TRUE FICTION
Louise Glück’s first published work of fiction explores truth, reality, and inner life through the eyes of infant twins.
Review by Marda Messick
Why do I suffer? Why am I ignorant?
Cells in a great darkness. Some machine made us;
it is your turn to address it, to go back asking
what am I for? What am I for?
—from Mother and Child
In Marigold and Rose, A Fiction, Louise Glück imagines the inner life of infant twins in a way that surprises, delights, saddens, and subverts our expectations of both literary form and child development. The Nobel Prize-winning poet’s first published work of fiction is unique. Is it a fairy tale, a fable, a meditation on language, time, and change? Is it even a story? This profound and witty little book defies categorization.
Glück dedicates the sixty-four-page book to her twin granddaughters, Emmy and Lizzy, born during the long isolation of the pandemic. Their father regularly sent videos of the growing babies that Glück watched over and over. This close and loving observation of her grandchildren’s first year inspired her to write and quickly complete “a fiction.”
In a 1989 lecture, “The Education of the Poet,” Glück told her audience, “The fundamental experience of the writer is helplessness.” Marigold, the introspective twin sister of sociable Rose, might agree. She’s writing a book, although she can’t yet speak—the twins are less than a year old. But they can think and, somehow, communicate with each other. (“We have inner lives, Rose thought.”) They wonder about their unity and their differences. They speculate about the puzzling behavior of Mother and Father, Grandmother and Other Grandmother. Since they can’t ask questions, they “take what they could pick up, like pigeons in the park.”
Marigold’s own creative process is altogether different from that of her creator. Her book “was taking shape in her head all day it seemed. How could it take shape without words? Marigold didn’t know. How little we know, Marigold thought.” She waits to hear what the book wants, “but the book was completely silent in the way of non-existent things. I will wait as long as I have to, Marigold thought. When the book is ready to talk, it will talk.”
Marigold’s persistent trust in her book’s becoming echoes Glück’s description, in the 1989 lecture, of a poem’s manifestation: “It seems to me that the desire to make art produces an ongoing sense of longing . . . Always there seems something ahead, the next poem or story, visible, at least apprehensible, but unreachable. . . It’s like a lighthouse, except that, as one swims toward it, it backs away.”
A fundamental mystery has already been hinted at: being and non-being, and the corollaries of presence and absence, silence and speech.
Marigold intends for her book to be about what she does know well, her daily life with Rose. But the book is slow in coming “because the twins didn’t do anything. They lay in their cribs, behind bars, like criminals.” Marigold hits upon the idea of changing their flower names to “Mother” and calling the book “The Childhood of Mother.” When practical Rose argues that Marigold should tell a true story, Marigold thinks, “It is true, it just isn’t real.”
Glück’s “a fiction” is exactly like that. Marigold and Rose are not only fictional; they are not remotely plausible. Real babies (Emmy and Lizzy, for example) don’t develop self-awareness until months past their first year. But Glück’s twins are parabolic. Their overheard thoughts provoke questions about what is true and real for our own existence. It is oddly as if Mother had given birth to triplets, and we are the third baby, a reminder that “unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”
A fundamental mystery has already been hinted at: being and non-being, and the corollaries of presence and absence, silence and speech. The twins can imagine a past time when they were not, and a future time when, again, they will not be. As their bodies grow they realize that they are aging. The babies understand “happy” and “safe” only when these feelings are gone. Loss finds them. And, as intimate as they are, their inherent differences are obvious to them. Already they must negotiate the wondrous, vexing mysteries of self and other.
Marigold, however, seems to intuit the creative power of Logos to hold her in life, just as she holds her book in potentiality. “Everything will disappear. Still, she thought. I know more words now and both these things would continue happening: everything will disappear but I will know many words.”
On the night of the twins’ first birthday party, Marigold dreams that she is writing her book, “a real book that people who could read would read.” Now a real book is in the world for us to read.
Marigold and Rose are vividly present to us—not really, perhaps, but truly.
Marda Messick is a former pastor, accidental theologian and poet living in Tallahassee, Florida on land that is the ancestral territory of the Apalachee Nation. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Christian Century, Delmarva Review, Verse-Virtual, Radix, Vita Poetica, and other publications.
Marigold and Rose: A Fiction was published on October 11, 2022 by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, an imprint of Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group. You can purchase your own copy at their website here.
