An Image of My Name Enters America - by Lucy Ives (Paperback)

About the Book

"What would you risk to know yourself? Which stories are you willing to follow to the bitter end, revise, or, possibly, begin all over? In this collection of five interrelated essays, Lucy Ives explores identity, national fantasy, and history. She examines events and records from her own life--a childhood obsession with My Little Pony, papers and notebooks from college, an unwitting inculcation into the myth of romantic love, and the birth of her son-to excavate larger aspects of the past that have been suppressed or ignored. With bracing insight and extraordinary range, she weaves new stories about herself, her family, our country, and our culture. She connects postmodern irony to eighteenth-century cults, Cold War musicals to a great uncle's suicide to the settlement of the American West, museum period rooms to the origins of her last name to the Assyrian genocide, and the sci-fi novel The Three-Body Problem to the development of modern obstetrics. Here Ives retrieves shadowy sites of pain and fear and, with her boundless imagination, attentiveness, and wit, transforms them into narratives of repair and possibility"--

Book Synopsis

From a "brilliant, one-of-a-kind maestro" (Booklist), a vibrant tapestry of memoir, research, and criticism

Again, today, if I must choose between love and memory, I choose memory.

What would you risk to know yourself? Which stories are you willing to follow to the bitter end, revise, or, possibly, begin all over? In this collection of five interrelated essays, Lucy Ives explores identity, national fantasy, and history. She examines events and records from her own life--a childhood obsession with My Little Pony, papers and notebooks from college, an unwitting inculcation into the myth of romantic love, and the birth of her son--to excavate larger aspects of the past that have been suppressed or ignored. With bracing insight and extraordinary range, she weaves new stories about herself, her family, our country, and our culture. She connects postmodern irony to eighteenth-century cults, Cold War musicals to a great uncle's suicide to the settlement of the American West, museum period rooms to the origins of her last name to the Assyrian genocide, and the sci-fi novel The Three-Body Problem to the development of modern obstetrics. Here Ives retrieves shadowy sites of pain and fear and, with her boundless imagination, attentiveness, and wit, transforms them into narratives of repair and possibility.

Review Quotes

Literary Hub's "most anticipated books of 2024"
A Vulture Best Book of 2024

"Part criticism, part personal essay, part intellectual jubilation, An Image of My Name Enters America is the most inventive and exciting work of nonfiction this year."--Maris Kreizman, Vulture's Best Books of 2024

"Extraordinary . . . a dazzling display of knowledge, wit, ratiocination, and prose style." --Kirkus Reviews

"Unconventional and resourceful, sorrowful and perceptive, a challenging, rewarding book full of irreverent humor, rich imagery and engrossing digressions" --Minneapolis Star Tribune

"[Ives's prose] is insightful, witty, and in on the joke; it is poignant, biting, and vibrant. It is sometimes elliptical but nearly always concrete. It delights in sound and image. . . . If there is a central motivating idea of this work, it is that we simply cannot capture everything in words: something unnamable is always lost in the translation from life to language. Thankfully for the rest of us, that doesn't stop Ives from trying, bringing this remarkable achievement of a collection into existence along her way." --Devyn Andrews, Chicago Review of Books

"I tore through the poet, art critic, and novelist Lucy Ives's essay collection with glee. . . . By revealing the ideology behind an object (whether it's a film or antique furniture), she patiently dismantles our fantasies about America and ourselves. It's painful to let go of these delusions; it's also the only way to go on. . . . In the aftermath, at least we can cling to her voice--lively, cathartic, and undeniably charming."--Celine Nguyen, The Believer

"Ives's writing simply has to be experienced. There are paragraphs and even sentences here that make whole essays in themselves, with a sculptural intensity you can circumnavigate, and the light of her thinking pours from the apertures."--Jonathan Lethem, author of Brooklyn Crime Novel

"Ives has written perhaps the keenest retrospective of those years just before and just after the new millennium."--Erik Anderson, Cleveland Review of Books

"Reading Lucy Ives's essay collection is exhilarating. I was reintroduced to favorite topics and introduced to new favorites, always in the company of her extraordinary rigor, intelligence, and wit. This is the kind of book you want to read aloud to people you love, to assign, to give as a present--but don't loan this one; you might not get it back."--Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

"It is rare for a mind as mercurial and voracious as Lucy Ives's to possess such obvious lexical facility in guiding readers from one thought to the next, but here we are: Ives is one of our brilliant weirdos and must be protected at all costs." --Jonny Diamond, Literary Hub's "most anticipated books of 2024"

"Readers of her other books know that Ives is brilliant: getting to know the person, the gorgeous mind, behind those books is a total treat."--Courtney Eathorne, Booklist

"A dazzling and deeply intelligent tour de force of wit and style. . . . It's a deft and enlightening collection fit for re-reads to come; Ives is truly an original."--Sam Franzini, Our Culture Mag

"From the expansive mind of novelist, poet, and critic Lucy Ives, stylish, sweeping essays that consider the lure of period rooms, Alanis Morissette, Heidegger, and more."--Vanity Fair

"Ives writes with a madcap intellectualism--think David Sedaris with a Ph.D. . . . Readers are advised to sit back and enjoy the many splendors of Lucy Ives' magpie brilliance."--BookPage, starred review

"Lucy Ives is probably the most talented, and must be the most interesting, American writer working in the public eye right now."--D. W. White, L'Esprit Literary Review

"Uniformly rigorous, intellectually demanding, and packed with insight delivered in lean, rousing prose. The author's polymathic breadth of knowledge--literary theory, cinema, history, apocalypticism, obstetrics--is breathtaking. . . . I am now convinced that Lucy Ives is the most intelligent human I have ever read."--Melissa Holbrook Pierson, On the Seawall

"The bond I form with Ives's work is stronger than the one I form when experiencing art with more superficial similarities to my own life. It is disquieting, in a way, to encounter, as a fully fledged person, an artist who sees the world the way you do with such clarity it is blinding. . . . It is still a comfort to exist alongside a book that feels so open to being known by you."--Sam Bodrojan, The Kenyon Review