The postpartum experience isnโ€™t just expensive; it can also be one of psychic trauma and creative crisis. Someone who was a person becomes a mother. โ€œYouโ€™re not a person. You donโ€™t have a name,โ€ says Zambreno. This feeling of erasure is a current that runs through her work, reaching peak intensity in โ€œTo Write as if Already Dead.โ€ โ€œI need to restore myself after being made into a ghost,โ€ Zambreno says. โ€œI always feel like writing the most when Iโ€™m being made invisible.โ€

Kate Zambreno on her new book "To Write as if Already Dead" - Los Angeles Times latimes.com