A Healthy Interest in the Lives of Others

Teresa Carmody has been writing a character named Marie for over a decade and across a series of unrelated books. A Healthy Interest in the Lives of Others follows Marie through 25 years and 11 linked autofictions about community, friendship, writing, labor, and gossip. In this novel-in-stories, Marie is a temporary packager, a sexual assault crises worker, a learner and a seeker, a friend and a wife, a writing student, but most of all a writer. She studies everything from books and trash to her own queerness and non-human animals. She notes how humans survive by taking in each other’s looks, gestures, and language, and her curiosity takes her into the lives of others, embodied in stories that become a form of gossip. Among a lineage of constraint-based and experimental writers, Carmody, whose lived life uncannily resembles Marie’s fictional one, weaves an artist's coming of age that is also a meditation on how we make and unmake each other.