Who Is Mary Sue?
About this book
In the language of fan fiction, a 'Mary Sue' is an idealised 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 men
invent while women
reflect; 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.
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Landing Page
- Title Page
- Contents
- Epigraph
- Preface
- Dear No. 24601
- Beauty Milk
- Sister
- Healers
- Eight Phrases
- Who Is Mary Sue?
- The Engine
- Untitled
- Before
- As bread is the body of Christ so is glass the very flesh of the Devil
- The Palace of Culture and Science
- Poor Clare
- A Course in Miracles
- The Saints
- Death Pact
- Ed
- Bunny
- Autobiography
- The Engine Continued
- Anna Karenina
- a whistle in the gloom
- A. S.
- Ed
- Postface
- Note on Fan Fiction
- Other Notes
- Acknowledgements
- About the Author
- Copyright
