Marcia Golub

Secret Correspondence
Ticknor & Fields
1990

"Marcia Golub's extraordinary first novel is a Chinese box full of different characters' diaries and letters. The interlockings are poignant, desperate, and sometimes very funny. Every writer hopes for a single, authentic voice; Marcia Golub commands a whole choir."
--Thomas Mallon


"Undoubtedly some new buzzwords will have to be coined to describe the kind of work that Marcia Golub is beginning to do, because its like has not been seen in contemporary fiction for a long time. Here is a deep understanding of archetypal psychology, of myth, dream, religion, practical magic, all combined with a consummate artistry in a story of extraordinary power. Secret Correspondence reads less like a first novel than like a first masterpiece."
--Madison Smartt Bell


"Marcia Golub's first novel is a technically sophisticated collage of diary entries and letters from the files of Gabriella Segul, a painter whose work begins winning international recognition only after she disappears--in 1993. Although framed with bits of her biographer's story (set in 2013), the majority of the novel consists of Gabby's reflections on art, sex and madness, interlaced with excerpts from the journal of her mad uncle, Moisha, a document with which she becomes increasingly obsessed. The result is an abstract portrait of an artist's inner life as she drifts between her dank job as a copy editor of sex magazines and her empty apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side, and as, with the loss of her parents, uncle, lover and neighbor, she gradually loses her own grip on life. There is wit as well as pathos in Gabriella's growing alienation. But for all its concern with the imagination, the novel is liveliest when it turns to the heroine's incisive descriptions of other characters--oddballs like the veteran who patrols her basement dressed in aluminum foil or the editor who doubles as a shopping-bag man, conducting a lively freelance business from the street. Even better is Gabby's collection of letters from literal-minded magazine fans."
--Robin Bromley
The New York Times


"In Secret Correspondence, Marcia Golub takes us into the future by setting her novel in the early 1990s, but her characters are also prisoners of the past.

"Golub's technique is variously called `a juxtaposition of different voices,' `a collage of letters, reminiscences, a diary within a diary' and an `intersection of magic, myth, madness and art.'

"The central consciousness is that of Gabriella Segul, the undiscovered artist-genius who has spent 17 years of her life editing and answering letters for the publishers of magazines called Sin, Slut and Soap Bubble. It is disconcerting to read some of this wretched correspondence on the same page as a description of Gabriella the artist gaining inspiration for her masterful portraits.

"Erratic displacement may be the effect Golub intends. She mixes snatches of the cynical present in the voice of her narrator with songs from the prophetic past sung by the old uncle. In the world Golub shows us, art, myth and desire all come together in the strangely modern image of Venus arising from the bathtub."
--Donna Lund
The Pittsburgh Press


"A story of consummate skill and subtle power."
--The Macon Beacon

Wishbone
Baskerville Publishers
1995


Discover Great New Writers selection



"Mabel Fleish, author of a broodingly erotic novel, is haunted by the years-ago drowning death of her baby son, the years-ago suicide of her 16-year-old first love, the erratic behavior of her young daughter, and various characters from her book. Yes, she does see a psychiatrist, but Dr. Xavier only feeds the confusion. Obsessed with death, love, and sex, hemmed in by people entranced with her book, and threatened by disturbing letters, she questions whether the suicide ever occurred. Rather bizarre content, then, difficult to classify and challenging to read, but oddly balanced and entertaining."
--Library Journal

"A professor's wife is the author of a book about an evil madman, but her fiction turns into horrifying fact when she's abducted by an insane man who believes she has captured his life's story on paper. In fact, everyone is hoping to benefit from Mabel's ill-begotten book; from the madman to a reporter. The black comedy is subtle and the tension riveting."
The Bookwatch

I'd Rather Be Writing
Writer's Digest Books
1999



TIP: If the writing won't flow, try to force it--freewrite, cajole, threaten, bribe. As a last resort take a nap. When you wake up think about your dreams and write them down. Use them to help you over the obstacle that's keeping you from writing. If you didn't dream, spend some time while you are still lying there to think about your project. See if you can find a sentence or image to get you started again.

TIP: Keep a notebook with you at all times and jot notes when ideas occur to you. One word on a slip of paper can serve to help you recall a story idea, but if you don't write that one word down you may not even recall you had a story idea.

TIP: When you can't get started, freewrite for a set amount of time, to lubricate the writing joints and get you past the fear factor. Moan, kvetch, write about the problem you are having beginning, write about what you want to write about. Eventually you will find a way to begin, just to get you away from that annoying, querulous voice.

TIP: Use mindless routine tasks to think out ideas, to plot, to dream stories through. A reader wrote to me recently, telling me she likes to knead dough when she's trying to dream out an idea. Walking, doing dishes, mowing the lawn, knitting, cleaning, any activity that doesn't demand a lot of mental attention. If you combine exercise time with "writing" you will have more time for both. Don't listen to your third-grade teacher: Be a daydreamer.

I'd Rather Be Writing
Copyright © 1999 by Marcia Golub
All rights reserved

Ticknor & Fields, 1990
ISBN 0-89919-916-X

REVIEWS
Minnesota Public Radio
"In this stunningly original debut novel, Marcia Golub nails down the twisty sensibility of the artist, indeed of anyone who lives chiefly in her own mind. Gabby's inner life is rich in magic, myth and dream as her visible life is meager. Mired in doubt, she manages to see the world fresh. We see how blurry is the boundary between past and present, presence and absence, wisdom and madness. How readily the creative mind slides into another life.

"Golub celebrates the artist's allegiance to the past--not so strange in a world which neglects her in the present. Gabby Segul clings to the rejected artist's fantasy: `After I'm gone, then they'll know.' And she's right. By disappearing, she wins out over isolation and neglect.

"Golub writes as Gabby painted, to raise the dead. Secret Correspondence does just that--splendidly."
--Susan Williams

Library Journal
"Twenty years after her disappearance, in 1993, we come to know--and miss--Gabby Segul through the diary she kept during her last year in Manhattan. Artist, astute observer of human foibles (including her own), bemused employee at a fanzine/porn publishing house, jilted lover, loyal friend, and niece: these only begin to describe the scope and depth of the diarist. In this first published novel, Golub is clever, but not at the expense of her characters or the reader; hers is a fine and telling portrait of life at the close of the 20th century among people who have lived and been shaped by earlier decades. The inclusion of explicit (and realistic) letters received by Gabby's publishing firm must be noted, but they are not an extraneous ploy by the novelist. For major urban fiction collections and students of contemporary fiction."--Francisca Goldsmith

Booklist
"Again and again the reader is reminded, through humor and irony, rich in Jewish idiom, that there is a story within a story. When Gabriella Segul, 39, schlock-magazine copy editor/neglected painter, disappeared in the early 1990s, she left behind many paintings and a diary concerning her Jewish immigrant family, the few friends she had, and her artistic worldview. Lara, Gabby's adopted niece, finds herself drawing closer to her aunt through the diary: `Then the humor of the situation hit her. Like a mirror reflecting a mirror, here she was, responding to entries in Gabby's diary that were in turn responses to entries her uncle's.' Golub masterfully plays with folklore and magic, from `Little Red Riding Hood' to the Kabbalah and numerology. Although set in the near future in New York's Upper West Side, this novel considers questions transcending time and place. Can creating art be an erotic experience? Can memory bring the dead to life? An artful choice for fiction collections."
--Danny Rochman

Publishers Weekly
"The ambitious structure of this debut novel is akin to that of a dream of one of the protagonists: `Like an Escher picture, where the repetition of one thing in a pattern metamorphoses into something else in its negative space.' Lara...sifts through the journals of her aunt Gabby, an alienated, lonely artist who disappeared 20 years earlier, in the 1990s. Preparing a biography, Lara also seeks clues to her now-famous aunt's whereabouts. Gabby herself, it emerges, undertook a similar quest with the diaries of her supposedly mad, vanished uncle, gradually yielding her identity to his--just as Lara, under the spell of her aunt's writing, grows increasingly like Gabby.... The author's thesis: that rejection will not vanquish the marginal or disaffected, that their pain inevitably returns to society and, occasionally, surfaces as art."


San Diego Union
"One of the 13 epigraphs that opens Marcia Golub's troubling first novel, Secret Correspondence, comes from the pen of the book's central character, Gabby Segul: `If it isn't art,' she writes in her journal, `it's madness, do you understand?'

"Through the course of the novel, we come to understand only too well that insanity is the backside of art here. The same intuitive gift that enables the artist to suggest relationships between things where none exists (metaphor, say) is the same curse that afflicts the mad with glimpses of the hidden interconnectedness of everything--the `secret correspondence' of the title.

"The novel is a mosaic of several elements. The first concerns Lara Jacob, who is researching a biography of her adoptive aunt, the famed artist Gabriella Segul, who vanished 20 years before the opening of the novel. Lara has little to base her biography on because her aunt was unrecognized until after her disappearance and was something of a hermit as well. So Lara focuses her research on the things Gabby left behind, her artwork, her letters and her diary.

"The diary takes us nearly the whole of Golub's book. In it she captures an original and unusual voice. Often funny, more often disturbing, the journal details Gabby's reclusive life and her various obsessions--her parents' death, the homme fatal she fell in love with and the Yiddish diaries of her meshuga (insane) Uncle Moisha, which she has had translated and which are leavened throughout her diary.

"Gabby needs to know if Moisha was truly mad, as her parents told her, or simply a misunderstood wise man, a person like herself whos art was never recognized in his lifetime.

"Additionally, Gabby's journal is peppered with `crazy letters' that people send to the schlock publishing outfit where she works. There are few differences between Moisha's nearly sane ravings in his diary and the sad, twisted correspondence Gabby reads at work.

"The titular correspondence has less to do with these letters than with the strange associations that arise between Gabby and her Uncle Moisha. Both are oddballs with artistic inclinations, both keep journals, and both are obsessed with their failed relationships.

"The correspondences between their journals grows as Gabby, like her uncle before her, loses her job, loses touch with her few friends and slowly loses her sanity. Moisha's journal entries, Gabby's dreams, the conversations she overhears, any stray thought--all become associated in Gabby's delusions with the `message' she feels her uncle is telling her. Her entries become more paranoid and out-of-touch to the point that her last dozen entries share the same crazy tone as her uncle's.

"The reader, too, becomes caught in this mad web of association. Relationships between the novel's different elements become clear, and the grand design of the book emerges....

"Golub's book is dense with idea and emotion, alternately poignant and funny, and written with a zeal, style and sense of voice that is rare among first novels. It makes us hunger for her next."--Michael Stearns

Jewish Forward
"It is when Moishe's angel sets out to tell a Kabbalistic parable or two that the novel is at its most gripping. Ms. Golub can unapologetically assume the voice of a simple, straightforward storyteller--and what stories her angels tell! One wonders what a collection of these might be like, as a commentary upon and extension of that Jewish tradition which has, in this century, been left almost entirely in the hands of Isaac Bashevis Singer."
--Bonnie Gordon

Newport News
"Secret Correspondence is a metaphysical treatise that through a combination of reality and fantasy and the spiritual and the earthly proposes plausible answers to some of the unanswerable questions of life which have transcended time and place. Among them: The continuity of life and its variances, and the interstices between magic, myth, madness and art."
--Evalyne C. Robinson