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“Mercury Retrograde was a question of social psychic energy writ large,” writes Segal.
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Or rather, she sees clearly that they are already - perhaps were always - inextricable.Īs Emily reflects on this formative era in her life, she muses on the pseudosciences and belief systems that structure and arbitrate modern life, providing a framework for processing the unknown or inexplicable: astrology, trend forecasts, algorithms, art. Unlike other artists who found it “normal to design Powerpoints for a corporate law firm by day, and conduct a Marxist painting practice by night, without ever admitting that one had anything to do with the other,” Emily actively seeks to intermingle and confuse these facets of her life. “I wanted a grander stage and less responsibility,” she admits. Throughout the novel, Emily attempts to hack the “contradictions of working and ‘making work’ in the big city” she wants the ability to participate in what she condemns and still get to condemn it.
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In the gendered work environment, sex, friendships, and creative partnerships become muddled. The wunderkind “founder boys” ooze a cliched confidence and charisma. Underwriting that ambition is a much more material one: she has less than $600 in her bank account and she sometimes “became so anxious about money that a metallic tang filled my mouth and I had to lie down.” The startup presents a path for transforming her “excess of cultural capital” into “actual capital.” eXe epitomizes tech bro-dom, and she soon finds herself knee-deep in the company culture, complete with meditation rooms and bottomless cab fare. After hemming and hawing, she accepts a job at an overfunded tech start-up called eXe, justifying it as “a chance to write on the membrane of reality itself.” She’s compelled not by the business, but by the idea that she could “genetically engineer the brand as art” so that “even after I left the company, the brand would continue to show up in the world - on billboards, on collateral, on audience-generated memes.” She’s attracted by the idea that she could create an “infinite, large-scale artwork, without lifting a finger or going broke.” The book itself is propulsive and engaging, the narrator relatable if not always sympathetic, and prickling with humor aimed indiscriminately at herself and those around her.
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“Soon I was cracked out on a new observation,” she writes, “in brand strategy presentations it was totally acceptable to generalize, globalize, lob assumptions as truth, casually plagiarize, misconstrue sociological data, and worse, as long as it was persuasive and narratively coherent.” Emily characteristically sees this as fodder for her art: “It was the feeling I’d always yearned for when I’d tried to write fiction,” she remarks. Through autofiction, she depicts and reinforces the semantic slipperiness of art, of advertising, of technology - of meaning itself.Įqual parts nefarious and seductive, the world of branding grabs Emily’s attention on aesthetic and theoretical levels. Writing about autofiction for Vulture, Christian Lorentzen says that “the way the term is used tends to be unstable.” This, he adds, “makes sense for a genre that blends fiction and what may appear to be fact into an unstable compound.” The destabilizing quality of the genre plays well into Segal’s story. At the same time, it reminds us that good fiction is frequently rooted in the truth. It boldly asserts the realities that quietly underlie all memoir: that memory is subjective and all narratives are in some way contrived. Emily Segal, Mercury Retrograde (Deluge Books, 2020)Īutofiction has gained prominence in the last decade as a genre that skirts easy categorization.