The Ancestry of Objects
As tragedies accumulate, a young woman contemplates the end of her life and her relationship to desire, consent, and control.
“Readers of lyrical, genre-bending fiction will be spellbound.”
– Publishers Weekly
Advance Praise
Tatiana Ryckman's second novel, The Ancestry of Objects, takes us deep into the labyrinth of eros and its manias. There is adultery, there is loneliness and abandonment, there is shame and longing, a family of ghosts, and there is a woman learning how to live and finally, how to love herself.
— Micheline Aharonian Marcom, author of The New American
'It is us—our fear and our shame and our pride—and no one else that haunts us,' says the narrator (or narrators) of this harrowing, startling novel, told in the first person plural. From the moment I started reading, I felt the presence of T.R. Ryckman's unmistakable genius. You could compare it to Ben Marcus, Alexandra Kleeman, Brian Evanson or Carmen Machado, but really The Ancestry of Objects is in a category of its own.
—Jess Row, author of Your Face in Mine
I’ve always loved Ryckman’s fiction, but nothing in the idiosyncratic originality of her short stories prepared me for her stunning new work, The Ancestry of Objects, with its dark eroticism, its plunge into depths of loneliness, and its quest for paradoxical liberation. In reading this powerful and disturbing short novel, I found myself splitting in two: into the reader who could not put these pages down, and the reader who had to, in order to regain her equilibrium and catch her throttled breath.
—Diane Lefer, author of Confessions of a Carnivore
Ryckman’s The Ancestry of Objects accomplishes a difficult and compelling tension with lyrical prose that ropes readers into a nuanced depiction of the pleasure and pain of human relationships. She renders the figures of her fragmented novel with a stark tenderness, reflecting the beauty and unattractiveness of desire. There are no villains, no heroes, just complications between people whose flaws will draw readers to recognize themselves and our shared yearning to be known.
—Donald Quist, author of Harbors and For Other Ghosts
I Don't Think of you (Until I Do)
Out from Future Tense Books
“Some chapters are memories, both lovely… and painful. The isolation of each individual entry underscores this haunting story from beginning to end.”
– Publishers Weekly
Read an excerpt of I Don’t Think of You on Tin House. More excerpts can be found on Fiction Advocate, Cosmonaut's Avenue, Numero Cinq, Hobart and Muse/A.
Advance Praise
More reviews can be found on Entropy, The Coil, The Collapsar, YIV, and Coal Hill Review. I Don't Think of You was selected as a recommended read by Maudlin House, and a best book of 2017 by PANK Magazine. Elite Daily called it a "must read" for fall 2017. Check out the playlist and book notes for I Don't Think of You, up on Largehearted Boy. Read Malvern Books’ recommendation of I Don’t Think of You on their blog.
“Keenly felt and fiercely written. Tatiana Ryckman is a revelation.”
— Jennifer DuBois, author of Cartwheel
“A voyage into the timeless whorl of when you are obsessed with someone far away. A romantic wound that keeps reinventing itself. When you can’t look away from the car wreck of your own desire as you’re passing it by.”
— Mark Leidner, author of Under the Sea
“The isolation of each individual entry underscores this haunting story from beginning to end.”
— Publishers Weekly
“In I Don’t Think of You (Until I Do), Tatiana Ryckman pulls from a dense palate of recollection, theory, observation and complicated emotion to create a new lover’s discourse as the narrator tries to work out what happened to a romance undone by distance and time and resentment. In the manner of Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, or Lydia Davis’s The End of the Story, Ryckman works through grief, the abstraction of the amorous object, the truth that one breakup maybe be as unremarkable as the next; I Don’t Think of You (Until I Do) is relatable to anyone that’s ever felt like shit because of another person.”
— Ben Fama, author of Fantasy
“An elegiac and dirty and horribly beautiful examination of love and the lack of it; Ryckman has written the anti-love story within all of us. A book so earnest and sharp in its examination of heartbreak, it will make you ache for all the people you haven’t even loved yet.”
— T Kira Madden, author of LONG LIVE THE TRIBE OF FATHERLESS GIRLS
“Reading Tatiana Ryckman’s intense I Don’t Think of You (Until I Do) was a dangerous read for a recovered romantic obsessive like me. I found myself stepping dangerously into territory from which I had believed myself weaned: unrequitedness, yearning, and the sweet hurt that accompanies the two. I was seduced back into those feelings – that familiar romantic world – by Tatiana’s poetic words of want.”
— Elizabeth Ellen, author of Person/a: a novel
“With I Don’t Think of You (Until I Do), Tatiana Ryckman has written a wonder; a remarkably accomplished work of such keen observation and emotional complexity as to rival those texts—Maggie Nelson’s Bluets and Chloe Caldwell’s Women come to mind—with which it shares some literary DNA. Ryckman is a ruthless investigator of reckless desire. I Don’t Think of You (Until I Do) asks—newly, stunningly, with precise prose chiseled from stone—what it is we’re meant to do when the source of our appetite is beyond the realm of our own cognition, and following this narrator in pursuit of the unanswerable is a reading experience as gutting as it is thrilling. One finishes this book with the simple thought: Now here is a person. Further, I Don’t Think of You (Until I Do) announces that here is a writer—one not to watch, but to read.”
— Vincent Scarpa, Kirkus Reviews
“With the publication of I Don’t Think of You (Until I Do) Tatiana Ryckman has refused to join the long list of young writers afraid of saying something real, afraid of feeling something so deeply they might appear foolish. Instead she has joined the likes of Clarice Lispector, Claudia Rankine, and John Berger. Ryckman has written a book you will return to over and over, you will feel crushed by and then celebrated through, she has written a book we all should give (wrapped in fire) to our one true love.”
— Matthew Dickman, author of All-American Poem
“I Don’t Think of You (Until I Do) makes me believe the longing and devastation of a love unfulfilled is greater than the love itself. This book feels necessary as hell, and lets me believe in art over the thing it represents. Tatiana’s prose is so masterful, its tenderness and seizure is something I never want to be released from. I adore this book.”