Fit Into Me: A Novel: A Memoir

In her most innovative book yet, Molly Gaudry embarks on a search for belonging amid loss, framing her memoir around a fictional narrative featuring the tea house woman--a character who appeared first as bride-to-be and then as widow in her earlier books. As Gaudry grapples with traumatic brain injury, family secrets, repressed memories, and the job market in her essays, the tea house woman goes on a parallel quest of identity and desire. Gaudry also delves into literature as guide and comfort, using the words of authors as wide-ranging as Sappho, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Marguerite Duras, and José Saramago to form yet another text within a text. Artfully braided into a hybrid-genre tour de force, the many strands of Fit Into Me: A Novel: A Memoir ask: to what extent can fiction reveal more about an author than nonfiction?

As the tea house woman manages a mercurial lover, a family business, and caring for her dying father during the winter holidays, Gaudry, too, reflects on some of her own challenges: relearning, post-skating injury, to read and write while in the midst of earning a PhD; questioning her loneliness, desires, and ability to connect; wondering what it would be like if her biological brother flew in from Korea to inform her that their father has died; and navigating her identity as a transnational adoptee. Each essay in Fit Into Me, the memoir, is a testament to resilience, and as those true stories merge with Fit Into Me, the novel, they reveal how literature can become a lifeline that guides us back to ourselves.

Molly Gaudry is the author of the verse novel We Take Me Apart, which was a finalist for the Asian American Literary Award and shortlisted for the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry. Desire: A Haunting, its sequel, and Fit Into Me: A Novel: A Memoir, are further explorations of the same storyworld and characters. Molly is the founder of The Lit Pub and holds master's degrees in fiction and poetry from the University of Cincinnati and George Mason University, respectively, and a PhD in experimental prose from the University of Utah. An assistant professor at Stony Brook University, she teaches nonfiction and poetry in the MFA and BFA programs. In the summers, she teaches fiction at the Yale Writers' Workshop.