Who Is Mary Sue?

Sophie Collins

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9780571346622
• Subtopic: European Poetry
• Index: Literature

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.

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