Plot summary
The plot centers on Victoria About, a prolific female English writer, who has invited some of her friends and relatives to come and stay at a seaside house she has rented in Southwold. The only condition is the fact that they all have to allow her to watch them and to turn all she sees and hears into her next novel, "From The Lighthouse". Clearly inspired by Virginia Woolf, Victoria drafts a synopsis with things (such as rows & relationships) that will happen during the month. But as summer holiday starts, Victoria is not pleased with the general boredom and carefree conversations that happen in the house.
Little does she know that when the guests discover she has hidden spycams all over the house, and when she gets trapped in the attic by all her friends and relatives, her life and her book start to take a twist.
Style and content
Finding Myself is most remarkable for the way it has been printed. What you read is in fact "the day-to-day account of the preparing of this book and all the other material on the file from her [Victoria's] laptop. In preparing this book, we have made one or two very slight cuts to the text - mainly for a desire to avoid unnecessary repetition. Apart from that, what you have just read (and, I hope, enjoyed reading) is exactly what Victoria herself wrote." (Finding Myself, page 386)
Indeed, you get, in the handwriting of Victoria's editor Simona, cuts, remarks, advice and replacements in the margins of the book. Simona, who was also invited by Victoria to stay for the summer, is worried about certain assumptions that Victoria makes, but also often cuts the descriptions of herself as "boring" and violent towards her husband.
The figure of the real author, Toby Litt, disappears completely in the background. While it is not unusual for a female writer to have a male main character in the I-narrator, it is the other way around. Litt manages to have a very convincing female I-narrator, and by making use of the "day-to-day" narration, the book sounds very real. At the same time the book also criticizes the concept of a narrator, and the way he/she can influence the truth or what really happened. Simona makes cuts and replaces things that Victoria wrote. Did Victoria write the truth, and is Simona bending it? Or is she merely adjusting the things that Victoria wrote down erroneously? And what role does the "real writer", Litt, play in this? In these regards the book can easily be seen as a postmodern novel.
Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English writer. She is considered one of the most important modernist 20th-century authors. She pioneered the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device.
In Search of Lost Time, first translated into English as Remembrance of Things Past, and sometimes referred to in French as La Recherche, is a novel in seven volumes by French author Marcel Proust. This early 20th-century work is his most prominent, known both for its length and its theme of involuntary memory. The most famous example of this is the "episode of the madeleine", which occurs early in the first volume.
Southwold is a seaside town and civil parish on the North Sea, in the East Suffolk district, in the county of Suffolk, England. It lies at the mouth of the River Blyth in the Suffolk Coast and Heaths Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, 11 miles (18 km) south of Lowestoft, 29 miles (47 km) north-east of Ipswich and 97 miles (156 km) north-east of London, within the parliamentary constituency of Suffolk Coastal. At the 2021 Census, the population was 950.
Mrs Dalloway is a novel by Virginia Woolf published on 14 May 1925. It details a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a fictional upper-class woman in post-First World War England. It is one of Woolf's best-known novels.
Victoria Mary, Lady Nicolson, CH, usually known as Vita Sackville-West, was an English author and garden designer.
Julie Myerson is an English author and critic. As well as fiction and non-fiction books, she formerly wrote a column in The Guardian entitled "Living with Teenagers", based on her family experiences. She appeared regularly as a panellist on the arts programme Newsnight Review.
Sandra Cisneros is an American writer. She is best known for her first novel, The House on Mango Street (1983), and her subsequent short story collection, Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991). Her work experiments with literary forms that investigate emerging subject positions, which Cisneros herself attributes to growing up in a context of cultural hybridity and economic inequality that endowed her with unique stories to tell. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, was awarded one of 25 new Ford Foundation Art of Change fellowships in 2017, and is regarded as a key figure in Chicano literature.
Joanna Trollope is an English writer. She has also written under the pseudonym of Caroline Harvey. Her novel Parson Harding's Daughter won in 1980 the Romantic Novel of the Year Award by the Romantic Novelists' Association.
To the Lighthouse is a 1927 novel by Virginia Woolf. The novel centres on the Ramsay family and their visits to the Isle of Skye in Scotland between 1910 and 1920.
A Room of One's Own is an extended essay by Virginia Woolf, first published in September 1929. The work is based on two lectures Woolf delivered in October 1928 at Newnham College and Girton College, women's colleges at the University of Cambridge.
Orlando: A Biography is a novel by Virginia Woolf, first published on 11 October 1928. Inspired by the tumultuous family history of the aristocratic poet and novelist Vita Sackville-West, Woolf's lover and close friend, it is arguably one of her most popular novels; Orlando is a history of English literature in satiric form. The book describes the adventures of a poet who changes sex from man to woman and lives for centuries, meeting the key figures of English literary history. Considered a feminist classic, the book has been written about extensively by scholars of women's writing and gender and transgender studies.
Toby Litt is an English writer and academic based at the University of Southampton.
Beatniks: An English Road Movie (1997) is a novel by British author Toby Litt set in Bedford in the United Kingdom in 1995, and concerns the adventures of a group of young people who admire the Beat Writers and Musicians of the 1950s and 1960s America. Initially published by Secker & Warburg in 1997.
Balthazar, published in 1958, is the second volume in The Alexandria Quartet series by British author Lawrence Durrell. Set in Alexandria, Egypt, around World War II, the four novels tell essentially the same story from different points of view and come to a conclusion in Clea. Balthazar is the first novel in the series that presents a competing narrator, Balthazar, who writes back to the narrating Darley in his "great interlinear".
Sade Adeniran is a Nigerian novelist whose debut novel, Imagine This, won the 2008 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book in Africa. Imagine This was originally self-published by the author. Based in London, she is also a filmmaker.
69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess is an experimental novel by the British writer Stewart Home, first published by Canongate in 2002. It tells the story of a suicidal man investigating a conspiracy theory about the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, with much explicit sex and philosophical discussions, and was positively reviewed by The Times and the London Review of Books.
Saaya is a 2014 Nepali novel by Subin Bhattarai. It published by Fine Print in 2014 as sequel to Summer love.
Annie Denton Cridge (1825–1875) was a UK-born suffragist, socialist, lecturer, and author. She moved to the United States around 1842 during the industrial and Victorian eras. Cridge was an author who wrote primarily about women's rights and spiritualism. In the mid-nineteenth century, spiritualism was considered the only religious group that recognized the equality of women. Ann Braude, in her book, Radical Spirits, defines spiritualism as "a new religious movement aimed at proving the immortality of the soul by establishing communication with the spirits of the dead… It provided an alternative to the established religious order. It held two attractions to thousands of Americans: rebellion against death and rebellion against authority".
I'm Thinking of Ending Things is the 2016 debut novel of Canadian writer Iain Reid. It was first published in June 2016 in the United States by Simon & Schuster. The book has been described as a psychological thriller and horror fiction, and it is about a young woman who has many doubts about her relationship with her boyfriend. In spite of her reservations, she takes a road trip with him to meet his parents.
The Friend is a novel by the American writer Sigrid Nunez published by Riverhead Books in 2018. The book concerns an unnamed novelist who adopts a Great Dane that belonged to a deceased friend and mentor.
