Who Is Mary Sue?

Description

In the language of fan fiction, a 'Mary Sue' is an idealised and implausibly flawless character: a female archetype that can infuriate audiences for its perceived narcissism. Such is the setting for this brilliant and important debut by Sophie Collins. In a series of verse and prose collages, Who Is Mary Sue? exposes the presumptive politics behind writing and readership: the idea that men invent while women reflect; that a man writes of the world outside while a woman will turn to the interior. Part poetry and part reportage, at once playful and sincere, these fictive-factive miniatures deploy original writing and extant quotation in a mode of pure invention. In so doing, they lift up and lay down a revealing sequence of masks and mirrors that disturb the reflection of authority. A work of captivation and correction, this is a book that will resonate with anyone concerned with identity, shame, gender, trauma, composition and culture: everyone, in other words, who wishes to live openly and think fearlessly in the modern world. Who Is Mary Sue? is a work for our times and a question for our age: it is a handbook for all those willing to reimagine prescriptive notions of identity and selfhood.

Sophie Collins grew up in Bergen, North Holland, and now lives in Edinburgh. She is co-editor of tender, an online arts quarterly, and editor of Currently & Emotion (Test Centre, 2016), an anthology of contemporary poetry translations. small white monkeys, a text on self-expression, self-help and shame, was published by Book Works in 2017 as part of a commissioned residency at Glasgow Women's Library. Who Is Mary Sue? is her first poetry collection.

"Collins encourages wildness. She strips her poems of context, which invites readers to collaborate and imagine with her.... Who Is Mary Sue? is a master class in open-ended reading. By combining poetry with feminist criticism, Collins helps readers break the confines of entrenched sexist expectations. By presenting myriad examples of impersonality, she also helps readers break the confines of apparently personal poetry and invites them into the imaginative process as poets or oracles themselves.... The differing accounts that readers form of Collins's poetry cannot be proven false. One reader may find the collection entirely personal; another might find it remote as deep space. Who Is Mary Sue? will speak in as many voices as it has readers. Male writers have long been offered this multiplicity. Who Is Mary Sue? is a welcome example of a female writer claiming it for herself and for others."--Poetry Foundation "Are women capable of writing fiction? From the kinds of questions you sometimes hear at readings, you wouldn't think so. Enter Sophie Collins's Who Is Mary Sue?, which combines lyric essays and poetic fragments to explore the idea of female creativity, the narrative I, and the border between truth and fiction. Drawing her title from the concept of the Mary Sue, that tacky authorial stand-in found in the world of fan fiction, Collins questions the identity of the female artist through poems about twinhood and Story of O, and with quotes from Rachel Cusk, Jamaica Kincaid, Joanna Russ, and more. It's at once thoughtful and thought-provoking--though I read it over the holiday break, I'm still reeling a week later."--Rhian Sasseen, Paris Review "part literary criticism, part feminist manifesto, this debut by an Edinburgh poet uses quotations, aphorisms and verse to explode the archetype of the 'Mary Sue' in fan fiction; the closest analog would be the 'manic pixie dream girl, ' too good to be true."--New York Times