Word Banks and Footnotes

Fit Into Me—A Novel: A Memoir

by Molly Gaudry

Rose Metal Press, 2025

reviewed by Seana Graham

Molly Gaudry’s Fit Into Me has found a great match in Rose Metal Press, which specializes in publishing hybrid works. This one fits the bill in multiple ways, being hybrid in its intention to be both a novel and a memoir, as witnessed in the title, and in its innovative use of footnotes, to name but two aspects.

I believe this is the first book I’ve read that has footnotes (three of them!) just for its table of contents. Following these, there’s a prologue, a first chapter and only then a title page and a preface. The story has begun before we even really know it’s started.

As the book opens, Gaudry is doing physical therapy after what she describes as “a mild traumatic brain injury” (though I wouldn’t call it mild), which we learn has left her with double vision, and with intense migraine reactions to smells, among other symptoms. Gaudry has already written two books, We Take Me Apart and Desire: a Haunting, which deal with some of the same content as this one, so readers of those books may already be aware of some of the disclosures here, but it may be a spoiler for those who haven’t  read them to mention that, among other things, Gaudry was a Korean born child who was adopted by an American family when she was three.

As in her previous books, she finds creating a word bank first to be essential. With her first book, she used Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons as the source of this word bank—with this volume she is using Sappho’s If Not, Winter, as translated by Anne Carson.

“I like to believe these word banks bring with them the souls of the books from which they’re taken…there’s something really lovely and reassuring to me about my process. I’m not alone, writing into a void. The other writer’s words are there, guiding, encouraging, leading the way. The result is both a strange, new thing and an extended ode.”

These word banks are not the only borrowings from other writers. Gaudry’s footnotes provide a kind of syllabus of other works that any writer struggling to find their path might find instructive. And the scope is extensive—everyone from Margaret Atwood, whose words provide this book with its title, to Jose Saramago, Ursula K. LeGuin and perhaps especially Marguerite Duras, Oh, and let’s not forget Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose love letters to his wife form an important text for Gaudry’s ruminations.

As Gaudry proceeds with her project, she wonders, “Can my fiction fit into my nonfiction? Can my fiction get closer to the truth than my nonfiction? Can my fiction reveal and expose vulnerability, where my nonfiction might withhold?”

Writing towards these riddles, she says, became an obsession.

The protagonist of the fictional part of this book, the tea house woman, has appeared in her two prior books, first as a bride-to-be and then as a widow. In passing, Gaudry mentions that in those works, she was never given a name. Now she has one–Constance. This story centers around one crucial Christmas Eve, in which a date goes horribly wrong and the night ends in a family emergency.

As with David Foster Wallace’s famous footnotes, Gaudry’s can sometimes take on a life of their own. In the most extreme example, one whole chapter becomes a footnote to another chapter.

And fiction and nonfiction blend in the tale of seeing her brother, who visits her in Salt Lake City. It is true (I think, because who knows?) that Gaudry went back to  South Korea and met her biological family or a strand of it, and that she and her little brother became quite attached while she was there. But it turns out that this visit and even her origin story itself become less clear the further we proceed. Which, of course, should make us ponder our own family histories. 

There are many things that Gaudry explores in her own interesting life that I was happy to learn about. The struggles with identity that being adopted from a foreign country invoke. The short- or long-term effects that someone who’s been concussed may have to live with. Even the glimpses into what an academic life looks like in the present age were welcome perspectives.

I’ll close this brief review of a fascinating work with the words she ends her first chapter with:

In my notes, I granted myself permission.

Go ahead with these words, let them inspire.

See what comes.

Seana Graham is the book review editor at Escape Into Life. She has also reviewed for the biography website Simply Charly. She attempts to keep up with her various blogs, including Confessions of Ignorance, where she tries to learn a little bit more about the many things she does not know. She has published stories in a variety of literary journals. The recent anthology Annihilation Radiation  from Storgy Press, includes one of them. Santa Cruz Noir, a title from Akashic Press, features a story of hers about the city in which she currently resides. 

Get a copy of Fit Into Me at Rose Metal Press

Molly Gaudry interviewed on YouTube about her adoptee identity

Have/Has/Had interviews Molly Gaudry