A provocative, exuberant novel about time, memory, desire, and the imagination from the internationally bestselling and prizewinning author of The Blazing World. A young woman, S.H., moves to New York City in 1978 to look for adventure and write her first novel, but finds herself distracted by her mysterious neighbor, Lucy Brite. As S.H. listens to Lucy through the thin walls of her dilapidated building, she carefully transcribes the woman’s bizarre monologues about her daughter’s violent death and her need to punish the killer. Forty years later, S.H. stumbles upon the journal she kept that year and writes a memoir, Memories of the Future, in which she juxtaposes the notebook’s texts, drafts from her unfinished comic novel, and her commentaries on them to create a dialogue among selves over the decades. She remembers. She misremembers. She forgets. Events of the past take on new meanings. She works to reframe her traumatic memory of a sexual assault. She celebrates the legacy of the wild and rebellious Dada artist-poet, the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. As the book unfolds, you witness S.H. write her way through vengeance and into freedom. Smart, funny, angry, and poignant, Hustvedt’s seventh novel brings together the themes that have made her one of the most celebrated novelists working today: the strangeness of time, the brutality of patriarchy, and the power of the imagination to remake the past.

Not many members of NUBClub had a chance to read Hustvedt's latest, but those of us that did were pleasently surprised by what we found. Given what we've read of her previously, we were expecting a complex and ambiguous work about complex social relationships. Instead we got a very meta story directly tackling the bias women face and a ton more witches than we bargained for. There was something quite nice about seeing Hustvedt hit issues of patriarchy and women's struggles head on in direct observation, and her choice of setting was terrific. The moment of New York she presents is compelling and rich. But more than anything else, Hustvedt paints a terrific picture of friendship. Paralleling the community of the narrator's small family with the coven of witches, and showing how those communities both protect their own in the idiosyncratic and flawed ways they do feel real and precious and touching. None of this would argue this was her greatest work of literature -- there just wasn't enough complexity in it to make it that rich -- but as a good read about reflecting on life experience and valuing relationships, it was worth the ride.