The Dead Ladies Project: Exiles, Expats, and Ex-Countries

by Jessa Crispin Narrated by Amy McFadden

Overview

When Jessa Crispin was thirty, she burned her settled Chicago life to the ground and took off for Berlin with a pair of suitcases and no plan beyond leaving. Half a decade later, she's still on the road, in search not so much of a home as of understanding, a way of being in the world that demands neither constant struggle nor complete surrender.



The Dead Ladies Project is an account of that journey-but it's also much, much more. Fascinated by exile, Crispin travels an itinerary of key locations in its literary map, of places that have drawn writers who needed to break free from their origins and start afresh. As she reflects on William James struggling through despair in Berlin, Nora Barnacle dependent on and dependable for James Joyce in Trieste, Maud Gonne fomenting revolution and fostering myth in Dublin, or Igor Stravinsky starting over from nothing in Switzerland, Crispin interweaves biography, incisive literary analysis, and personal experience into a rich meditation on the complicated interactions of place, personality, and society that can make escape and reinvention such an attractive, even intoxicating proposition.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly - Audio

07/04/2016
In this unusual and absorbing travelogue, Crispin pursues some of her favorite dead artists to their places of exile, intent on learning how they were able to “scrape their lives clean and start again elsewhere.” Traveling throughout Europe, she draws comparisons among historical figures (William James, Nora Barnacle, Maud Gonne, and others), their personal challenges, and the ways in which Crispin grapples with the modern world and the life she left behind. Voice actress McFadden reads in a clear, sharp, and unwavering voice. She maintains a lively and energetic voice, which may seem at odds at times with the more morose and melancholic tone of the prose, but she keeps listeners engaged. Additionally, she handles accents and foreign language flawlessly, and her quoted voices come across as distinct and real. A Univ. of Chicago paperback. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

06/22/2015
Crispin’s unusual and absorbing travelogue pursues some of her favorite dead artists to their places of exile, intent on learning how they were able to “scrape their lives clean and start again elsewhere.” The Bookslut founder considers Igor Stravinsky’s flight from occupied France for Switzerland, Margaret Anderson’s flight from an indecency charge after she serialized James Joyce’s Ulysses, and Somerset Maugham’s flight from an unbearable marriage, and she contemplates “those who use their force of will to change the direction of their own story.” Her affinity for the invisible woman (Nora Barnacle), the ambitious woman (Rebecca West), and the undomesticated, “unfit” woman (Maud Gonne) only gives Crispin a slight hold on understanding her own experience, the restlessness that slingshots her from place to place. Smart, brash, and self-aware, Crispin is a fearless observer, a purveyor of odd and wonderful detail, and an unflinching witness to her own stifling mental state. Though the big questions as well as the personal conflicts go unresolved, Crispin’s swift intelligence, fierce empathy, and dark humor offer up great insights as she discovers, if not a home, then an “ability to move through the world” and survive it. Agent: Judy Heiblum, Sterling Lord Literistic.(Oct.)

David McConnell

"Jessa Crispin is trying to heal the rift between us regular people and the heroic age of art. The Dead Ladies Project, a dazzling literary travelogue, a series of un-bookish, wildly refined meditations on books and artists, is also the intimate record of a personal crisis. Art matters here in a way likely to scare Americans almost as much as they deserve. Crispin travels the Europe of the canon, of dead white men, studying its entrails. Both Viking and monk, she can write with a barbarian's romantic peremptoriness or with the withering self-containment of a philosopher. She rolls her eyes at the monotony of history's public face and throws everything in the story—including the put-upon mistresses forced to pinch pennies, the tampons, unwieldy suitcases, tedious dates and crying jags. But if these linked essays are written with a literary arsonist’s urgency, they are also full of a very rare reverence for art that matters. Interested in what the life of an artist really has to involve? Quit your MFA program and read this wonderful book!"

J. C. Hallman

A sometimes rollicking, sometimes panicked, but always insightful and moving chronicle of a series of intellectual apprenticeships, with ‘guides’ ranging from writers to philosophers to editors to composers.

Shalom Auslander

"Crispin is both smart enough to know there are no answers, and human enough to admit she needs them; her resulting travelogue is a phenomenal record of the mind in service (maybe) of the heart."

Chicago Tribune

"A book of vigorous struggle and lucid confusion. It's also very, very funny. . . . The whole book is packed with delightfully offbeat prose. . . . And it's all over the place in terms of subject matter: sex, politics, history, philosophy, existential dread, gender dictates, difficult travel logistics, etc. . . . But that's exactly what it needs to be: a rambling polymorphous beast, as raw as it is sophisticated, as quirky as it is intense.

Laura Kipnis

"Read with caution: midway through The Dead Ladies Project you’ll be wanting to pack a suitcase and give away your possessions. Crispin is funny, sexy, self-lacerating, and politically attuned, with unique slants on literary criticism, travel writing, and female journeys. No one crosses genres, borders, and proprieties with more panache."

John Biguenet

"Tracing a pilgrimage of sorts across Europe to places where artistic couples mostly came to grief, Jessa Crispin confronts in searing personal terms the problem not just of being but of being with someone else. It is an unsettling and unforgettable journey."—John Biguenet

Kathryn Davis

"Suppose you could have for a traveling companion a changeling, someone who 'came to this planet as an already fully formed creature,' someone who’s looking for reasons to keep herself alive and is devoting every last particle of herself, body and soul, to this endeavor, who is willing to tell you every last thing that passes through her extraordinary mind as she takes you (for instance) to visit Berlin, Trieste, Sarajevo, Nora Barnacle, Rebecca West, Claude Cahun, who wants more than anything to make you 'take in the whole canvas without choosing, without discriminating'—wouldn’t you be beside yourself to have this fascinating creature beside you? I’d follow Jessa Crispin to the ends of the earth."

Shelf Awareness

"Is it possible for a memoir to be at once introspective and yet fully embedded in the context of the world around it? The Dead Ladies Project seems to suggest that it is—or at least, that Bookslut founder Jessa Crispin is capable of making us believe it is. . . . Imbued with a deadpan sense of humor, The Dead Ladies Project tackles some of the weightiest subjects possible—suicide, death, infidelity, fulfillment—in a way that is always heartfelt but never heavy. The result is somewhat astounding: a philosophical musing on what it is to live one's best life, even if—or perhaps especially when—that best life fits no mold of conventionality or tradition."

LA Times - Liz Brown

Crispin’s book chronicles her attempt to reconstitute her life by leaving it behind—not through self-harm but through acts of pilgrimage, retracing the steps of dead writers and artists in a hope of finding communion with ‘the unloosed, the wandering souls who were willing to scrape their lives clean and start again elsewhere.’

From the Publisher

"I'd follow Jessa Crispin to the ends of the earth." ---Kathryn Davis, author of Duplex

Chicago Tribune

"A book of vigorous struggle and lucid confusion. It's also very, very funny. . . . The whole book is packed with delightfully offbeat prose. . . . And it's all over the place in terms of subject matter: sex, politics, history, philosophy, existential dread, gender dictates, difficult travel logistics, etc. . . . But that's exactly what it needs to be: a rambling polymorphous beast, as raw as it is sophisticated, as quirky as it is intense.

From the Publisher - AUDIO COMMENTARY

"I'd follow Jessa Crispin to the ends of the earth." —Kathryn Davis, author of Duplex

Library Journal - Audio

11/01/2016
Writer, blogger at Bookslut.com, and tarot reader Crispin flees depression in Chicago in an attempt to discover reasons to live. A wanderer at heart, Crispin begins anew in Berlin, Germany. She seeks out the stories of women and men whose literary, artistic, and personal endeavors were developed during times of expatriation. This memoir entwines her tangible and emotional journeys. While this offering provides scant information about the individuals whose lives and works have intrigued Crispin, it affords an abundance of honest confessions, feelings, and insights. Crispin opines openly and unapologetically about politics, social justice, marriage, love, art, music, and other topics. Unfortunately, some of these observations are didactic, repetitive, and unimaginative. Most fascinating are the lovely, frequently unorthodox descriptions of the locations that Crispin visits and accounts of their inhabitants. Amy McFadden draws in listeners with a combination of conversational flow, pacing fluctuations, and humor. VERDICT This is a supplemental purchase with limited appeal to patrons who are interested in memoirs, books about books, and discussions of art, literary giants, and outsiders. ["This selfie is on a short stick with an undistinguished background. Readers should look elsewhere for women's travel guides": LJ 7/15 review of the Univ. of Chicago hc.]—Lisa Youngblood, Harker Heights P.L., TX

Library Journal

07/01/2015
The traditional 1960s hippies' search-for-self road trip has been updated, backpack replaced by a small, wheeled suitcase in this autobiographical travelog. Crispin (editor, bookslut.com & spoliamag.com) rolls on for a year and a half, settling in well-traveled locales such as Berlin, London, and Paris, and some less worked-over areas: Lausanne, Trieste, Sarajevo, and Jersey Island. A "prelude" presents the author's threatened suicide in unsatisfying Chicago, announcing her project: reboot her life. She journeys abroad to eat, play, love, and text, finding historical subjects who relocated to the places she visits who also suffered from a lack of self-actualization and needed self-confidence. Literary insights are minimal, and local color limited. There's lots of drinking, tacky accommodations, severe depression, local lovers, and very funny, angry rants. Crispin stands with feminists but doesn't ask them to dance. VERDICT This selfie is on a short stick with an undistinguished background. Readers should look elsewhere for women's travel guides.—Ann Fey, SUNY Rockland Community Coll., Suffern

Kirkus Reviews

2015-07-07
Bookslut founder and editor Crispin's account of how she set off in search of meaning by following in the footsteps of dead writers, artists, and composers. After confiding suicidal impulses to a friend and then being confronted with a possible trip to a psychiatric hospital, the author knew she had to act. So she packed her suitcases and left for Europe to be among the "wandering souls who were willing to scrape their lives clean and start again elsewhere." With mordant wit and a dash of bravado, Crispin interweaves the story of her journey to commune with the spirits of men and women who shared her existential crises with autobiographical details and astute critical insights. In Berlin, she meditated on the despair that sent William James fleeing from the United States while contemplating her own sense of personal failure. In Trieste, she reflected on the life of James Joyce's wife, Nora Barnacle, a woman who loved a man she could not count on. In the south of France, Crispin mused on the life and work of another kindred spirit, Margaret Anderson, a fellow Midwesterner who founded and co-edited the Little Review, one of the most influential avant-garde literary magazines of the early 20th century. After years of struggle, her work would all be destroyed in a court battle over her serialization of Ulysses, a book deemed too obscene for American readers. Constantly questioning the choices of her "guides" and finding no easy answers to her own concerns about life and love, Crispin continued to travel and "chase discomfort." Yet by the time she reached the last destination in the book, the Greek island of Zakynthos, she could embrace the randomness of a life journey that was now literally lived at the flip of a coin. Through moments of ennui, drunkenness, and intense joy, Crispin had unexpectedly discovered meaning in the ever renewing possibilities of a life lived in fluidity. An eloquently thought-provoking memoir.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169789003
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	04/19/2016
Edition description:	Unabridged

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