Who Needs Intimacy?

Influential novelists are imagining what women's lives might look like without the demands of partners and children.

- By Jordan Kisner

Over the past decade or so, an influential set of female novelists has been circling a shared question: Given how often women are forced to understand themselves as fundamentally in relation to others (most commonly a child and/or a partner, but also parents, extended family, friends), is it possible for a woman to have an authentic, independent self? If a female narrator is extracted from her core relational ties, what kind of consciousness is left?

I am thinking here of Rachel Cusk's Outline trilogy, whose narrator, divorced and currently apart from her children, travels and observes the world with a sense of self so hollowed out as to render her more a conduit for the musings of her interlocutors than a full-fledged character. I also have in mind Jenny Offill's alienated wife in Dept. of Speculation, as well as Ottessa Moshfegh's parodically disaffected protagonist in My Year of Rest and Relaxation. Katie Kitamura's last two novels, A Separation and Intimacies, are exemplars of this form. Her female protagonists lack the normal trappings of selfhood: They have no names, ages, or detailed backgrounds. They are loners, dispassionate and disassociated, floating through foreign places in dreamlike Woolfian internal monologue. They recall Emerson's turn of phrase “I become a transparent eyeball.” Who are they? They're rarely sure. “I don't really know what ‘authentic’ means,” Kitamura said in a recent interview about her new novel, Audition. “When you take away all of the role-playing, all of the performance, what is left? I don’t know if that’s your authentic self, or if it’s a profoundly raw, destabilized, possibly non-functioning self.” Audition, which Kitamura describes as the final entry in a loose trilogy, lingers over this curiosity about the instability of the “self,” and her bafflement at how authenticity could have anything to do with something so clearly assembled and performed.