An Image of My Name Enters America

Winner of the 2024 Vermont Book Award for Creative Nonfiction
A Vulture Best Book of 2024

Again, today, if I must choose between love and memory, I choose memory.

What would you risk to know yourself? Which stories are you willing to follow to the bitter end, revise, or, possibly, begin all over? In this collection of five interrelated essays, Lucy Ives explores identity, national fantasy, and history.

She examines events and records from her own life — a childhood obsession with "My Little Pony," papers and notebooks from college, an unwitting inculcation into the myth of romantic love, and the birth of her son — to excavate larger aspects of the past that have been suppressed or ignored.

With bracing insight and extraordinary range, she weaves new stories about herself, her family, our country, and our culture. She connects postmodern irony to eighteenth-century cults, Cold War musicals to a great uncle’s suicide to the settlement of the American West, museum period rooms to the origins of her last name to the Assyrian genocide, and the sci-fi novel The Three-Body Problem to the development of modern obstetrics.

Ives retrieves shadowy sites of pain and fear and, with her boundless imagination, attentiveness, and wit, transforms them into narratives of repair and possibility.

“Part criticism, part personal essay, part intellectual jubilation, An Image of My Name Enters America is the most inventive and exciting work of nonfiction this year.” — Maris Kreizman, Vulture Best Books of 2024

“This is the kind of book you want to read aloud to people you love, to assign, to give as a present—but don’t loan this one; you might not get it back.” — Alexander Chee

“I tore through the poet, art critic, and novelist Lucy Ives’s essay collection with glee. . . . By revealing the ideology behind an object (whether it’s a film or antique furniture), she patiently dismantles our fantasies about America and ourselves. It’s painful to let go of these delusions; it’s also the only way to go on. . . . In the aftermath, at least we can cling to her voice—lively, cathartic, and undeniably charming.” — Celine Nguyen, The Believer