Marginalia: An Autobiography - Paperback

by Naomi Washer (Author)

"What does it mean to dissolve into one's text?" Naomi Washer asks in Marginalia: An Autobiography. Comprised of a decade's worth of notes made in the margins of other writers' books, collected and arranged into an original work, Marginalia accumulates into an essay that interrogates both its own form and its author's sense of self. From her own readings of writers like Kate Zambreno, Roland Barthes, Maggie Nelson, and Robert Walser, among countless others, Washer arrives at an uncanny rediscovering of a self both her and not, visible and hidden. And in the act of re-reading, she distills the experience of one's ongoing transformation in writing and everyday life.

Author Biography

Naomi Washer is a writer and psychoanalyst in formation in New York City. She is the author of a novel, Subjects We Left Out (Veliz Books, 2021), and several chapbooks across genre. Her work has appeared in the anthology In the Footsteps of a Shadow: North American Literary Responses to Fernando Pessoa (MadHat Press, 2025), Psychoanalytic Perspectives, Seneca Review, Asymptote, Essay Daily, and other journals. She is the Editor of "Extra-Analytic: Creative Readings," a column on reading psychoanalytically for Psychoanalytic Perspectives.