The Female 'I'

By Laura Allsop.

"In reality there is no story of the other that is not filtered through an 'I'", wrote Italian literary phenomenon Elena Ferrante to the esteemed American author Elizabeth Strout in a correspondence recently published in The Guardian. "No matter how love for others and language as an act of love try continuously, insistently, desperately to get outside the margins of the suffocating first-person singular," Ferrante goes on to say, "we remain bodies organically enclosed in our isolation."

The immersive seductions of the first-person singular are very much at work in Thirsty Sea, Italian singer-songwriter Erica Mou's debut novel. Narrated by Maria, it chronicles a day in the life of a young woman in a state of free-fall, haunted by her past, sidestepping her present, and stalked by a future she is reluctant to meet. Switching between different narrative modes — poetry and comedy, memoir and stream of consciousness — Maria is trapped in her impossible, maze-like consciousness. But the 'I' she would clearly love to escape nevertheless appears halfway through the very first sentence of the novel, as if it couldn't be avoided — just like her daily homecoming to a partner she no longer loves cannot be put off, nor the looming doctor's appointment she has booked for the following day.

ERICA MOU

Titles By This Author

SOMETHING YOU'LL HATE ME FOR

THIRSTY SEA