Reviewed by Charles Rammelkamp
Fit Into Me
by Molly Gaudry
Rose Metal Press
December 2025, $17.95, 208 pages, ISBN: 978-1941628379
Known for being an innovative publisher of cutting edge hybrid texts, Rose Metal Press has pushed the envelope even further with the publication of Molly Gaudry’s brilliant Fit Into Me, part memoir, part fiction, part philosophical meditation on the nature of creativity and the essence of identity. Along the way, Gaudry writes with insight about the Nineteenth Century American author Nathaniel Hawthorne, his love letters to his wife, and how The Scarlet Letter informs her own fiction – and non-fiction.
Indeed, copiously footnoted – 176 footnotes over the course of just slightly more pages – Fit Into Me also feels at times like a scholarly dissertation, and for sure Gaudry, a writing professor at Stony Brook University in New York, has a couple of master’s degrees and a PhD; she’s a true academic. A great deal of the memoir aspect of Fit Into Me involves her journey through academia and the trials and challenges she confronts along the way.
Fit Into Me is also a continuation of her previous literary works, a verse novel called We Take Me Apart and Desire: A Haunting, which involve the same characters, such as the tea house woman, who first appears as a bride-to-be in We Take Me Apart and later as a widow in Desire: A Haunting. Dedicated to her parents, Fit Into Me is also very much about family, from the generations of the tea house family that make up the fictional world of this book to the author’s own complicated background, the adopted Korean child of an American couple in Ohio, the father himself an adopted child. We Take Me Apart was similarly dedicated to her grandfather.
Gaudry’s footnotes range from Margaret Atwood and D.H. Lawrence, The Love Letters of Nathaniel Hawthorne 1841 – 1863, Kate Chopin, and Min Jin Lee to articles about concussions, fairy tales, ballet, and all of chapter five, “Everything I Know About Nell; Or Not Really a Chapter at All—Just a Piece of the Greater Puzzle,” which deals with Nell’s Breasts of Venus catastrophe, is in a footnote.
Nell is one of the characters in the story about the tea house woman. Nell works in the tea house. Gaudry tells us she is an amalgam of her grandmother and an 80-year-old woman who lived in an apartment above her in Salt Lake City. Fiction and non-fiction intertwine here almost indistinguishably, like coils of DNA. Nell “mothers” the tea house woman, whom she refers to as “Spiny.” We learn in the footnote that Nell, though she calls the tea house woman Spiny, knows the name of the tea house woman, while the author, Gaudry, does not. This causes Gaudry some consternation so she decides to call the tea house woman Constance. (Whew, a close one! Gaudry’s cleverness is a delight.)
Nell’s Breasts of Venus catastrophe involves Salvador Dali’s cookbook, Les Dîners de Gala, which contains a recipe for a chestnut and brandy dessert called “The Breasts of Venus” (Les seins de Venus). Suffice it to say that some tea house patrons object, and Gaudry brews us a tempest in a teapot in a tea house! To say Molly Gaudry has a subtle sense of humor is to understate the case. Indeed, when the tea house woman goes to her lover’s house dressed provocatively in just a fur coat, to seduce him (but is then rejected), she receives an emergency call about her father and winds up getting into an ambulance with only the fur coat on for cover. The situation is fraught, but the humor is almost slapstick.
So many of Gaudry’s sentences, from the very first – “Because most nights during the final semester of my MFA at George Mason University, while recovering from a mild traumatic brain injury, I fell asleep watching Prison Break on my laptop in bed.” – to the penultimate sentence – “Because words, imagined in the greatest yearning, as a means of finding love, defining it; as a means of shaping it (This is how it feels, this is where it hurts) and sharing with others its permutations, astonishments, exaltations, and erosions.” – seem to offer an explanation for some unstated condition. This highlights the provisional, exploratory nature of the work, and Gaudry’s central thesis that the act of writing is a tool for discovery of the self (“an act of faith, then, to write,” as she notes in the very last sentence).
So is the act of reading all about discovery. “And how did you become the person you are, wherever you are, reading this into existence, now?” Gaudry asks the reader. A voracious reader herself, Gaudry recognizes the dependence writers and readers have on one another. Writing, she says in that final sentence, is a communal act of revelation. The book ends on: “I have written this, will you read it?” Well, it actually ends on the footnote accompanying this thought, citing Thomas Glave’s essay “Panic, Despair: When the Words Do Not Come,” in the collection Words to Our Imagination and Dissent. But the compact between reader and writer is essential.
In the memoir feature of Fit Into Me Gaudry discusses her own writing process, how she used a “word bank” of nouns and verbs from various texts to prompt her writing. She began this with her first book, We Take Me Apart, using words from Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons. It worked so well for her that she did the same with Desire: A Haunting, only this time her source of words was John Ratti’s A Remembered Darkness. For Fit Into Me her source was Anne Carson’s translation of Sappho, If Not, Winter.
Throughout Fit Into Me Gaudry shows her word lists – ten times, in fact, the final one containing the words evening, long, alone, boy, see, motion, tears, dripping, left and pillow – and then the texts she constructs employing those words to develop the story about the tea house woman and her “Portuguese lover” Giovanni and the cast of characters that make up the “fiction” side of Fit Into Me, including family members, lovers, patrons of the tea house and others. Fiction and non-fiction bleed into one another.
One of the very real non-fictional memoir themes involves a head injury Gaudry sustained while running in 2011 in Fairfax, Virginia, where she was enrolled in a Master’s Degree program at George Mason University. It affects everything from her social life to her work habits. She sleeps fourteen hours a day. The ordeal continues when she goes to Salt Lake City in 2013 to start her PhD program. Gaudry details the therapy and treatment she undergoes at the Cleveland Clinic, the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, and through her own research and efforts, taking ballet classes at her therapists’ suggestion.
In the chapter called “Origin Story,” Gaudry discusses her birth family and her adoptive family, in both fictional and non-fictional terms, which mirrors her own confusion about her identity. Form and content work together here. And of course her background informs her fictional creation. Is the curly-haired nun aunt her biological mother? Is this another fiction? “Like anyone else I want an origin story.”
And Nathaniel Hawthorne? In the chapter called “Dreaming About a Thousand Things,” which we learn in a footnote is taken from one of Hawthorne’s letters, Gaudry confesses, “Trying to write this chapter, though, this essay, is proving a self-fulfilling failure. It’s supposed to be about Desire and about Nathaniel Hawthorne dreaming about a thousand things as he pours his heart out to Sophia Peabody,” whom he eventually marries and with whom he has a child.
Gaudry continues the incident of the tea house woman on Christmas Eve in Salt Lake City, when she is dismissed by her lover back to her van. minute by excruciating minute (11:23…11:24…). Then she interrupts herself to talk about Hawthorne and his passionate letters to Sophia. “Stoop down and kiss me—or I die!”
The contrast with the tea house woman’s “walk of shame” couldn’t be starker.
Gaudry goes on to say she turned a ghost character in Desire into the ghost of Pearl Prynne, Hester’s daughter in The Scarlet Letter, who herself was inspired by Hawthorne’s first-born daughter Una.
The chronicling of her writing process is one of the real treats of Fit Into Me. At one point she writes that she embraces “an expansive, ever-shifting definition of fiction.” And how! Entertainment and instruction are equal partners in Molly Gaudry’s book. Well – she is a writing teacher, after all.
About the reviewer: Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for Brick House Books in Baltimore and Reviews Editor for The Adirondack Review. His most recent releases are Sparring Partners from Mooonstone Press, Ugler Lee from Kelsay Books, Catastroika from Apprentice House, Presto from Bamboo Dart Press, See What I Mean? from Kelsay Books, The Trapeze of Your Flesh from Blazevox Books, and just out, The Tao According to Calvin Coolidge, published by Kelsay Books.