Collins, Sophie: Who Is Mary Sue?

Description

Faber & Faber (paperback, 2018)

Publisher Marketing:In the language of fan fiction, a “Mary Sue” is an idealized and implausibly flawless character: a female archetype that can infuriate audiences for its perceived narcissism.

Such is the setting for this brilliant and important debut by Sophie Collins. In a series of verse and prose collages,Who Is Mary Sue?exposes the presumptive politics behind writing and readership: the idea that meninventwhile womenreflect; that a man writes of the world outside while a woman will turn to the interior.

Part poetry and part reportage, at once playful and sincere, these fictive-factive miniatures deploy original writing and extant quotation in a mode of pure invention. In so doing, they lift up and lay down a revealing sequence of masks and mirrors that disturb the reflection of authority.

A work of captivation and correction, this is a book that will resonate with anyone concerned with identity, shame, gender, trauma, composition, and culture: everyone, in other words, who wishes to live openly and think fearlessly in the modern world.

Who Is Mary Sue?is a work for our times and a question for our age: it is a handbook for all those willing to reimagine prescriptive notions of identity and selfhood.