Lamento by Madame Nielsen

In this masterful work of reverse autoficion, the multi-gendered performer and world history enactor Madame Nielsen stages a relentless trial of her former self. Writing as a mother addressing her daughter, Nielsen inhabits the perspective of the woman who survived the man she once was. What begins as a 'magical state of emergency', slowly dissolves in the smoke of a Parisian apartment fire. As the narcissism of the male creator abandons their domestic life for the sake of his art, the novel exposes the impossible friction between creative radicalism and the strenuous performance of the everyday.