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‘Kate Zambreno has invented a new form. It is a kind of absolute present, real life captured in closeup’
Annie Ernaux, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature
‘The Light Room is both a gift and a beacon’
Sinéad Gleeson, author of Constellations
‘Kate Zambreno has performed a miracle, capturing real, lived time from within the exhaustion of pandemic-era parenthood. The Light Room reminded me of that fundamental magic of writing – that the details of another person’s life, so precisely and honestly rendered, can instantly loosen the edges of your own life and make you feel less alone’
Jenny Odell, bestselling author of How to Do Nothing
In The Light Room, Zambreno offers her most profound and affecting work yet: a candid chronicle of life as a mother of two young daughters in a moment of profound uncertainty about public health, climate change, and the future we can expect for our children. Moving through the seasons, returning often to parks and green spaces, Zambreno captures the isolation and exhaustion of being home with a baby and a small child, but also small and transcendent moments of beauty and joy. Inspired by writers and artists ranging from Natalia Ginzburg to Joseph Cornell, Yuko Tsushima to Bernadette Mayer, Etel Adnan to David Wojnarowicz, The Light Room represents an impassioned appreciation of community and the commons, and an ecstatic engagement with the living world.
How will our memories, and our children’s, be affected by this time of profound disconnection? What does it mean to bring new life, and new work, into this moment of precarity and crisis? In The Light Room, Kate Zambreno offers a vision of how to live in ways that move away from disenchantment, and toward light and possibility.
Annie Ernaux, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature
‘The Light Room is both a gift and a beacon’
Sinéad Gleeson, author of Constellations
‘Kate Zambreno has performed a miracle, capturing real, lived time from within the exhaustion of pandemic-era parenthood. The Light Room reminded me of that fundamental magic of writing – that the details of another person’s life, so precisely and honestly rendered, can instantly loosen the edges of your own life and make you feel less alone’
Jenny Odell, bestselling author of How to Do Nothing
In The Light Room, Zambreno offers her most profound and affecting work yet: a candid chronicle of life as a mother of two young daughters in a moment of profound uncertainty about public health, climate change, and the future we can expect for our children. Moving through the seasons, returning often to parks and green spaces, Zambreno captures the isolation and exhaustion of being home with a baby and a small child, but also small and transcendent moments of beauty and joy. Inspired by writers and artists ranging from Natalia Ginzburg to Joseph Cornell, Yuko Tsushima to Bernadette Mayer, Etel Adnan to David Wojnarowicz, The Light Room represents an impassioned appreciation of community and the commons, and an ecstatic engagement with the living world.
How will our memories, and our children’s, be affected by this time of profound disconnection? What does it mean to bring new life, and new work, into this moment of precarity and crisis? In The Light Room, Kate Zambreno offers a vision of how to live in ways that move away from disenchantment, and toward light and possibility.
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Reviews
The Light Room is both a gift and a beacon
Early reviews called this book a miracle between two covers. In The Light Room, Zambreno writes about the intersections of catastrophes that unfold on a global scale . . . Zambreno writes with a sense of hope that will especially resonate with anyone who's soldiered through pandemic-era parenting
One of our most formally ambitious writers
Kate Zambreno has performed a miracle, capturing real, lived time from within the exhaustion of pandemic-era parenthood. The Light Room reminded me of that fundamental magic of writing-that the details of another person's life, so precisely and honestly rendered, can instantly loosen the edges of your own life and make you feel less alone
Elegant. . . . This is a book about the aloneness of motherhood - the limits of maternal attention, the dissolution of self, the mind-numbing tedium of raising small children - [and] a book about a "life inside" - not just inside the home, but inside the mind. . . . It may be among the most lasting literature of Covid, a lightbox for the future: the story of a mother looking for brightness in a diary of dark days
Kate Zambreno has invented a new form. It is a kind of absolute present, real life captured in closeup
When Kate Zambreno writes she must use a special microscope, with which she studies the dust in the sunlight, and the clutter of motherhood, and the thinnest fibers of exhaustion and hope. The Light Room is a miracle, a wooden box with a golden clasp filled with the specimens of all our most precious, disappearing days