My Death by Lisa Tuttle

 

My Death / Lisa Tuttle
read by Hillary Huber
Old Saybrook, CT: Tantor Media, 2024, c2004.

I saw someone mention this on Instagram recently and it piqued my interest. There was an audiobook edition available at my library, so I downloaded it and listened to it immediately. I've read a couple of Tuttle's other books and always find them interesting for their focus on women and mythology, in a modern setting. My Death included all these topics, in a fairly short book that turns out to have quite a wild twist in the end! 

A widowed writer is about to meet her agent, after a year of mourning in which she hasn't written at all. Trying to come up with a book idea for him, she stumbles across a painting by Helen Ralston, an artist she used to like in college. Ralston's art has been mostly overlooked, rather she is remembered primarily for her affair with an older male artist and as the model for one of his famous paintings. 

On the spur of the moment she decides she's going to write a biography of Helen Ralston -- to her surprise, Ralston is still alive, in her 90s and living with a daughter in Edinburgh. Everything just seems to be falling into her lap to get her book written, even if she just came up with the idea. 

But as it continues, this straightforward literary novel about art and writers and women's work begins to feel uncanny. The narrator starts to feel so many coincidences and similarities between Helen's life and her own, and it makes her panic a little. There's something going on that is making her uneasy, but why? Helen and her daughter are lovely, they want to help her, she should be happy about it! 

Very close to the end the creeping sense of the weird just bursts right out. I was left wondering what in the world I just heard -- and had to go back and listen again. I could not have predicted this ending in a million years, and it was a mind-bender. Tuttle doesn't tie everything up neatly, she leaves it with a bit of an open ending for you to figure out, and that may frustrate some readers, but I really enjoyed the way she did it. It's wild, something so fantastical I was taken completely by surprise -- and it was great. If you like small stories of the weird in women's lives, definitely give this one a try. It's just been republished in the NYRB series as well, so it's much more accessible now. Take a look for it!