The Year of My Disappearance

Carole David's The Year of My Disappearance is a searing, surreal, darkly comic descent into a woman's psyche: as pitiless an assault on her own torments and pretences as it is on those figures lodged in her memory: lovers, strangers, her own mother, Bosch-like apparitions out of her dreams and imaginings. Through it all, a fierce combat is being waged between immolation and survival, wherein, as she has written, I gave free range to the lives that dwelt within me. Nothing and no one is spared in this book, and yet it is wonderfully invigorating.