Kate Zambreno's head is haunted in equal measure by ghosts of men and ghosts of women. The men are the same ghosts who haunt most ambitious young writers: Fitzgerald, Bowles, Eliot—the canon, the white guys who lord above us all from their unimpeachable places in history. The women are the wives and writers who lived in the shadows of those men, women who were in many ways sacrificed by history in order to make the canon burn brighter. Those ghosts, the men and women in Zambreno's head, are continually playing out their struggle, over and over again. From a certain perspective, it looks like war. From another, it's just life, another unremarkable demonstration of the way things happen.

Heroines is a bookshelf's worth of nonfiction books layered one over the other. We begin with a memoir of Zambreno. She's a young wife who makes the difficult choice to move to a place (actually two places—first Akron, Ohio, and then Asheville, North Carolina) where she has no roots or prospects, because her husband lands a coveted academic librarian job there. She feels resentment as she reads about glitzy Paris and the glamorous Lost Generation. She feels shame over the resentment. And then she feels sympathy, and then outrage, for the women whose lives were shoved aside for some greater cause. Heroines is a wild spray of paragraphs scattered across every page; sometimes they follow a narrative, sometimes they don't. Zambreno shifts between brief history lessons, bursts of self-pity, angry tirades, and desperate attempts to correct the historical record on behalf of women like T. S. Eliot's wife, Vivian, who suffered mental distress and was thrown aside by the poet...

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