63 pages • 2 hours read
Sulari GentillThe Woman in the Library
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Power of Reading and Writing
In traditional narrative and fiction, there is a hard boundary between the reader and the writer, and the text the writer delivers to the reader is well-made, with the process that informs the rhetorical and creative choices the writer makes skillfully hidden from view. The Woman in the Library abides by none of those conventions because it is metafiction. Metafiction is a work that makes the reader pay attention to the text as a product of reading and writing practices rather than a product whose meaning is determined by the intent of the author. The narrative structure—a novel about an entitled, dangerous reader writing to a writer writing a novel about a writer writing a novel inspired by real people and events—calls attention to the acts of both reading and writing as powerful means for constructing reality.
The Woman in the Library is a story-within-a-story, with the correspondence from Leo A to Hannah Tigone being the frame narrative that sits outside of it all. Leo A is a reader who insists on collapsing the boundary between himself and the text and between himself and Hannah, so much so that he re-writes Hannah’s novel because it doesn’t abide by his rigid beliefs about what a mystery should be. When he stalks Hannah, arriving almost in reach of her in Australia, he closes the distance between the writer and reader. Leo is a character who uses his interaction with Hannah and the mystery genre as a pretext for murdering people, all in the name of research. The danger this places Hannah in is a reminder that the collapse of that boundary, especially in this age of social media contacts between writers and readers, may not always be healthy for fandoms or writers.
Gentill also comments on the identity of the writer and the nature of writing in the novel. Hannah’s voice is invisible to the reader except when filtered through Leo A’s emails and responses from the FBI agent and Hannah’s lawyer. The relationship between Leo A and Hannah is one in which you, the reader, must rely on Leo A’s distorted recreation of Hannah’s voice to imagine who Hannah might be. The only other indications of who Hannah the author might be are the authorial choices she makes, as when she places respirators/masks on every character after Leo A scolds her for refusing to use anti-masking sentiment as a source of conflict in her novel. The writer appearing only as an invisible hand shaping events is part of traditional narrative, but because Gentill chooses to show the reader how the ubiquitous hoodies made it into the chapter after Leo gives her a note on including racial markers, the reader comes to understand that the boundary between the world of the writer and the world the writer creates is porous.
These boundaries may be porous, but a specific text may give readers little insight into who the writer is in their day-to-day lives. A text is not the writer, in other words, and it would be a mistake to think that reading a text gives one special insight into the writer’s mind.
Writing What You Know
An old saw for beginning writers is that they should write what they know. In The Woman in the Library, the writers take that idea to heart, but Gentill presents a more complicated picture of the relationship between real life and creative works.
As a writer, Freddie relies on her ability to collapse the boundary between imagination and reality to fuel her creativity. The work that got her the fellowship was one for which she mined her grief and that of her family after the death of her sister. She worries that she will be unable to produce something as good since there would be “no more pain to draw upon” (164-65). The manuscript she works on throughout the novel is one that gains momentum as she incorporates dialogue, physical details about the characters, and settings from her own life. That is her gift as a writer, but it is also a burden.
Freddie finds that Caroline Palfrey’s death causes her words to “com[e] quickly, swirling into sentences that are strong [….] It feels a little indecent to write so well in the wake of tragedy” (12). As a writer, she makes the decision to incorporate details of the murder into her own writing because they make for a good story. The needs of her “muse” (37)—Freddie’s word for her creative inspiration—outweigh any ethical concerns about using the dead woman’s story as inspiration. Real-life crime is good for her writing, but it is not good for her as a person. As she grows closer to the other people from the library, especially Cain, she finds herself confronting more and more moral quandaries because she is writing what she knows.
Cain is another writer whose reliance on personal experience helped him create Settling, a first novel that propelled him to success as a writer, and his work-in-progress inspired by Isaac Harmon is also rooted in personal experience. The overlap between personal experience and his creative transformation of that experience poses a threat to Cain. When Marigold volunteers to do factual research on Isaac to help Cain write his book, Cain rejects her help, saying the new work is “a novel, not an autobiography” (91). This defensiveness shows that he, like Freddie, fears that reliance on traumatic experiences as inspiration for his first works means he won’t be able to produce narrative that deviates from experiences he has had in real life.
The writing lives of Freddie and Cain show that personal experience can be a powerful source of inspiration, but too much reliance on it can undermine writers’ confidence.
Reality Versus Imagination
While Freddie and Cain struggle to come to terms with the role of personal experience in their acts of creation, other characters breach the line between imagination and reality as well, but they do so in ways that are dangerous and destructive. Whit and Leo A/Wil Saunders are thwarted writers who eventually resort to ethically questionable acts and outright violence to make the world conform to their vision of it.
Whit is an excellent writer as Freddie discovers when she lies her way into his house. He is also ambitious, so much so that he collaborates with Caroline to deceive Cain and the other people in the library for the sake of a good story. He and Caroline “intended to get close to Cain, and then to put him under pressure…a story on whether a murderer could in fact be reformed” (246). He kills Caroline when she attempts to steal the story out from under him, points the police and FBI at Cain as a stalker and repeat murderer, may have attacked his own mother, and shoots Cain, all in the service of enhancing his professional reputation as a writer. His inability to bring any ethical lens to bear on getting material for a story empowers him to act in ways that violate the trust of his friends and lead to death.
Leo A/Wil Saunders has a related problem. He constantly takes Hannah to task for failing to acknowledge reality—the COVID pandemic; debates around masking; racism; and more innocuous details, such as diction and discontinuities like the ages of characters. Leo A isn’t able to tolerate deviations from how he sees the world. When people challenge his vision or even assert that there might be more than one way of seeing things, he resorts to violence. When the literary agent won’t agree to represent him and thus acknowledge his inflated sense of his own talent, he kills her. When Hannah chooses to represent conflict as interpersonal tension, Leo eggs her on to introduce violence, as when he encourages her to insert sexualized humiliation and violence into the sex scene between Cain and Freddie.
He is at his most dangerous when he makes reality and imagination match through violence. Hannah only obliquely represents the violence done to Boo and Jean Metter, but Leo A likely kills people to generate realistic photos of what the crime scenes in Hannah’s book should look like. His stalking of Hannah is also an instance of trying to make imagination and reality identical. Whit is also too literal a thinker. He kills Caroline, making the imagined killing of a woman a reality.
Gentill paints imagination as a powerful force writers must struggle with to give the world pieces of art. As with anything powerful, there is always the danger that people may misuse it.
