Chapter 2 is concerned with the role of the writer as artist. It focuses on three auto/biographical texts which document the ugly difficulties of writing the self: Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother? (2012), Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be? (2012), and Kate Zambreno’s Heroines (2012). None of these texts is a pure autobiography: Bechdel’s graphic memoir follows her psychotherapeutic unravelling of her relationship with her mother; Heti’s ‘novel from life’ recounts a crucial friendship between Sheila and her artist friend Margaux; and Kate Zambreno’s Heroines is part memoir, part biographical essay about female writers such as Virginia Woolf, Vivien(e) Eliot, and Zelda Fitzgerald, who she dubs the ‘mad wives’ of modernism. All three texts are interested in female genius and tell of the unravelling of the self from others en route to becoming an artist. I argue that ugliness is crucial to their aesthetic projects: the ugliness of the self and its secrets, the ugliness of writer’s block, the ugliness of betrayal, and the ugly terrain of genius.

This chapter argues that market metafiction has emerged as the vanguard fictional style of the post-financial crisis period. It begins by discussing the work of Tao Lin and Chris Kraus. The remainder of the chapter analyses two recent works of market metafiction that exemplify the paradigm, even as they register and contest differing financial and literary market logics. In Ben Lerner’s 10:04 (2014), attempts to deal with risk and uncertainty central to derivatives trading provide models for “hedging” between different forms of literary value, so that underperformance in market terms may be offset against critical approbation. In Teju Cole’s Open City (2011), meanwhile, the depredations of what David Harvey calls “the Wall Street–IMF–Treasury complex” are seen to be of a piece with the global publishing industry’s exploitation of images of African suffering. In his novel, Cole deliberately sidesteps these stereotyped and voyeuristic images, while at the same time acknowledging the privilege that permits him (now a relatively affluent and highly educated New Yorker) to perform precisely such a resistance to market-dictated convention.

This chapter argues that recent examples of market metafiction by Nell Zink, Joshua Cohen, and Sheila Heti stake out a set of key positions that the ambitious novelist might adopt in the contemporary literary field. Beginning with an analysis of the improbable rise to literary fame of the long-obscure Zink, it identifies a recurrent logic, evident across all elements of the “Zink phenomenon”, including her 2016 novel Nicotine, whereby an embrace of market forces paradoxically enables the very writing that it at the same time threatens to destroy. Turning to Cohen, the chapter reads the sprawling, experimental Book of Numbers (2015) as an ambivalent attempt to channel the logic of the iconic “disruptors” of the contemporary tech sector. Finally, the chapter argues that in her memoir-cum-novel How Should a Person Be? (2010) Heti aims to produce a text that circumvents conventional forms of literary valuation by being neither merely desired (as a commodity on the market) nor simply admired (as an object of critical veneration), but existing instead as an object of use – a guide or tool with the potential to be strategically deployed by those who read it.