Naomi Washer: On Writing in Books, Psychoanalysis, the Fiction of the Fixed Self, and Her New Autobiography ‘Marginalia’

There’s a delightful sense of mystery built into Naomi Washer’s Marginalia: an autobiography (Autofocus Books, 2025), a narrative shaped from a decade spent writing notes in the margins of a personal library. Separated from the originating texts, Washer’s marginalia layer into a fascinating form—a wonderful hybrid of poetry and memoir.

Washer pulls her marginalia from books by authors ranging from Henry David Thoreau, Anne Carson, Valeria Luiselli, Julio Cortázar, to Kate Zambreno, with a full reading list provided for any who’d like to follow in her footsteps. Readers might devour this literary timelapse in one sitting or perhaps take in just a page each day, carrying a single line into their own lives before returning to the text once more. 

At its heart, Marginalia is a book that offers one possible answer to a personal favorite question: How might the art we love offer space for us to learn something new about ourselves? 

I was delighted to speak to Washer about her relationship to books, her occupation’s influence on her writing life, and the unique story behind Marginalia’s creation.

Abigail Oswald: I love the idea of including handwriting in a book about marginalia, and yours does exactly that. One of the first pages features a scan of a handwritten quote on notebook paper from Osip Mandelstam:

Tear apart your manuscripts—but save whatever you have scribbled in the margins, scribbled out of boredom, out of helplessness, in a half-dream.

The note has a kind of mysterious origin story that you allude to at the end of the book, and you mention that you carried it around for quite a while. Tell me more about that—how’d it come to be your opening? 

Naomi Washer: When I was putting together the final draft before the advance copies, I decided to put in the little story about this quote in the acknowledgements. I didn’t know where the quote was from until I decided to say something about it in the book, so I went on this whole little adventure of trying to find it. I think I discovered it sometime in graduate school—one of those late nights of research and drafting toward my thesis. Just something I scribbled to the side and thought, oh, what an incredible thing. And that really feels like my relationship to the writing life: scribbling in the margins and having this private relationship with books.

I also relate to the idea of “helplessness, in a half-dream” in terms of writing, and definitely in terms of producing a book. It always feels like such a massive undertaking, and I’ve always been drawn to the idea of producing a book out of feelings of failure, helplessness, and struggle, rather than sitting down, following an outline of a book, and just producing it. I’ve never written any of my books that way. 

So that quote really spoke to me, and I didn’t know where it came from. The story in the back of the book explains how I tracked it down. The version I wrote down is actually a very inaccurate translation, and I’ve also translated, so then I started to have some complicated feelings about putting in a very inaccurate translation. But this was the version that stuck with me, and I was really carrying it around in me for a long time. It felt like that was very much what inspired this book, and so it had to be the version that I had stumbled across on whatever website, or whatever blog, or wherever I had found it. It had to appear for readers of this book the way that I found it, because that’s what prompted the idea of being able to make a whole book of my own marginalia.

AO: I really like that comment you made about having a private relationship with books; I wonder if we could talk for a minute about your relationship to books as objects. Are you a collector? 

NW: I’m a hoarder with books, for sure. Some of them are in pretty poor condition, if you care about those sorts of things—which I don’t, really. But one image that comes to mind when you ask about that is the desk I wrote at in grad school in that Chicago apartment I lived in. There was a polar vortex, and everybody’s windows froze from the inside that year and melted. At one point my books were stacked on the floor, so the windows iced over, melted, and started dripping down to my books. And so I did end up getting rid of a lot of those books when I left that apartment and moved to a different state. I also gave a bunch of books to a former student, because I wanted them to continue living with someone who would care about them. 

I’ve moved a lot, and I’ve gotten rid of a lot of objects in my life, but I rarely consciously get rid of my books. They’re things I feel like I have to keep. But somewhat recently, when my husband and I moved to New York, we got rid of everything from where we were living. But we shipped our books, and they all arrived—except for one box. And it was the box of all of the signed books from the press I used to run, Ghost Proposal, and signed books by our friends. And we just don’t know where that one box is. And that feels like a book as well—the story of what happened to that box. 

But in general, I do feel like I need my copies of these books around me.

AO: Almost like they offer a sense of comfort, yeah. I’m really enjoying your podcast Reading Around the Margins, in which you interview different members of the literary community about their relationships to reading, marginalia, and books as objects. What have your findings been so far regarding other readers’ relationships to their books—are they similar to your own, different?

NW: I think the tone of every episode is very different based on each person that I bring on, and that has been really fun for me. When I first started the podcast, I was really nervous. Like, do other people write in their books as much as I do? Maybe this podcast will fail; maybe nobody has anything to say about this. But so far that has not been true at all. 

I’ve interviewed writers, publishers, booksellers, professors, and so it’s been really interesting to hear about their multiple approaches to marginalia. The professors can look back at their marginalia and see the markings that they know are for how they want to teach this book or short story. But then they can also see the parts that are just them having a private relationship with the text, and that’s on the same page as well. So I have enjoyed hearing them have the experience of recognizing their own multiplicity in that way—like, oh, that part’s just me, and then that part is my more public self, and my more didactic teaching self, and what I want to convey to the students, and what I hope they will glean from a text like this, and then just purely their own more emotional responses to the text. 

And booksellers, too—I was like, oh, maybe booksellers feel really strongly about not writing in their books. But so far that has also not been the case, because they’re like, that’s my work self. Some booksellers have shown me really interesting marginalia from their personal collection. Claire Foster cut out a quote to put on her fridge. She’s a bookseller through and through, but she’s a translator, she’s a writer, you know. So I’ve loved giving people the opportunity to see their own multiplicity in that way. It’s been really fun.

AO: I’m fascinated by this form you explore: marginalia separated from its source text. At times there’s this air of mystery that reminded me of how some of my favorite poems make me feel. At one point, you write: “The poem is for us to enter, not categorize.” What’s Marginalia’s relationship to poetry?

NW: Michael—the publisher of Autofocus—and I kind of went back and forth in terms of what we should call it. Autofocus publishes what they call “artful autobiographical writing,” so it’s typically prose, for the most part. But they’re broadening that in a way that’s really important. And so we were talking about it, and he was like, it’s a book-length essay, but it’s also a long poem. And I was like, absolutely, it’s all of these things. It is a yes/and, both/and. 

I definitely feel there’s a relationship to poetry here. If I think back on how this project started, so long ago, I got into literary nonfiction through the lyric essay at the end of undergrad. That’s when the lyric essay was kind of having a moment—John D’Agata; Jenny Boully’s early work; Eula Biss’s early work, like The Balloonists; Maggie Nelson—everybody was reading Bluets, which is a book I still love so much, and is very much in here. And I was coming out of being a theater major and a performance person, and I was doing choreography and devised work. Something really spoke to me about the idea of form that was starting to be talked about in the world of literary nonfiction, because it felt very choreographic to me. It felt very much like the way that I worked with dancers and actors in a space to devise something together. To give them a prompt and have them generate a lot of the content, the material, but then we would shape it together into a form. Structured improvisation and things like that felt really resonant to me with what was happening in literary nonfiction. 

So that’s what brought me to my MFA with Jenny Boully, who was my thesis advisor. I remember having this moment when I was taking this course in the lyric essay with the poet Mark Wunderlich… We were reading Anne Carson, I think, and we read Jenny Boully’s book, The Body, which is a book made entirely of footnotes, and that just completely blew my mind. That really sowed the seeds for thinking about how nonfiction could arise from the idea of a form. Like, what is a book that’s made entirely of footnotes? That stuff sunk in deep and has lived with me ever since. Jenny started out in poetry, and she spoke about how she became interested in extending the line as far as it could go, and that is one of the things that brought her out of strict poetry into more experimental forms of prose. 

I was also very involved in the small press poetry community in the city where I was doing my graduate program, and I met a lot of poets, and I started a journal that was focused on poetry, lyric essays, and experimental nonfiction. I felt very much like I grew up with poets, in terms of my writing life—more so than prose. I’ve published a novel, but I’ve never really studied fiction beyond my own reading. I haven’t taken a course in fiction writing. And I think of that novel as a poet’s novel. With everything I write, my attention is very much on the line, which you could also call the sentence, but I do think of it as the line. That feels really important to how this book came together, because I also think of each page as a stanza.

AO: Can you talk more about the process of shaping your marginalia from all of these books into a book of your own?

NW: This is where the “half-dream” comes in. It really feels like so much of this unconsciously came together. There was a time—maybe a little after graduate school—that I published a very short version in a numbered list form. That was a time when I was playing, experimenting, trying something out, just doing a short version of something, sending it to a journal, and then was like, okay, that’s cool, and set it to the side and worked on other things. 

But I would say that the larger endeavor of this book happened during a move. I left a whole life. I left everything except my books and moved across the country. Ended up in this new place, totally new life. I was starting over. And it had also come out of a time when I didn’t feel like I could read. So I really wasn’t reading. I remember having a very difficult time reading anything for a couple of years. It was right after grad school, too, so some of that is to be expected—I think you get tired. But I wasn’t reading, and I found that really disconcerting. It was very unsettling to me to be a person who didn’t spend all of my time reading. 

There’s the Walter Benjamin line, “I am unpacking my library.” When I landed in this new place, and I was unpacking, I felt like I was trying to put myself together again. I was trying, in a very real way, to become a person again, and to figure out who I was, and if there was any continuity from that. What was new, what was different, what was lost? 

And so I was going through my books. I started looking at all this marginalia, and this is where the choreography stuff kicks in for me. I had this very physical, visceral need to compile all of these fragments and see what it would build up into. So that’s what I started doing; I started writing down all of my marginalia on index cards. Taking them out allowed me to start to forget where I had written them, so they could start to exist on their own. That’s an explanation I can put on it now. At the time, I didn’t know what I was doing. I was just frantically, compulsively trying to find myself. But now I can say that that’s how it started to build. The fragments started to stand on their own once I pulled them out of the books and put them somewhere else. So then I had this huge stack of my own writing, and I could physically move them around, rearrange them, throw them up in the air, throw them on the floor, and put them up on the wall—that whole thing. 

But even that was a long time ago now. So then I just kind of put them to the side again, and moved again, and then moved again, and did this thing where I kept uprooting my life. But the books, and my fragments in the books, were the one constant thing. And then I remembered that I had published that essay, and the essay was called “Marginalia.” I liked the idea that that could be the title of the book, thinking about Jenny’s book, The Body, and other books like that. And so it finally came together in a more conscious way. I guess two years ago now is probably when I submitted it.

AO: Quite a journey.

NW: Very much a journey. That’s how I think about the essay as a form. When I think of the essay, I think of a journey, a path, an exploration. I don’t just think of a certain way that words look on the page.

AO: At one point, you write, “My reader will be called upon to think,” which is kind of cool to read in the present as one of your readers. In retrospect, were there moments where your marginalia felt like predictions? Stuff you wrote that ended up coming true? 

NW: I haven’t thought about marginalia as prediction, probably because I just think about it so much related to the past, and how it came from the past. So that’s really interesting. I know that came out of a time where I was really asking a lot of questions about what a novel could be. It was when I was writing my novel, Subjects We Left Out. 

I was really trying to test the boundaries of what a novel could be, and I knew I was gonna get criticized for how I was approaching it. I’m not really that interested in plot; I’m not interested in chronological narrative. I’m really interested in how everything is much more achronological than we think it is. And so I was writing this very achronological novel, and I was thinking about, you know, how do you inspire a reader to approach reading that way, if they haven’t thought about reading in that way before? Like, I really hope people can approach my novel in this way and feel called upon to think in a way that excites them. 

But this reminds me—my mom had this book when I was growing up, a collection of Shakespeare quotes for every day of the year. And I was a real Shakespeare nerd; I grew up reading Shakespeare as a young child and performing it… The book was kind of like a horoscope. I would flip through periodically and look at what the quote was on a certain day. I really liked having that kind of relationship to a book. I would love if people had that kind of relationship to Marginalia. I think it’s a really fun book to read in one sitting, but I also think you can flip around and just read one stanza, one page, and take it with you that day. 

AO: Almost like using time as a lens for reading, and your perspective changes from day to day. That’s cool. That book you mentioned reminds me of those daily calendars where you tear off each page as you go. I feel like writers could experiment with that as a form.

NW: Totally, that would be fun.

AO: I wonder if we could talk next about your relationship between work and writing, because I’m curious—going back to the idea of dailiness and how everyday perspective affects one’s writing and reading—how you’re bringing your work as a psychoanalyst to the lens of your writing, and vice versa. I know you also edit “Extra-Analytic: Creative Readings,” a column on reading psychoanalytically for Psychoanalytic Perspectives. How do you feel like that part of your life affects your writing (and reading)?

NW: You know, it’s funny, when you said that about the tearaway calendar pages… I think I’ve thrown it out now, but for many years—probably from high school until 2020-ish—I had a tearaway calendar page from the date of my birthday that I think my mom gave me. I always had it tacked up above my desk, everywhere I lived. And it said… let me see if I can remember… It was there for so long. How difficult it is to blend the process of our life and the process of our work, yet how sweet it is when we do it.

AO: Oh my god, I can’t believe how many different things just coalesced when you said that!

NW: I know! I was like, whoa, this is really big. 

So I have always been someone who needed there to be some blending. I’ve had a couple jobs where they were in my field but felt very separate, and I felt like my writing life and my reading life and my personal life were just a little too separate. I’ve just never been good at the 9-to-5 life. It’s really helpful for some people because it’s consistent, and so they’re like, okay, I know what my work life is, and that gives me freedom outside of those boundaries. And I think that’s so important to identify—like, what kind of person are you? What works for you? Because there’s not one right way to do it. What’s important is to figure out what works for you. 

I think that’s why I was drawn to things like teaching, because I like working with people and long-term process, but I never liked things like giving grades. Having to give a grade at the end of an essayistic exploration of life just feels so meaningless, but then it’s so important and determines things about their future in ways that I just don’t want to be responsible for. 

So that’s where I was in my professional life before starting psychoanalytic training. I can’t speak to other kinds of therapy trainings, but psychoanalytic training is a huge, whole-person endeavor and experience. It’s the only form of therapy training that requires you to be in your own psychoanalytic treatment as a patient; other forms of therapy don’t require you to be in therapy. Obviously, most people are, because it’s kind of a no-brainer, but it’s not actually required, which I find really strange. And so a good third of my week is spent in my own psychoanalytic treatment… And then, thinking about that working upon me between sessions, I see patients, I study, I write. And it’s all starting to blend in ways that feel really holistic. 

I think the way you find psychoanalysis is really interesting and important, and kind of speaks to how you enter the field. When I found it, it felt like, oh my god, this is what I’ve been trying to do my whole life. This is the language I’ve been trying to speak my whole life. This is the work I’ve been trying to do, and I’ve been trying to do it in these spaces where it didn’t fit.

Psychoanalysis is so not goal-oriented. That’s an important part of the process: the therapist not having a goal for the patient, the therapist really listening to the patient’s speech—how they’re not speaking, how they are speaking—and letting that guide the treatment. And that’s a very summarizing way to describe it, but that is really important to me and felt very resonant with my relationship to having studied the form of the essay in graduate school, and that being an open-ended endeavor. 

Something I was really drawn to when thinking about essay writing was that the end of an essay should always feel like a new beginning, and not a very culminating ending. And that’s certainly true of a treatment as well. When a treatment ends, it’s because a person is going out into the world to live a freer, happier, mildly less miserable life. There’s so many parallels with psychoanalytic process and the way that I’ve approached the writing process, and that has allowed me to start writing in new ways, because I feel less like I’m fighting the boundaries of a different discipline. Now I feel like it’s all kind of coming together, and everything feels like an open-ended, non-goal-oriented process and practice. 

AO: That reminds me of a quote I’d written down from Marginalia: “Something I’ve learned about writing is that you never write the book you plan to write. You always end up writing something different.” That feels so tied to what you just said about not being goal-oriented. 

NW: It really feels like a book that came together while I wasn’t paying attention. Like there was a part of my brain I had to turn off in order to create this object, this Word document that became a PDF that I sent to Autofocus. But that quote definitely came out of years and years of trying to write books that never got written, or did get written and are still in my files somewhere, and thank God they’re not published. 

But at the time, I was like, I have to publish this book. It has to fulfill this fantasy I have for myself and my writing life, and for what could come from my life if I fulfill this fantasy. So also connecting to psychoanalytic process, psychoanalysis is really about understanding what people’s fantasies are, why they have those fantasies, and what those fantasies are doing for them, and also how they’re blocking them from actually living their life and doing the things they actually want to do. I think a lot of my books that didn’t come to be were the ones that were trying to fulfill a fantasy. And then the ones that did come to be were the ones that I somehow found a way to let live without me forcing their production too much.

AO: I’m interested in this idea that we have to kind of pin ourselves down in memoir writing—almost freeze time so that we can depict a version of ourselves on the page. But of course time keeps passing, so the things that were true at the time of writing might no longer be true at the time of publication. 

Which is all to say: Have you found a four-leaf clover yet? 

NW: No, I haven’t! I wish. I have still never found a four-leaf clover, but maybe I no longer constantly consider myself to be unlucky.

AO: That’s what I like about interviews: the writer can address the evolution of the self that has occurred since the text was written. 

NW: That was an anxiety about putting this book together, for sure. There’s so many old selves in this book, and there’s references to the age I was at the time that I wrote the piece of marginalia. And that was totally an anxiety—oh, people are gonna read that and think that’s still how I feel, but actually I was only twenty-five at the time that I wrote that. There are descriptions about the way I was living that I now see as a very defensive way of living. Protecting myself in ways that I don’t need to anymore, about my relationship to objects and my relationship to spaces, and my reasons for keeping people out, away from me, that are very present in the book, because they are very present in the decade-plus of marginalia, and that’s not who I am anymore. But it’s part of who I’ve been, and I was interested in being able to put that out there, and to feel okay about not being that person anymore. 

That’s always how it feels when you publish any kind of book, because by the time you actually finish it, you submit it, it sits in the queue forever, people review it, they accept it, you go through the edits… I mean, it’s ages and ages before a book actually comes out. So, you’re never the same person who even submitted the book. Marginalia is going to come out two years from when I submitted it. And I worked on it for ten years before that. So I’m interested in that idea. 

I think I came to nonfiction from such a different place. I don’t know if it’s my particular family background, or my particular makeup, or having been in theater my whole life, but I just always felt that everybody is multiple, and that we’re never fixed. And so when I came into an interest in nonfiction writing, I always thought that the idea of a fixed self is a fiction—that felt like a fact to me. And so, it felt like if you’re saying, this is always true, and this is the only truth, that is a fiction. So how is that different from writing a novel? 

I was always interested in that complexity, and that very much drove Marginalia’s thinking. How can I illustrate the way that we are all so multiple? We were multiple in the past, we are multiple in the present, and we have no idea how multiple we’ll be in the future.

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Naomi Washer is a writer and psychoanalyst in formation in New York City, and host of the podcast Reading Around the Margins. Her novel, Subjects We Left Out, was published by Veliz Books in 2021. She is the author of several chapbooks across genre, and her work has appeared in Psychoanalytic Perspectives, Essay Daily, Seneca Review, Asymptote, and other journals and anthologies. She writes Process Notes about revisiting the books that shape our creative practice, and is the Editor of “Extra-Analytic: Creative Readings,” a column on the psychoanalytic process of reading for Psychoanalytic Perspectives.