Fiction – so close to lying – has always been a suspicious enterprise, not least to those undertaking it: from the elaborate frame narratives of the 18th century (all those found texts and epistolary novels) to the research expeditions of Victorian realists to the autobiographical turn of the present, authors have long found ways to avoid seeming to make things up, or what Rachel Cusk once called the “fake and embarrassing” business of “making up John and Jane and having them do things together”.
US writer Kathryn Scanlan has some especially crafty workarounds up her sleeve. One of her previous books, Aug 9 – Fog (2019), comprised sentences repurposed from the diary of a stranger. Her new book, Kick the Latch, is a kind of ghosted memoir drawn on conversations with Sonia, a horse trainer from the midwest, taking the form of a few dozen reflections and vignettes that range in length from three pages to just 15 words, as she looks back on her life and work from childhood deep into middle age.
It opens with an eight-line reminiscence in which we learn Sonia was born in 1962 with a dislocated hip, a setback overcome within the course of the paragraph (“Ended up I could walk”), quietly sounding the keynote of a book in which trauma is never allowed to become definitive. Fending for herself in a poor neighbourhood while her largely offstage parents make rent, she wants to be a jockey from an early age, learning to ride at weekends on a horse hired by the hour: “Once, on my birthday, I got to rent him for five hours straight.”
