Perhaps I could be convinced of this claim if not for the fact that half of the chapters have been published independently in journals and anthologies over the course of many years. A review in New York magazine remarked that, 'Part of Myles's enduring appeal is that she's experimental in the true sense of the word every time you turn around, she's up something different'. It has been marketed by Grove Press as a stunning reinvention of the memoir. We don't even know who's publishing it'.' Later, Rosie urges the author to structure a certain chapter as 'a tapestry'.Ĭontributing to the journal-like traits of Afterglow are are the inclusion of Myles' pen-and-ink drawings random footnotes and the author's black-and-white photographs. Indeed, the entire book reads like a journal, with deeply personal and idiosyncratic meditations on the ontological potential of foam the possibility that her dog is the reincarnation of her alcoholic father and imagined interjections about the writing process from Rosie the dog: ''Oh yeah, very tasteful dog book. Yeah well how about my whole long life, Eileen.'ĭog-loving readers will recognise certain human/canine experiences that are virtually obligatory in all pet memoirs, such as the attempt to mate our furry friends with a fertile companion the always terrible day when they're taken to the vet to be desexed and eventual loss of health and mobility that is as heartbreaking as it is inevitable.Įarly in the book certain passages appear to have the shambolic and compressed quality of diary entries, and this similarity is confirmed towards the end of it, when a narrator called Bo Jean Harmonica confesses that she has lifted her text from the journal of Eileen Myles.

and oh yeah and when I was dying, get this, when they're wheeling me around town like a man who has money – then she writes on her legal pad 'puppet, puppetry'. Rosie is on an author tour discussing the ways in which her owner has misused her in life, and also in death: '. The live TV audience also consists of puppets. Continuing to play with form, in chapter five the author delivers the text of a short, animated script, in which an imagined television interview is conducted between Rosie and a talk show-host that happens to be a puppet.

Afterglow by Eileen Myles