"She is besieged on all sides-by her in-laws, by social workers, by untreated psychosis-and yet in possession of a terrible freedom. She wishes she were dead, but she's inclined toward killing someone else first. She is overwhelmed by anger and lust, an alchemical compound that can alter matter, energy, laws of physics. Characters teleport, rewind themselves-the reader is often unsure of where she is in time and space-and traverse the boundaries between species."
"Her superego, or maybe her id, keeps materializing in the form of a stag, and she sees her baby through the eyes of a crab. The narrator of Harwicz's "Feebleminded" describes her brain as "moths in a jar, hanging themselves." The opening line of another novel, "Tender," is "I wake up gaping like a force-fed duck when they strip its liver out to make foie gras.""
Ariana Harwicz writes spare novels that focus on a fraying maternal consciousness in rural France, blending visceral bodily imagery and mythic metamorphosis. A composite antihero—a mother besieged by in-laws, social workers, and untreated psychosis—oscillates between suicidal despair and violent impulses while claiming a terrible freedom. Sensory details include flies, a machete, and animal transformations: a lover as a fox, a superego as a stag, and a baby's perspective through a crab. Narrative time and space fracture with teleportation and rewind, producing disorientation. Die, My Love received critical recognition and a film adaptation and aligns with postpartum psychological horror and metamorphic fiction.
Read at The New Yorker
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