Choke Box
a Fem-Noir
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- ¥2,200
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- ¥2,200
発行者による作品情報
When Edward Tamlin disappears while writing his memoir, Jane Tamlin (his wife and the mother of his young children) begins to write a secret, corrective “counter-memoir” of her own. Calling the book Choke Box, she reveals intimate, often irreverent, details about her family and marriage, rejecting—and occasionally celebrating—her suspected role in her husband’s disappearance.
Choke Box isn’t Jane’s first book. From her room in the Buffalo Psychiatric Institute, she slowly reveals a hidden history of the ghost authorship that has sabotaged her family and driven her to madness. Her latest work, finally written under her own name, is designed to reclaim her dark and troubled story. Yet even as Jane portrays her life as a wife, mother, and slighted artist with sardonic candor, her every word is underscored by one belief above all others: the complete truth is always a secret. But the stories we tell may help us survive—if they don’t kill us first.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Milletti's debut is a bracing cri de coeur against the silencing of women's voices. "Ghost writer. Housewife. Mother. I've been trained to silence myself in countless ways," says the narrator, Jane Tamlin, who has been committed to a Buffalo psychiatric institute after a series of unsettling domestic incidents culminating in the mysterious disappearance of her husband. Jane has a "family history of authorship and unusual endings," having ghostwritten the bestselling memoirs of her teenage brother before his overdose. Written in her confinement, Jane's own narrative describes her "family's swift and complete devolution" in the months before her husband's disappearance, beginning when, in a blackout, she stabs her son with a butter knife. A nonfatal accident also befalls her infant daughter. All the while, her husband has quit his job, begun an affair with a neighbor, and decided to write his memoirs. Overwhelmed, underappreciated, and exhausted, Jane becomes convinced that her husband is orchestrating the strange events rocking the household: "Everything my husband writes becomes true." The novel's mishmash of genres domestic drama, psychological thriller, satire, supernatural tale, metafiction sometimes overwhelms, but Milletti is always entertaining in her dismantling of the madwoman in the attic trope, making for a sharp, playful novel.
