Synopses & Reviews
"Marie Calloway has a very specific literary personality that the reader is intrigued by: she's masochistic, loves to experiment, is quickly bored and intermittently self-hating, very hip, rebellious. Figuring her out is a gripping adventure." -Edmund White
I have never read a book like this before. Its painful, shocking, and compellingly written, composed with great sensitivity to which details should be revealed and which must stay concealed. Its genre-muddle and formal complexity make for a completely unforgettable, profoundly contemporary, and plainly great work of courage and art. Heres a terrifying proposal: could this be The Great American Novel for the twilight of Great" America? - Sheila Heti (author of "How Should a Person Be?")
This society hates feelings,” Kathy Acker said about a million times. A chain of regulation controls us by making us fear that we will be expelled from the human club for being the wrong kind of person. Marie Calloway breaks that chain of regulation by displaying her body like a beggar displays her wounds, by asserting awkwardness and shame (for the body, for ambition). Her book should be called, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman Who Cant Be Controlled. Or is she the fiction, Holden Caulfield, Lolita, or Mme. Merteuil? How does a questing intelligence live inside the commodity?searching for identity or personal branding? And if she is an attention whore, am I the attention john? Yes--but Calloway wonders as strongly as I do about what she might be, and she invites misunderstanding into her work. One thing is certain, thoughShe can really write about sex! - Robert Glück
"what purpose did i serve in your life is moving, unprecedented, threatening, and surrealthe exciting, rare work of someone with nothing to lose. It's intuitive and overpowering, concise and extreme. And, like a plant or a comet, it doesn't pause to explain what it's doing, defend or rationalize its existence, or attempt to obscure or distort its intentions. If you're attentive toward itand earnest and open-minded and non-malicious in your attentionyou will likely question and examine what you yourself are doing and why, and how to change." Tao Lin
"'Adrien Brody' is riveting, fresh, and written with a distinctive new voice."Stephen Elliott
"That's the most incredible thing I've ever seen."
"What is?" I asked, though I knew.
"Your face right now."
I was vaguely aware my eyes were open very wide.
Marie Calloway's fiction debut, what purpose did i serve in your life, is both a portrait of American youth and a gamble, a chance taken, in answer to the following: for a young woman, is there such a thing as the soul, a life more than the organs, or is she forever recalled to her body? Marie does not answer this question but instead acts it out through a series of intertwined stories. The result is a fusillade of brutally self-aware and insightful pieces that take on the meaning of sex, art, and, most of all, survival in the age of Internet-based sex work and love that can flame and turn to ash in the space of a tweet.
Marie Calloway (b. 1990) is interested in sexuality and gender. She rose to prominence in 2011 with her controversial story, "Adrien Brody," which was published by Muumuu House.
Review
It's a perfectly captured internal life: Contradictory, maddening, maudlin, desperate, pleased, pleasure-seeking. Maybe that's got something to do with the nasty responses Calloway generates: If you're not happy living with the mess in your own head, chances are you'll hate living with the voices in Calloway's head. - The Stranger
Synopsis
By the author of "Adrien Brody," the controversial Internet piece, Marie Calloway effaces the boundary between life and narrative.
Synopsis
what purpose did i serve in your life is such a unique document that I have no idea if she could ever repeat its success. But she has gone all the way. She has not chickened out. She wrote the story she was given down to the bone. That's what real artists do. It's maybe the most surprising triumph to emerge from the literature of disaffection: What purpose did i serve in your life is the real thing."
-Esquire Magazine The experience of reading what purpose did i serve in your life, which rides the line between performed and genuine vapidity and malign naiveté so closely that the distinction between them blurs, is by turns dull, titillating, appalling, riveting, and as head-spinning, in Hobermans phrase, as a hall of mirrors in which Girl Power and female powerlessness are endlessly reflected.” It is not, in other words, easy to turn away from. Easier, perhaps, to catch a shattered glance of oneself. -Slate
Graphic, disturbing, enlightening and heart-warming (in its own weird way). —USA Today
I have never read a book like this before. Its painful, shocking, and compellingly written, composed with great sensitivity to which details should be revealed and which must stay concealed. Its genre-muddle and formal complexity make for a completely unforgettable, profoundly contemporary, and plainly great work of courage and art. Heres a terrifying proposal: could this be The Great American Novel for the twilight of Great" America?" - Sheila Heti (author of "How Should a Person Be?")
Marie Calloway has a very specific literary personality that the reader is intrigued by: she's masochistic, loves to experiment, is quickly bored and intermittently self-hating, very hip, rebellious. Figuring her out is a gripping adventure. -Edmund White
This society hates feelings,” Kathy Acker said about a million times. A chain of regulation controls us by making us fear that we will be expelled from the human club for being the wrong kind of person. Marie Calloway breaks that chain of regulation by displaying her body like a beggar displays her wounds, by asserting awkwardness and shame (for the body, for ambition). Her book should be called, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman Who Cant Be Controlled. Or is she the fiction, Holden Caulfield, Lolita, or Mme. Merteuil? How does a questing intelligence live inside the commodity?searching for identity or personal branding? And if she is an attention whore, am I the attention john? Yes--but Calloway wonders as strongly as I do about what she might be, and she invites misunderstanding into her work. One thing is certain, thoughShe can really write about sex! -Robert Gluck
what purpose did i serve in your life is moving, unprecedented, threatening, and surrealthe exciting, rare work of someone with nothing to lose. It's intuitive and overpowering, concise and extreme. And, like a plant or a comet, it doesn't pause to explain what it's doing, defend or rationalize its existence, or attempt to obscure or distort its intentions. If you're attentive toward itand earnest and open-minded and non-malicious in your attentionyou will likely question and examine what you yourself are doing and why, and how to change." Tao Lin
About the Author
Marie Calloway: Marie Calloway (b. 1990) is interested in sexuality and gender who rose to prominence in 2011 with her controversial story, "Adrien Brody" published by Muumuu House. She's influenced by feminine art as well as net art, She has long brown hair with bangs. She also has a low tolerance to carbohydrates; correcting her diet allowed her to complete her first book.