When Edward Tamlin disappears while writing his memoir, Jane Tamlin (his wife and the mother of his young children) begins to write a secret, corrective "counter-memoir" of her own. Calling the book Choke Box, she reveals intimate, often irreverent, details about her family and marriage, rejecting—and occasionally celebrating—her suspected role in her husband's disappearance.
Choke Box isn't Jane's first book. From her room in the Buffalo Psychiatric Institute, she slowly reveals a hidden history of the ghost authorship that has sabotaged her family and driven her to madness. Her latest work, finally written under her own name, is designed to reclaim her dark and troubled story. Yet even as Jane portrays her life as a wife, mother, and slighted artist with sardonic candor, her every word is underscored by one belief above all others: the complete truth is always a secret. But the stories we tell may help us survive—if they don't kill us first.
Choke Box isn't Jane's first book. From her room in the Buffalo Psychiatric Institute, she slowly reveals a hidden history of the ghost authorship that has sabotaged her family and driven her to madness. Her latest work, finally written under her own name, is designed to reclaim her dark and troubled story. Yet even as Jane portrays her life as a wife, mother, and slighted artist with sardonic candor, her every word is underscored by one belief above all others: the complete truth is always a secret. But the stories we tell may help us survive—if they don't kill us first.
Christina Milletti's Choke Box is a razor-sharp page-turner that, as it hurtles to its conclusion, explores motherhood, guilt, marriage, and so much else while toying with the reliability of memory and narrative itself. This is an unforgettable, original, and satisfying read.'—Sabina Murray, author of Valiant Gentlemen: A Novel
'Christina Milletti is a comic genius, a gorgeous stylist, and a master of inventiveness, who has, in this tour de force novel, fashioned a conceit of Nabokovian brilliance that challenges all our assumptions about domesticity as it simultaneously reinvigorates the English language. A man, his wife. His book, her knife. Her cunning counter-memoir. Choke Box will keep you guessing, and its delightfully slippery narrator will charm you as she sets the record straight.'—Mary Caponegro, author of All Fall Down
'Choke Box is a chilling and wonderfully thrilling, lyrical book that will send its readers on a journey through truth, violence, and language, straight up to the tantalizing border of bodies and brains. Christina Milletti has forged a gorgeous monster.'—Samantha Hunt, author of The Dark Dark
'The velocity of its intelligence and its wit, and the grace of its language, makes Christina Milletti's Choke Box a wild, audacious and utterly pleasurable ride. I read it in one sitting with great admiration and delight.'—Carole Maso, author of Mother & Child
'Milletti's debut is a bracing cri de coeur against the silencing of women's voices . . . Milletti is always entertaining in her dismantling of the madwoman in the attic trope, making for a sharp, playful novel.'—Publishers Weekly
'Using the tropes of crime fiction, psychological thrillers, and chick lit, Milletti manages to turn a complex, feminist critique into a dark page-turner . . . Choke Box is an invitation to a shadowy world where all speech is suspect, and the perpetrator may be the story itself.'—American Book Review
'In Choke Box, winner of the University of Massachusetts Press's Juniper Prize for Fiction, common household objects can prove deadly, and horror abounds beneath the seemingly placid surface of suburban domesticity . . . This novel offers many pleasures, including the appropriate noir turns of its plot.'—Necessary Fiction
CHRISTINA MILLETTI is associate professor of English at the University at Buffalo and author of the short story collection The Religious & Other Fictions. Her work has appeared in the Iowa Review, Best New American Voices, the Masters Review, Denver Quarterly, the Cincinnati Review, and the Brooklyn Rail, among other outlets.
