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My Death
My Death | Lisa Tuttle
2 posts | 2 read | 3 to read
The November 2023 selection of the NYRB Classics Book Club The narrator of Lisa Tuttle’s uncanny novella is a recent widow, a writer adrift. Not only has she lost her husband but her muse seems to have deserted her altogether. Her agent summons her to Edinburgh to discuss her next book. What will she tell him? At once the answer comes to her: she will write the biography of Helen Ralston, best known, if at all, as the subject of W.E. Logan’s much-reproduced painting Circe, and the inspiration for his classic children’s book, Hermine in Cloud-Land. But Ralston was a novelist and artist in her own right, though her writing is no longer in print and her most radical painting, My Death, deemed too unsettling—malevolent even—to be shown in public. Over the months that follow, Ralston proves an astonishingly cooperative subject, even as her biographer uncovers eerie resonances between the older woman’s history and her own. Whose biography is she writing—really?
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The_Penniless_Author
My Death | Lisa Tuttle
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The sort of story that quietly pulls you in, an easy book (at just over one-hundred pages) to finish in a day. I wouldn't classify it as horror exactly, more like "weird fiction". A struggling writer tries to resurrect her career by tackling the biography of Helen Ralston, herself an underappreciated writer/artist from the early part of the 20th century. The deeper she dives into her subject's life, the more things begin to blur.

Reggie This author gets nominated a lot for the Stoker awards but I‘ve never read her. I need to change that. 12mo
The_Penniless_Author @Reggie Yeah, she's had quite a career as a genre writer - horror, science fiction, and fantasy. I recognized her name, but like you I had never read anything before now. 12mo
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The_Penniless_Author
My Death | Lisa Tuttle
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#FirstLineFridays @ShyBookOwl

As I traveled, I watched the landscape - lochs and hillsides, the trees still winter-bare, etched against a soft, grey sky - and all the time my empty hand moved on my lap, tracing the pattern the branches made, smoothing the lines of the hills.