In my end is my beginning

[bibliogramma]

My Death, Lisa Tuttle.

Lately I seem to have been reading, by happenstance I presume, books that in one way or another make me think about what I can only describe as the secret history of women, and the ways in which women as whole, real individuals are erased in our culture and its products. Sometimes it’s been an obvious theme, the writer’s intent being to examine either the reality of women’s lives, or some aspect of how women are disappeared and what they may have been doing that no one wanted to, or was able to, record. Sometimes – as in some of the classic SFF (written by men) that I’ve been re-reading of late - it has been about the total absence of women, or the absence of independence and agency in the women who are represented. Sometimes, it’s just been about a sense that there are untold women’s stories behind a narrative that’s focused more on the stories of men – something that would be less problematic if only there were as many narratives where men’s stories were left in the background in order to tell the stories of women.

Lisa Tuttle’s My Death is very much a story about ways in which women’s stories are erased – and reclaimed. It is also at some levels a vast metaphor for the act of creation when artist and subject merge in order to create a new vision.

In this novella, an unnamed narrator, an author still working through her grief at the death of her husband, is led by a series of apparent coincidences to embark upon writing a biography of an earlier novelist (supposedly a contemporary of Virginia Woolf et.al.) who influenced her when she was younger and which whom she has always felt a strange sense of connection. This novelist – Helen Ralston – had served as model and muse for her older lover and former teacher Willy Logan, whose paintings and novels became well-known, while Ralston’s slipped into obscurity. Ralston, thus, is simultaneously the women whose work is overshadowed by the man she is associated with, and the woman whose individuality is erased by her assigned function as inspiration.

The narrator’s quest to discover what happened to the real woman behind the muse leads her to the discovery of a painting by Ralston, titled “My Death,” which is a visual paradox, simultaneously picturing an island that she and her lover visit; and a woman’s body with the focus on her exposed vulva – yet another form of disappearing of the real woman, this time through the classic tropes of woman as the earth/the land/the soil and woman as sex.

There is much more to this novel, including a profound shift in perspective near the end that cannot be logically reconciled yet illuminates the core truths that Tuttle has to offer about the distinction between Woman as muse and women who themselves create art, between women who are observed, submerged, erased, and women who are seen, known, remembered for who they are as individuals and what they do for themselves.

It is only after this shift takes place that the speculative elements of this work emerge, but once they do, it becomes apparent that this novella – one of the Conversation Pieces series published by Aqueduct Press – lies securely within the scope of literary speculative fiction.

This not a book that can be understood wholly from a rational perspective, for like the painting that give the book its name, the story itself is more than one thing at once, and at the same time symbolic of other things entirely. But it works, and powerfully so, as a an exploration of women and their relations, historically and potentially, to art.