Caitlin R. Kiernan’s newest novel, The Drowning Girl: A Memoir, is a story written by India Morgan Phelps — Imp — about her encounters and involvement with Eva Canning, a siren or a wolf or “something far, far stranger,” as the flap copy says. It is her ghost story, her attempt to record her haunting and put it to rights when her own unreliable memory has wound circles and tributaries of fiction around the (factual) truth. The text is constructed as Imp’s recording of the events of 2008 from a point two years and some months in the future, initially, and slides between the past and present in her life as the story accretes and unwinds for the reader of the manuscript — a manuscript at first intended to be unread, to be ultimately private, but in front of us-the-reader all the same.
A helpful hint: here there be layers — layers upon layers, of fiction and fact, of fact and truth, of story and memoir, of tense and pronoun and audience, of real and unreal. The Drowning Girl: A Memoir is not an easy novel, but it rewards tenfold the effort and engagement of the reader who is willing to put in the work.
[Bewilderment and wonder]