The “Real” Self, Psychoanalysis, and Autobiography: A Conversation with Naomi Washer

“The world will ask you who you are, and if you do not know, the world will tell you,” said the great psychoanalytic master Carl Jung. Naomi Washer, author of Marginalia, and a psychoanalyst in formation, might amend the latter half of that quote: “If you do not know, books will tell you.”

Marginalia is Washer’s autobiographical exploration of the self through margin notes. The books from which these notes originate remain unnamed throughout, as do many of the important details of the narrator’s life: where she lives, her friends and family, the story of her life outside of reading. What we’re left with is a rich exploration of consciousness—thought alchemizing thought. And through these fragments, a narrator emerges on the page, a self that is as layered, dynamic, and complex as the machinations of the psyche.

I had the pleasure of chatting with Washer over email about the tension between her “real” self and her narrator, and how her psychoanalytic training has informed her writing process.

Sophie Newman: When I read your first line—“I want to write a book where nothing happens”—ironically, I was hooked. Is this how you see Marginalia now?

Naomi Washer: I’m so glad it hooked you! My hope was that it would have that impact. Maybe it only does for a certain kind of reader, but I believe those readers are out there. I always wanted to read books where nothing happened in terms of plot, because I don’t read books for their plot. When I want a plot, I watch a good television series. Marginalia is certainly a book where nothing happens, but I wrote that fragment while I was reading and writing toward what would become my novel, Subjects We Left Out (Veliz Books, 2021).

Those are sentences I wrote about someone else, but once I looked at them in a different context, I saw they were also about myself.

I wanted to write a novel where nothing happened, where the fragmented, essayistic exploration of the mind served the same propulsive function as a plot. I was reading a lot of books that were being published around that time that were called novels but which were doing this other thing, this non-plot-oriented thing, and I was very excited about that. I’m being specific in using the word ‘plot’ now because I do think Marginalia is a book where things happen—where they can happen. For one thing, I really hope that readers write their own marginalia in it. That would be the ideal reading experience. Writing our own thoughts, ideas, and questions in the margins of our books is a happening—it’s an encounter with our own mind and the minds of others that might not ever appear in the same way if we didn’t allow our words to collide with the other to spark something new.

SN: So much of this book is about tension between self as “protagonist” and the real self off the page. There are places where you slip between third and first-person pronouns. How would you characterize this relationship?

NW: I remember briefly wondering if I should smooth those out by choosing either first or third person, to be consistent throughout the book, but I knew I had to preserve the shifts. Most of the time, the fragments in third person were in reference to the author, my understanding of what the author was doing on the page. But once I separated those fragments from their source texts, they began to sound more autobiographical. “She was an invented character who was also herself.” “She often feels as though she only exists in the space between dreaming and living.” “She has an obsession between walking the line between image and reality.”

Those are sentences I wrote about someone else, but once I looked at them in a different context, I saw they were also about myself—about how I felt embodied and disembodied in my own life during the decade these readings took place. For most of my life, I felt as though I was constantly slipping between third and first-person pronouns every day, and I wanted to capture that slippage. I had genuine questions about what makes someone a character and what makes someone real. I think the boundaries between the two are much slimmer or more slippery than we typically believe.

SN: You’re in the process of becoming a psychoanalyst. How has that course of study informed your writing and the idea of the autobiographical self?

NW: The slippage! The first and third person. The space between dreaming and living. The whole complicated idea that there could even be one autobiographical self, which I don’t believe there is. Psychoanalysis interrogates these very questions. These were the questions that took focus in my writing life for the decade-plus that led up to Marginalia, but they were also the questions that made my life feel impossible until I went through my own personal experience of psychoanalysis. I didn’t know how much they were dominating my life from the inside out, so the focus was intellectual. And in that way, there was always a screen between me and the world, a screen I couldn’t break through, but it filtered everything and made it difficult to connect. I was the writer in workshop where everyone would always say, “We need more guideposts in this piece, you need to teach us how to read it.”

As a psychoanalyst, you find that out very quickly—the surface narrative of someone’s life has very little to do with their experience of it, and their experience of it is what matters.

All I wanted was transparency between my thoughts and the page, and transparency was the one thing I could never achieve. This felt like constant failure. But psychoanalysis gives us a lens through which to ask these questions about ourselves, about the people who come to speak to us about what feels impossible about their lives. In other spaces, we don’t let people contain multiplicity; in psychoanalysis, we take it as a given that people contain contradictions. In other spaces, it feels threatening to the ways we’ve pinned each other into narrow categories of what we need each other to be. We don’t want to believe that we hate at the same time that we love, or that we desire separation at the same time that we desire closeness and connection. But in psychoanalysis, that’s precisely what we’re dealing with. I hope this has freed up my writing to be less what I think it needs to be and more of what it actually is.

SN: When I first read the concept of the book, I assumed the books containing your margin notes would be included in the text itself (i.e., that we’d be able to see the source material alongside the marginalia). You do provide a list of source works at the end, but I’m curious about your decision to present the notes separately.

NW: There was a version early on where I included the source material in a sparse grey text placed below each of my own margin notes. It was a way of playing with citation that was more visually intriguing. But the next time I went back to the project, that move felt gimmicky and unnecessary. I reminded myself of the main question driving my interest in compiling my notes into a book in the first place: if you cull together fragments of a life from the places where those fragments have been hidden, will you discover a voice? Will there be something consistent in that voice, complex and contradictory as it may be? I had to see if the fragments held together in some kind of consistent voice, otherwise it wouldn’t be a book. It would only have been an exercise. At the end of the day, I don’t think people would have found that very compelling.

SN: Place and time are both very amorphous in Marginalia. Locales and exes are sometimes mentioned, but the reader has little information about the protagonist’s life outside her margin notes. It reads almost like an autobiography of the evolution of the speaker’s thought over time. Does this sound right?

NW: Yes, I love that perspective. It was intentional, and it had to do with this question about what remains throughout all the different chapters of our lives. Honestly, I’m not at all interested in traditional autobiographies. I read very few of them. If I want to know about someone’s life from A to Z, I read their Wikipedia page. I just have no interest in reading a chronological text like that because I don’t believe that’s how we experience our lives. As a psychoanalyst, you find that out very quickly—the surface narrative of someone’s life has very little to do with their experience of it, and their experience of it is what matters. That’s something I’ve always felt to be true, and why psychoanalysis has felt more like a homecoming than a career change.

I did include a note in the acknowledgements about the places where I lived when I wrote all this marginalia, but even that minor explanation shows how weird and circular our lives really are. I kept returning to places where I’d lived before, trying to work something out, trying to get it right, and I never succeeded. In psychoanalysis, that’s the repetition compulsion, and staying curious about it can open up new ways of seeing our own thoughts. So yes, that’s what I wanted to capture in Marginalia—not information about my life, but the evolution of my thought.

SN What was the process like for compiling and editing the margin notes? How much was changed from what you originally wrote?

NW: Very little changed! I wanted to preserve as much as possible. That felt important to the project. I often changed numbers like ‘25’ from my original margin note to ‘twenty-five’ in Marginalia because I had the space. And there were places where I had written someone’s name in my marginalia that I felt I didn’t need to include in this book, so I found ways to anonymize them.

It’s not something I would have done without my experience in psychoanalysis and all that it shifted for me, within me.

As for the compiling process, there were phases. For years, I was just writing in the margins of my books because that’s what I do. It was entirely private, and I never had the idea I might share those fragments one day. At some point – I was reading and studying a lot of form-driven nonfiction—I compiled some of the notes into a numbered list and played with the juxtapositions that appeared to create a fragmented essay. That was published in an online magazine. After that, I just went back to reading and writing my notes. I moved apartments and cities a lot in my twenties. Every time I moved, unpacking my library again became a significant encounter, a way of reckoning with what I’d left, what I’d lost, what I’d arrived in this next place to try to gain.

During one of those encounters, I was feeling very lost and very alone and very confused about my life and who I was, so I returned to my books. And I found all these fragments of myself. And I had a lot of time on my hands, so I started transcribing all the fragments onto index cards. It took a long time, I don’t know how long. I wrote the source text on the back of each card. And then I scrambled the cards. I just mixed them all up so there would be no cohesion. Eventually, I moved on to the next stage of typing them up. I retained the names of the source texts and authors. But now it was typeface that I could also cut and paste and rearrange. At some point within that phase, other things started happening in my life and I moved again, and then moved again.

And that last move, to New York where I live now, prompted my entry into psychoanalysis as an analysand. My first analysis ended because I had decided to begin my own analytic formation and would need to find a proper training analyst with certain qualifications. During the break between my first analysis and the academic start of my formation, I compiled the notes into this final book form of Marginalia. It’s not something I would have done without my experience in psychoanalysis and all that it shifted for me, within me.

SN: Toward the end, you write, “The hardest narrative to abandon is the one you unconsciously write about yourself.” Do you have an idea of what your unconscious narrative is? Was it revealed at all through this writing process?

NW: Marginalia is my unconscious narrative. It was a narrative I couldn’t see until I’d been through analysis. In the Lacanian tradition of psychoanalytic formation, there is this process called the pass wherein an analysand-in-formation gives testimony to how they have traversed their unconscious fantasies in their analysis and come to occupy their own subjective position, self-authorizing their capacity to move from analysand to analyst. It’s a process of becoming familiar with your symptom to the point that it can become your style, your savoir-faire, it can be something you work with in life instead of something that keeps you trapped and thwarted.

Marginalia is not my version of the pass, but it is a kind of preliminary testimony to my capacity to begin an analytic formation. The questions at the heart of this text were questions that unconsciously determined how I moved through life, until I came to a place where I could see them, and play with them, and speak to them. The process of compiling Marginalia was different than writing my novel because I can see now that I wrote my novel from inside my symptom, inside my unconscious narrative—the symptom of believing I was a character and not a person. I couldn’t see my symptom then, I could only act from within it. My first analysis led me to Marginalia, made it possible for me to speak with my symptom instead of being led by it.

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