A HEALTHY INTEREST IN THE LIVES OF OTHERS - Teresa Carmody
ABOUT THE BOOK
Teresa Carmody has been writing a character named Marie for over a decade and across a series of unrelated books. A Healthy Interest in the Lives of Others follows Marie through 25 years and 11 linked autofictions about community, friendship, writing, labor, and gossip. In this novel-in-stories, Marie is a temporary packager, a sexual assault crises worker, a learner and a seeker, a friend and a wife, a writing student, but most of all a writer. She studies everything from books and trash to her own queerness and non-human animals. She notes how humans survive by taking in each other’s looks, gestures, and language, and her curiosity takes her into the lives of others, embodied in stories that become a form of gossip. Among a lineage of constraint-based and experimental writers, Carmody, whose lived life uncannily resembles Marie’s fictional one, weaves an artist's coming of age that is also a meditation on how we make and unmake each other.
PRAISE FOR A HEALTHY INTEREST IN THE LIVES OF OTHERS
“As the fig tree needs the fig wasp, so it is that the formally dense, deeply intimate fictions of Teresa Carmody thrive on the invasion of essay, memoir, and even drawing through their branches. What satisfaction to see Marie, the protagonist of Carmody’s first novel, shift, like Balzac’s Lucien Chardon, from the provinces into a literary world previously only charted by Gilbert Sorrentino’s Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things. Carmody’s is a tree very full of figs.”
—Jonathan Lethem
“A Healthy Interest in the Lives of Others is a dynamic, inventive, and hilarious novel radically attuned to the delight and awkwardness of human interaction. With an unsparing eye and the dark humor of Can Xue and Jane Bowles, Teresa Carmody depicts the life of the writer's mind.”
—Patrick Cottrell
"What is a world when writing is the drug? Dryly, refreshingly funny, Teresa Carmody's sentences act like acid droplets in this cheeky meditation where writing is both the poison and the cure."
—Pola Oloixarac
"Carmody’s latest in their long-running exploration of a character named Marie is a playfully profound meditation on self and community that centers the outcasts (poets, artists, puppeteers, masseuses, adjuncts, caregivers, activists, nonhuman animals) of a materialist, segregated, medicalizing, and oppressive heteropatriarchy. By turns lyrical, processual, and metafictional, Carmody’s writing embraces vignettes, sketches, and visions as part of a spiritual summoning of a “future self, queer and fluid” in prose as beautifully tangled as our deepest selves. Carmody reminds us that books can and should be an intersubjective practice of freedom, a home for our silences and hungers."
—Urayoán Noel
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Teresa Carmody (she/they) is a writer of fiction, creative nonfiction, inter-arts collaborations, and hybrid forms. Her books include The Reconception of Marie (2020), Maison Femme: a fiction (2015), and Requiem (2005). Their writing has appeared in LitHub, Los Angeles Review of Books, Michigan Quarterly Review, Matters of Feminist Practice, WaterStone Review, Lifework, and elsewhere. A co-founding director of Les Figues Press in Los Angeles, Carmody co-edited I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women and TrenchArt Monograph: hurry up please its time. She currently lives in Omaha and teaches in the Writer’s Workshop and low-residency MFA in Creative Writing Program at University of Nebraska Omaha. Find Carmody on Instagram @troseistrose and online at teresacarmody.com.
BOOK INFO
Pub Date: February 18, 2025
Print Length: 198 pages
Dimensions: 5.5 x 8.5 inches
ISBN: 978-1-957392-34-9
ABOUT THE BOOK
Teresa Carmody has been writing a character named Marie for over a decade and across a series of unrelated books. A Healthy Interest in the Lives of Others follows Marie through 25 years and 11 linked autofictions about community, friendship, writing, labor, and gossip. In this novel-in-stories, Marie is a temporary packager, a sexual assault crises worker, a learner and a seeker, a friend and a wife, a writing student, but most of all a writer. She studies everything from books and trash to her own queerness and non-human animals. She notes how humans survive by taking in each other’s looks, gestures, and language, and her curiosity takes her into the lives of others, embodied in stories that become a form of gossip. Among a lineage of constraint-based and experimental writers, Carmody, whose lived life uncannily resembles Marie’s fictional one, weaves an artist's coming of age that is also a meditation on how we make and unmake each other.
PRAISE FOR A HEALTHY INTEREST IN THE LIVES OF OTHERS
“As the fig tree needs the fig wasp, so it is that the formally dense, deeply intimate fictions of Teresa Carmody thrive on the invasion of essay, memoir, and even drawing through their branches. What satisfaction to see Marie, the protagonist of Carmody’s first novel, shift, like Balzac’s Lucien Chardon, from the provinces into a literary world previously only charted by Gilbert Sorrentino’s Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things. Carmody’s is a tree very full of figs.”
—Jonathan Lethem
“A Healthy Interest in the Lives of Others is a dynamic, inventive, and hilarious novel radically attuned to the delight and awkwardness of human interaction. With an unsparing eye and the dark humor of Can Xue and Jane Bowles, Teresa Carmody depicts the life of the writer's mind.”
—Patrick Cottrell
"What is a world when writing is the drug? Dryly, refreshingly funny, Teresa Carmody's sentences act like acid droplets in this cheeky meditation where writing is both the poison and the cure."
—Pola Oloixarac
"Carmody’s latest in their long-running exploration of a character named Marie is a playfully profound meditation on self and community that centers the outcasts (poets, artists, puppeteers, masseuses, adjuncts, caregivers, activists, nonhuman animals) of a materialist, segregated, medicalizing, and oppressive heteropatriarchy. By turns lyrical, processual, and metafictional, Carmody’s writing embraces vignettes, sketches, and visions as part of a spiritual summoning of a “future self, queer and fluid” in prose as beautifully tangled as our deepest selves. Carmody reminds us that books can and should be an intersubjective practice of freedom, a home for our silences and hungers."
—Urayoán Noel
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Teresa Carmody (she/they) is a writer of fiction, creative nonfiction, inter-arts collaborations, and hybrid forms. Her books include The Reconception of Marie (2020), Maison Femme: a fiction (2015), and Requiem (2005). Their writing has appeared in LitHub, Los Angeles Review of Books, Michigan Quarterly Review, Matters of Feminist Practice, WaterStone Review, Lifework, and elsewhere. A co-founding director of Les Figues Press in Los Angeles, Carmody co-edited I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women and TrenchArt Monograph: hurry up please its time. She currently lives in Omaha and teaches in the Writer’s Workshop and low-residency MFA in Creative Writing Program at University of Nebraska Omaha. Find Carmody on Instagram @troseistrose and online at teresacarmody.com.
BOOK INFO
Pub Date: February 18, 2025
Print Length: 198 pages
Dimensions: 5.5 x 8.5 inches
ISBN: 978-1-957392-34-9
ABOUT THE BOOK
Teresa Carmody has been writing a character named Marie for over a decade and across a series of unrelated books. A Healthy Interest in the Lives of Others follows Marie through 25 years and 11 linked autofictions about community, friendship, writing, labor, and gossip. In this novel-in-stories, Marie is a temporary packager, a sexual assault crises worker, a learner and a seeker, a friend and a wife, a writing student, but most of all a writer. She studies everything from books and trash to her own queerness and non-human animals. She notes how humans survive by taking in each other’s looks, gestures, and language, and her curiosity takes her into the lives of others, embodied in stories that become a form of gossip. Among a lineage of constraint-based and experimental writers, Carmody, whose lived life uncannily resembles Marie’s fictional one, weaves an artist's coming of age that is also a meditation on how we make and unmake each other.
PRAISE FOR A HEALTHY INTEREST IN THE LIVES OF OTHERS
“As the fig tree needs the fig wasp, so it is that the formally dense, deeply intimate fictions of Teresa Carmody thrive on the invasion of essay, memoir, and even drawing through their branches. What satisfaction to see Marie, the protagonist of Carmody’s first novel, shift, like Balzac’s Lucien Chardon, from the provinces into a literary world previously only charted by Gilbert Sorrentino’s Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things. Carmody’s is a tree very full of figs.”
—Jonathan Lethem
“A Healthy Interest in the Lives of Others is a dynamic, inventive, and hilarious novel radically attuned to the delight and awkwardness of human interaction. With an unsparing eye and the dark humor of Can Xue and Jane Bowles, Teresa Carmody depicts the life of the writer's mind.”
—Patrick Cottrell
"What is a world when writing is the drug? Dryly, refreshingly funny, Teresa Carmody's sentences act like acid droplets in this cheeky meditation where writing is both the poison and the cure."
—Pola Oloixarac
"Carmody’s latest in their long-running exploration of a character named Marie is a playfully profound meditation on self and community that centers the outcasts (poets, artists, puppeteers, masseuses, adjuncts, caregivers, activists, nonhuman animals) of a materialist, segregated, medicalizing, and oppressive heteropatriarchy. By turns lyrical, processual, and metafictional, Carmody’s writing embraces vignettes, sketches, and visions as part of a spiritual summoning of a “future self, queer and fluid” in prose as beautifully tangled as our deepest selves. Carmody reminds us that books can and should be an intersubjective practice of freedom, a home for our silences and hungers."
—Urayoán Noel
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Teresa Carmody (she/they) is a writer of fiction, creative nonfiction, inter-arts collaborations, and hybrid forms. Her books include The Reconception of Marie (2020), Maison Femme: a fiction (2015), and Requiem (2005). Their writing has appeared in LitHub, Los Angeles Review of Books, Michigan Quarterly Review, Matters of Feminist Practice, WaterStone Review, Lifework, and elsewhere. A co-founding director of Les Figues Press in Los Angeles, Carmody co-edited I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women and TrenchArt Monograph: hurry up please its time. She currently lives in Omaha and teaches in the Writer’s Workshop and low-residency MFA in Creative Writing Program at University of Nebraska Omaha. Find Carmody on Instagram @troseistrose and online at teresacarmody.com.
BOOK INFO
Pub Date: February 18, 2025
Print Length: 198 pages
Dimensions: 5.5 x 8.5 inches
ISBN: 978-1-957392-34-9