I was first introduced to Suzanne Scanlon at Dixon Place in the Lower East Side of Manhattan over a decade ago, at a now seemingly prescient gathering that Kate Zambreno had assembled in collaboration with Belladonna* Collaborative: a reading and conversation examining the intersection of fiction and the essay, with Renee Gladman, Amina Cain, and Danielle Dutton. I’d encountered Scanlon’s writing the previous year within the exhilarating but short- lived blog ecosystem teeming with brilliant female writers, of which Scanlon and Zambreno were essential components. In Scanlon’s blog, RepatBlues, she wrote with an intimacy befitting a personal notebook; and without fully revealing her identity, she posted candid accounts of her reading life, teaching, motherhood, and the messiness of being a self.

Writing, for Scanlon, is the essential crucible through which the material of life is transformed into art, and in a way that’s usually not obscured by the guise of artifice. One senses that, for her, living is a form of research, but also that art and writing are just as essential in informing her life. Scanlon has said she thought of her second book, Her 37th Year, an Index, as a fictional memoir in the same way that her first book of interlinked stories, Promising Young Women, published by Dorothy, a publishing project, in 2012, could be considered a nonfiction novel: “Both are constructions. Both take from life, and both invent.”