clean area on the web page. Typically, when studying experimental work, I can recognize what the author is doing to push past the norms of conventional genres and the usage of distinctive technical development, however the outcome might be complicated or lack emotional connection. Gaudry avoids each pitfalls. Match Into Me calls for the reader’s shut consideration, with over 170 footnotes, shifting kinds, and complicated layers. In return, you’ll expertise an mental and emotional journey in contrast to something else.