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The Lost Daughter Collective
Every woman was once a girl
and every girl was once a daughter
For every woman in the world,
there will always be laughter in slaughter.
Midnight at the Institute. Using bedtime stories as cautionary tales, a Wrist Scholar tells his only child of the Lost Daughter a fabled group of bereaved fathers who meet in an abandoned umbrella factory to mourn the loss of their girls. Over everything hangs the mystery of the Archivist’s daughter―neither dead nor missing, but indisputably gone. Blurring the line between reality and artifice, far past and near future, Drager’s satirical exploration of gender politics and identity queers the old “A son is a son ’til he finds himself a wife, but a daughter is a daughter all her life.”
With allusions to Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, and Peter Pan, The Lost Daughter Collective is a gothic fairy tale fusing the fabulism of Donald Barthleme and Ben Marcus with the language play of Rikki Ducornet and Jenny Offill.
and every girl was once a daughter
For every woman in the world,
there will always be laughter in slaughter.
Midnight at the Institute. Using bedtime stories as cautionary tales, a Wrist Scholar tells his only child of the Lost Daughter a fabled group of bereaved fathers who meet in an abandoned umbrella factory to mourn the loss of their girls. Over everything hangs the mystery of the Archivist’s daughter―neither dead nor missing, but indisputably gone. Blurring the line between reality and artifice, far past and near future, Drager’s satirical exploration of gender politics and identity queers the old “A son is a son ’til he finds himself a wife, but a daughter is a daughter all her life.”
With allusions to Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, and Peter Pan, The Lost Daughter Collective is a gothic fairy tale fusing the fabulism of Donald Barthleme and Ben Marcus with the language play of Rikki Ducornet and Jenny Offill.
176 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 2017
About the author
Lindsey Drager
6 books78 followersHer experimental novels have won a John Gardner Fiction Prize and a Shirley Jackson Award; been listed as a “Best Book of the Year” in The Guardian and NPR; and twice been named a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award.
Her work has received support from the Anderson Center for Interdisciplinary Study, the I-Park Foundation, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and the Vermont Studio Center. The recipient of a 2020 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Prose, she is currently at work on two speculative multimedia projects.
Her work has received support from the Anderson Center for Interdisciplinary Study, the I-Park Foundation, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and the Vermont Studio Center. The recipient of a 2020 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Prose, she is currently at work on two speculative multimedia projects.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 39 reviews
June 20, 2023
In her later The Archive of Alternate Endings, Lindsey Drager somehow took Handsel and Gretel, Haley's Comet, and those ostracized by society, and spun together something unexpectedly vital and moving. Here, we have another strange assortment of signifiers: ice, shadows, esoteric academic arguments ("does the wrist exist?"), fairy tales, vague dystopia, and loss of family. The melding is in this case less seamless, perhaps a little less assured, the logic less effortless. But as you find yourself asking where, in this story of fathers and daughters, the sons and mothers may be, rest assured that at least one those omissions is a precise and transformative one, and the core here, beneath the faux scholarship and incompletely transmitted stories, seems just as deeply felt. Having now exhausted her first three novels I am very much looking forward to whatever Drager may do next.
September 4, 2017
I was immediately intrigued by Lindsey Drager's novella, The Lost Daughter Collective. Throughout, bedtime stories told to young girls are used as cautionary tales; each, like a fairytale, starts off in rather a beguiling and sweet manner, but soon the sinister begins to creep in.
The main narrative, which in its first half introduces us to a five-year-old girl and her father, is interspersed with the smaller 'bedtime' stories, all of which add a lot to the whole. This approach to structure is simple yet clever, and works incredibly well. We do not learn the girl's name, but learn about her through her thoughts, fears, and dreams.
Grief is one of the mainstays of the novella, in all its many forms. The Lost Daughter Collective of the title is a group for bereaved fathers, who have lost their daughters either to death, or to life. The collective 'gathers on the top floor of an abandoned umbrella factory in the downtown of a mid-sized city. The group is composed of men who meet weekly to harness their mourning, a delicate practice best not undertaken alone.' The fathers, different as they are, have decided that the best way to meet is to categorise their daughters into two distinct groups; there are the Dorothys, who are dead, and the Alices, who are missing. 'Qualifying their lost girls in this way,' writes Drager, 'is a silently endorsed coping mechanism. When a new father arrives, no one need articulate the method of daughter-exit from his life. The others can tell whether he is the victim of a Dorothy or an Alice by the new father's posture and gait. Father sorrow is best read through the mobile body.'
I loved the stylish fairytale feel which the prose had, and the fact that all of the characters, for the first half of the book, are unnamed; instead, they go by their job titles. The father of our unnamed young protagonist is known as the 'Wrist Scholar' for instance, working as he is upon that almost unidentifiable space between hand and arm. The themes which Drager has woven in are rather dark on the whole, and her clever ideas have such a power to them. There is an awful lot to think about and mull over in The Lost Daughter Collective. There are interesting twists which cause one to consider exactly what loss is, and whether one can truly overcome it.
Drager manages to be both charming and unsettling in her prose and storyline, and strikes a balance between the two marvellously. She uses familiar stories and tropes - for instance, using 'Dorothy' of The Wizard of Oz, and Alice of Lewis Carroll's books - and sometimes simplistic, fairytale-esque prose, in which she fits all of the separate stories. Really, though, Drager makes them all her own; there is little similarity here between other books which have at least a partial basis in fairytale. Drager also cleverly weaves in semi-autobiographical stories which feature the likes of Virginia Woolf, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Mary Shelley, which are wonderful to behold.
There is no predictability here, and whilst similar structures have been used, and parallels can be drawn, the ideas are all Drager's own. The Lost Daughter Collective is at once familiar and fresh, and uses artful repetition at junctures; it is as beautifully written as it is startlingly profound. It is short enough to be read in a single sitting, but its depth of ideas and prose will linger long afterwards. The Lost Daughter Collective is quite unlike anything I've read in ages, with its reimagined and reshaped stories, and its original approach. It is a real gem of a book, both enchanting and entrancing.
The main narrative, which in its first half introduces us to a five-year-old girl and her father, is interspersed with the smaller 'bedtime' stories, all of which add a lot to the whole. This approach to structure is simple yet clever, and works incredibly well. We do not learn the girl's name, but learn about her through her thoughts, fears, and dreams.
Grief is one of the mainstays of the novella, in all its many forms. The Lost Daughter Collective of the title is a group for bereaved fathers, who have lost their daughters either to death, or to life. The collective 'gathers on the top floor of an abandoned umbrella factory in the downtown of a mid-sized city. The group is composed of men who meet weekly to harness their mourning, a delicate practice best not undertaken alone.' The fathers, different as they are, have decided that the best way to meet is to categorise their daughters into two distinct groups; there are the Dorothys, who are dead, and the Alices, who are missing. 'Qualifying their lost girls in this way,' writes Drager, 'is a silently endorsed coping mechanism. When a new father arrives, no one need articulate the method of daughter-exit from his life. The others can tell whether he is the victim of a Dorothy or an Alice by the new father's posture and gait. Father sorrow is best read through the mobile body.'
I loved the stylish fairytale feel which the prose had, and the fact that all of the characters, for the first half of the book, are unnamed; instead, they go by their job titles. The father of our unnamed young protagonist is known as the 'Wrist Scholar' for instance, working as he is upon that almost unidentifiable space between hand and arm. The themes which Drager has woven in are rather dark on the whole, and her clever ideas have such a power to them. There is an awful lot to think about and mull over in The Lost Daughter Collective. There are interesting twists which cause one to consider exactly what loss is, and whether one can truly overcome it.
Drager manages to be both charming and unsettling in her prose and storyline, and strikes a balance between the two marvellously. She uses familiar stories and tropes - for instance, using 'Dorothy' of The Wizard of Oz, and Alice of Lewis Carroll's books - and sometimes simplistic, fairytale-esque prose, in which she fits all of the separate stories. Really, though, Drager makes them all her own; there is little similarity here between other books which have at least a partial basis in fairytale. Drager also cleverly weaves in semi-autobiographical stories which feature the likes of Virginia Woolf, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Mary Shelley, which are wonderful to behold.
There is no predictability here, and whilst similar structures have been used, and parallels can be drawn, the ideas are all Drager's own. The Lost Daughter Collective is at once familiar and fresh, and uses artful repetition at junctures; it is as beautifully written as it is startlingly profound. It is short enough to be read in a single sitting, but its depth of ideas and prose will linger long afterwards. The Lost Daughter Collective is quite unlike anything I've read in ages, with its reimagined and reshaped stories, and its original approach. It is a real gem of a book, both enchanting and entrancing.
October 1, 2019
Das ... Uff. Ich finde spontan keine Worte, um das Buch zu beschreiben. Deshalb ein paar Content Notes: Tod (Mütter der beschriebenen Töchter fast durchweg, manche Töchter), Vermisst werden, Suizid, psychische Traumata durch emotionale Distanz in der Kindheit.
Aus einer Laune heraus, weil es gut klang, habe ich es dieses Jahr im Wien-Urlaub gekauft. Dass ich ein sprachliches Meisterwerk, dass sich irgendwo zwischen Gothic Novel, Fairy Tale und Philosophischer Abhandlung, gepaart mit der Suche nach der eigenen Identität, einpendelt, gekauft habe, wusste ich bis vor kurzem nicht.
Ich werde mir definitiv die anderen Bücher der Autorin kaufen.
Aus einer Laune heraus, weil es gut klang, habe ich es dieses Jahr im Wien-Urlaub gekauft. Dass ich ein sprachliches Meisterwerk, dass sich irgendwo zwischen Gothic Novel, Fairy Tale und Philosophischer Abhandlung, gepaart mit der Suche nach der eigenen Identität, einpendelt, gekauft habe, wusste ich bis vor kurzem nicht.
Ich werde mir definitiv die anderen Bücher der Autorin kaufen.
August 11, 2018
I really enjoyed this. But the occasional prose hiccups were distracting.
Read
February 17, 2018I published this review in Quarterly West, but until they get their archives up, I'll put it here:
All over the United States this last holiday season, many children couldn’t go home for the holidays. There was too much weeping to be done. Many children who went home realized that it wasn’t home any more, maybe never had been. “I went house for the holidays,” they came back saying. Children with children are quarantining their young ones from relatives. This bad time is good timing for Lindsey Drager’s ice labyrinth, The Lost Daughter Collective, which documents all the ways we didn’t know children can go, missing.
This novel is divided into two parts, “The Room with Two Doors” and “The Region of Perhaps.” In each section, the diegesis of the other is presented as non-diegetic material, further destabilizing any attempts to iron the narrative into linearity. In the first part, a father (the Scholar) tells his five-year-old the bedtime story of the Lost Daughter Collective. The Lost Daughter Collective is a group of men who meet on the top floor of an abandoned umbrella factory to mourn the loss of their daughters. In the second section, the story of the Scholar and his daughter takes the form of bygone folklore that a group called FOLD (Fathers of Lost Daughters) failed to finish telling their daughters before their deaths or disappearances.
The stories that the Collective and FOLD relate are a catalogue of paternal neglect reminiscent of macabre German cautionary tales like Max und Moritz and Der Struwwelpeter. In the first section, the members of the Collective have lost their daughters mostly through accident or under mysterious circumstances. The second section, on the other hand, shifts into free adaptations of famous women writers’ difficult relationships with their fathers. My knowledge of Mary Shelley helped me identify William Godwin in the domineering, creativity-quashing father figure of “Mary and her Father,” but the stories of Virginia Woolf and Charlotte Brontë / Perkins-Gilman seemed far more improvisatory. Rather than being intentionally cruel, most of the neglect is a result of fathers failing to understand their daughters’ needs, or failing to think outside of patriarchal cultural norms: “The fathers wanted very much for their daughters to fit certain archaic standards, but their daughters did not. And so the daughters left.”
The structural shift in cautionary tales hinges on the last story that the Scholar tells his daughter in the first section, “The Mystery of the Archivist’s Daughter.” This story is different than the others in that it does not end with the literal disappearance or death of the daughter. The archivist has simply shown up too late to his daughter’s ice sculpture competition to see her prize-winning statue before it melted. The losing of the daughter here must be interpreted as a rending that takes place inside the daughter. Her father is no longer who she’d believed fathers are supposed to be, throwing into uncertainty her daughter status as well. Thus, the daughter deaths and disappearances in the book can now be read metaphorically as the alienation we all feel from our parents to some degree as we grow older. “She cannot help thinking,” Drager writes, “that while the fathers see their girls as lost, the girls interpret their leaving differently.”
It’s no accident that an Archivist is not so different from a Scholar, that the daughter who puzzles over this final story grows up to become the Ice Sculptor. This frame story of Scholar and daughter is subsumed into the cautionary tales and becomes the novel’s overarching fable of carelessness. The Scholar is so caught up in theoretical and ultimately irrelevant work at the Wrist Institute that he fails to warn his daughter of a coming change, the loss of her baby teeth. The bedtime story of the Lost Daughter Collective, it turns out, was far less practical than the advice she needed, thus implicating storytelling itself in the girl’s originary trauma, the same fairytale cloaking of real-life issues in which the novel itself participates. One reason the story of the Collective might be less than helpful for the young girl is that, by focusing the lesson on the father’s pain, it misuses love by putting the daughter in a position of guilt, of obligation not to be the cause of her own father’s anxiety. Less than unhelpful, actually—as the story has the opposite effect on the daughter than the father intended. She spends the rest of her life “exhibit[ing] her fears,” first via shadow puppets, then the ice sculptures that increasingly condemn her father’s mistake.
In one of the novel’s many allusions, a father named Peter—loosely adapted from J.M. Barrie’s writing—appears to emerge as a redemptive father figure. Like the Archivist, Peter “loses” his daughter in a more figurative way: his daughter transitions into a son. Though Peter hears his child in a way that the book’s other fathers do not, though he supports the transition, the reader still gets a sense that Peter is seeing himself rather than his child at the center of the narrative, a reading that is reinforced by the image that ends the novel, the FOLD’s chairs after the adjournment of their meeting compared to “rotting teeth on the bottom of a mouth.” Thus there’s something wrong with reading Peter as an evolutionary leap forward, or at least a perfection of, the father figure—and I think we receive further clues in Drager’s other allusions to children’s literature, namely the Collective’s practice of referring to disappeared daughters as Alices and dead daughters as Dorothies. J.M. Barrie, Lewis Carroll, L. Frank Baum—what do these three writers have in common? They’re men who wrote novels that are commonly passed to children, not directly, but via the mediation of films or abridged storybooks. Why? Because if you actually read the books, they’re totally fucked up. As a writer of strange literature, I mean that mostly as a compliment, but my encounters with these books have left me feeling weird about the overwhelming sanction our culture has given them. The Tin Woodmen is hacked into pieces by his enchanted ax and given tin limbs as prosthetics, for example. Peter Pan eroticizes children, Peter speaking to Wendy “in a voice that no woman has ever yet been able to resist,” for example. Lewis Carroll, for example. Thus Drager’s allusions to diseased children’s literature written by men is positioned in dialectic opposition to the novel’s loose biographies of suppressed female writers, the end effect being to call into question the whole cultural apparatus that has passed to us the formative, canonic literature that we in turn pass to our children. This is the mistake being reenacted by the Scholar throughout the book, the rottenness of male-centric storytelling that fetishizes the bodies of girls while excluding their lived experiences. In a just world, our teeth would fall out for the stories we tell children.
This reading is either reinforced or complicated—I’m not sure—by the suggestion at the end of the novel that Peter’s last name might be Writer. One overriding question of The Lost Daughter Collective is, with all the competing, heteroglot storylines, who is the overarching narrator? The story of the Scholar and his daughter undergoes significant distortion by the time it becomes the FOLD’s folklore; they “corrected” their daughters when they referred to the Scholar as the “father without whisks.” “Risks,” the fathers said, rather than “wrists.” In a Region of Perhaps where all readings are misreadings and all fathers inherently solipsistic, the lesson they fail to learn is how to relinquish control over narratorial authority. The reading that I like best is a Quixotic one: that the girl who grew up to become the Ice Sculptor actually or additionally became the Writer, the last image of the folding chairs as rotten teeth her wink to the reader—however, insisting on this reading would show me perpetuating the fathers’ errors.
At times, the book’s language is comparable to Rabelais’s frozen words that are gradually heard as they thaw on the deck of the ship in Gargantua and Pentagruel. I love “We say that clocks have hands; we say that shoes have tongues. The notion of the wrist, however, has not been admitted into the domain of dead metaphor—in short, nothing else contains a wrist.” But overall the book’s language failed to enchant me as much as it aims to. Mainly, because it aims to, too emphatically. It’s this type of language intensive writing in which fairytale simplicity clashes with modernist enstrangement, an unrelenting trend these last twenty years or so that I hope falls out of fashion pronto. Every sentence seems to turn back at you to ask whether or not you thought it was lovely and weird. One of the book’s mantras, “For every woman in the world, there will always be laughter in slaughter,” doesn’t make much sense in context—slaughter in laughter would be more appropriate, or, better yet, ought in daughter. However, I was quickly made to forget my personal stylistic peeves by the book’s riddle-like, looping structure and the critique of patriarchy it achieves via holding up to scrutiny the narratives that fathers attempt to make meta-narratives for their daughters.
In Pixar’s handbook, Plato’s Republic, the philosopher advises us to exile from our city any storytelling or other forms of art that go against the propagandistic aims of imprinting the polis’s values on children. Both Platonic and anti-Platonic lessons can be extracted from Drager’s cautionary fable. It’s important that we pay attention to the stories we tell our children, the advice that we give and the advice that we save for later (sometimes save for too late). Most important of all, however, is realizing that children are already writing their own stories. Most important is to listen.
All over the United States this last holiday season, many children couldn’t go home for the holidays. There was too much weeping to be done. Many children who went home realized that it wasn’t home any more, maybe never had been. “I went house for the holidays,” they came back saying. Children with children are quarantining their young ones from relatives. This bad time is good timing for Lindsey Drager’s ice labyrinth, The Lost Daughter Collective, which documents all the ways we didn’t know children can go, missing.
This novel is divided into two parts, “The Room with Two Doors” and “The Region of Perhaps.” In each section, the diegesis of the other is presented as non-diegetic material, further destabilizing any attempts to iron the narrative into linearity. In the first part, a father (the Scholar) tells his five-year-old the bedtime story of the Lost Daughter Collective. The Lost Daughter Collective is a group of men who meet on the top floor of an abandoned umbrella factory to mourn the loss of their daughters. In the second section, the story of the Scholar and his daughter takes the form of bygone folklore that a group called FOLD (Fathers of Lost Daughters) failed to finish telling their daughters before their deaths or disappearances.
The stories that the Collective and FOLD relate are a catalogue of paternal neglect reminiscent of macabre German cautionary tales like Max und Moritz and Der Struwwelpeter. In the first section, the members of the Collective have lost their daughters mostly through accident or under mysterious circumstances. The second section, on the other hand, shifts into free adaptations of famous women writers’ difficult relationships with their fathers. My knowledge of Mary Shelley helped me identify William Godwin in the domineering, creativity-quashing father figure of “Mary and her Father,” but the stories of Virginia Woolf and Charlotte Brontë / Perkins-Gilman seemed far more improvisatory. Rather than being intentionally cruel, most of the neglect is a result of fathers failing to understand their daughters’ needs, or failing to think outside of patriarchal cultural norms: “The fathers wanted very much for their daughters to fit certain archaic standards, but their daughters did not. And so the daughters left.”
The structural shift in cautionary tales hinges on the last story that the Scholar tells his daughter in the first section, “The Mystery of the Archivist’s Daughter.” This story is different than the others in that it does not end with the literal disappearance or death of the daughter. The archivist has simply shown up too late to his daughter’s ice sculpture competition to see her prize-winning statue before it melted. The losing of the daughter here must be interpreted as a rending that takes place inside the daughter. Her father is no longer who she’d believed fathers are supposed to be, throwing into uncertainty her daughter status as well. Thus, the daughter deaths and disappearances in the book can now be read metaphorically as the alienation we all feel from our parents to some degree as we grow older. “She cannot help thinking,” Drager writes, “that while the fathers see their girls as lost, the girls interpret their leaving differently.”
It’s no accident that an Archivist is not so different from a Scholar, that the daughter who puzzles over this final story grows up to become the Ice Sculptor. This frame story of Scholar and daughter is subsumed into the cautionary tales and becomes the novel’s overarching fable of carelessness. The Scholar is so caught up in theoretical and ultimately irrelevant work at the Wrist Institute that he fails to warn his daughter of a coming change, the loss of her baby teeth. The bedtime story of the Lost Daughter Collective, it turns out, was far less practical than the advice she needed, thus implicating storytelling itself in the girl’s originary trauma, the same fairytale cloaking of real-life issues in which the novel itself participates. One reason the story of the Collective might be less than helpful for the young girl is that, by focusing the lesson on the father’s pain, it misuses love by putting the daughter in a position of guilt, of obligation not to be the cause of her own father’s anxiety. Less than unhelpful, actually—as the story has the opposite effect on the daughter than the father intended. She spends the rest of her life “exhibit[ing] her fears,” first via shadow puppets, then the ice sculptures that increasingly condemn her father’s mistake.
In one of the novel’s many allusions, a father named Peter—loosely adapted from J.M. Barrie’s writing—appears to emerge as a redemptive father figure. Like the Archivist, Peter “loses” his daughter in a more figurative way: his daughter transitions into a son. Though Peter hears his child in a way that the book’s other fathers do not, though he supports the transition, the reader still gets a sense that Peter is seeing himself rather than his child at the center of the narrative, a reading that is reinforced by the image that ends the novel, the FOLD’s chairs after the adjournment of their meeting compared to “rotting teeth on the bottom of a mouth.” Thus there’s something wrong with reading Peter as an evolutionary leap forward, or at least a perfection of, the father figure—and I think we receive further clues in Drager’s other allusions to children’s literature, namely the Collective’s practice of referring to disappeared daughters as Alices and dead daughters as Dorothies. J.M. Barrie, Lewis Carroll, L. Frank Baum—what do these three writers have in common? They’re men who wrote novels that are commonly passed to children, not directly, but via the mediation of films or abridged storybooks. Why? Because if you actually read the books, they’re totally fucked up. As a writer of strange literature, I mean that mostly as a compliment, but my encounters with these books have left me feeling weird about the overwhelming sanction our culture has given them. The Tin Woodmen is hacked into pieces by his enchanted ax and given tin limbs as prosthetics, for example. Peter Pan eroticizes children, Peter speaking to Wendy “in a voice that no woman has ever yet been able to resist,” for example. Lewis Carroll, for example. Thus Drager’s allusions to diseased children’s literature written by men is positioned in dialectic opposition to the novel’s loose biographies of suppressed female writers, the end effect being to call into question the whole cultural apparatus that has passed to us the formative, canonic literature that we in turn pass to our children. This is the mistake being reenacted by the Scholar throughout the book, the rottenness of male-centric storytelling that fetishizes the bodies of girls while excluding their lived experiences. In a just world, our teeth would fall out for the stories we tell children.
This reading is either reinforced or complicated—I’m not sure—by the suggestion at the end of the novel that Peter’s last name might be Writer. One overriding question of The Lost Daughter Collective is, with all the competing, heteroglot storylines, who is the overarching narrator? The story of the Scholar and his daughter undergoes significant distortion by the time it becomes the FOLD’s folklore; they “corrected” their daughters when they referred to the Scholar as the “father without whisks.” “Risks,” the fathers said, rather than “wrists.” In a Region of Perhaps where all readings are misreadings and all fathers inherently solipsistic, the lesson they fail to learn is how to relinquish control over narratorial authority. The reading that I like best is a Quixotic one: that the girl who grew up to become the Ice Sculptor actually or additionally became the Writer, the last image of the folding chairs as rotten teeth her wink to the reader—however, insisting on this reading would show me perpetuating the fathers’ errors.
At times, the book’s language is comparable to Rabelais’s frozen words that are gradually heard as they thaw on the deck of the ship in Gargantua and Pentagruel. I love “We say that clocks have hands; we say that shoes have tongues. The notion of the wrist, however, has not been admitted into the domain of dead metaphor—in short, nothing else contains a wrist.” But overall the book’s language failed to enchant me as much as it aims to. Mainly, because it aims to, too emphatically. It’s this type of language intensive writing in which fairytale simplicity clashes with modernist enstrangement, an unrelenting trend these last twenty years or so that I hope falls out of fashion pronto. Every sentence seems to turn back at you to ask whether or not you thought it was lovely and weird. One of the book’s mantras, “For every woman in the world, there will always be laughter in slaughter,” doesn’t make much sense in context—slaughter in laughter would be more appropriate, or, better yet, ought in daughter. However, I was quickly made to forget my personal stylistic peeves by the book’s riddle-like, looping structure and the critique of patriarchy it achieves via holding up to scrutiny the narratives that fathers attempt to make meta-narratives for their daughters.
In Pixar’s handbook, Plato’s Republic, the philosopher advises us to exile from our city any storytelling or other forms of art that go against the propagandistic aims of imprinting the polis’s values on children. Both Platonic and anti-Platonic lessons can be extracted from Drager’s cautionary fable. It’s important that we pay attention to the stories we tell our children, the advice that we give and the advice that we save for later (sometimes save for too late). Most important of all, however, is realizing that children are already writing their own stories. Most important is to listen.
April 2, 2018
"Just as we think we can tell the foreground from the back, the inside from the out, the mother from the daughter, we think that we tell our stories. But, I am here to tell you: our stories tell us."
Metafiction and fantasy esoterica - I think I understood hints of what was happening, but not all, and that's okay. My reading of it: a lens on grief, specifically men's grief - those who have "lost" their daughters, however that may be defined.
Metafiction and fantasy esoterica - I think I understood hints of what was happening, but not all, and that's okay. My reading of it: a lens on grief, specifically men's grief - those who have "lost" their daughters, however that may be defined.
May 20, 2018
This book felt like it slipped through my fingers as I kept trying to grasp hold of it. Like I was better off just watching it tumble out than trying to collect it into a unifying thing. Dense ideas but clean writing. So slim and quick to read, but now I want to diagram its parts, pry apart its layers and figure out its mechanics.
December 7, 2016
Review to come in The Rumpus
April 24, 2017
Really confusing. Not my cup of tea.
May 16, 2017
Some of this book probably went over my head, but the metaphors and the way the girls' stories were told as fairy tales was brilliant.
August 30, 2017
WTF did I just read? No. Just no. I kept thinking it was bound to come together and it never did. This was some weird shit man
June 14, 2023
I was not expecting my favorite book of the year to be one that I randomly picked up from a charity shop with no actual reviews on Goodreads, but here we are. One of the most beautiful novels I have ever read-- exploring the relationship between father and daughter. The physical and emotional space that those relationships take. Or do not take because girlhood is so complex. The importance of story, the disregard of fact from folklore. This is a hidden gem of feminist literature.
January 31, 2023
An odd story mixing fairy-tale and scientific style to this strange end, full of moments of poignant wordplay that feel like they dig at Fundamental Truths (tm).... but to what end I'm not entirely sure? Once the story transcends the Daughter-Father binary I think it does a marvelous job challenging itself, but that core dynamic is.... strange is underselling it, this is an odd thing.
October 29, 2021
3.5/4
Need to think on this one for a while, but it was intriguing and confusing at the same time and I enjoyed the ride it took me on.
Need to think on this one for a while, but it was intriguing and confusing at the same time and I enjoyed the ride it took me on.
August 12, 2023
Resonant, haunting poem of a novel which meditates deeply on the theme of daughterhood. There’s much to think deeply about here.
January 22, 2020
To be fair, I will only compare this book to Drager's latest, "The Archive of Alternate Endings". I say that because I feel it would be absolutely impossible to hold any other author to the standard that Drager has set. Seriously, this book is absolutely stunning. Typically, you can follow the trajectory of an author, watch their skills improve, their ideas expand, their writing coalesce, experience the worlds they envisioned come to be, and understand how they went from not-so-good to much-better to quite-reasonably-talented. I firmly believe Lindsey Drager started at the summit of the Stunningly Talented and Extremely Gifted Storyteller mountain. The aforementioned book "The Archive of Alternate Endings" is her third, and I was utterly amazed at how incredible it was. I HAD to read this book after finishing that one. I did not know what to expect, as there are times when an author conjures up a gem but their other books are just average, and not even average-in-comparison, just overall-average. Much to my unbridled glee and flabbergast (is that even a word?!?), "The Lost Daughter Collective" is on the same level as "The Archive of Alternate Endings". And yes, I will keep writing out the complete titles, no abbreviations or ellipses, because these books deserve, have earned!, the right to be spelled out. In. Their. Entirety. I won't say "The Lost Daughter Collective" is just as good as "The Archive of Alternate Endings" because they are vastly different tales. They are equal in their superlative elements though. Anything you could critique in a book is done here with an artist's keen grasp of their medium. Ideas? Check. Concepts? Check. Word usage? Check. Structure? Check. Emotional impact? Check. Creativity? Check Check Check. (I feel like John Malkovich in "Rounders"!) Honestly, I could not stop reading this and would gladly have kept reading even if the page count had exceeded 1000, or if the book was actually being written while I was reading and pages were being added continually for the next few years or so. It was that stellar. I am in awe of Lindsey Drager's talent. I now plan to read her first book because I have to. If no more posts come fom my profile, then you will know I imploded from the irrefutable fact that Lindsey Drager's FIRST book, yes, her first!, was resting next to her follow-up books at the summit of aforementioned literary peak of hard-to-do-once-and-really-hard-to-do-twice-and-unheardofcomplicated-to-do-thrice and my body was unable to process that occurrence. Death by reading. Not all bad, huh?
I have now read two books in the same month, by the same author!, that make my (used to be) slowly growing (but is now accelerating) list of Best Books I Have Ever Read.
This is an essential piece of literature.
I have now read two books in the same month, by the same author!, that make my (used to be) slowly growing (but is now accelerating) list of Best Books I Have Ever Read.
This is an essential piece of literature.
May 11, 2020
Smart, but strange. I have a feeling most of this went over my head. I read this all in a day, but I feel like I need way more time and maybe more readings to pick it apart. The title is the best way to think of this: it's a collection of all the ways a father can lose a daughter, and I think it's the title that helped me gain some understanding of the novel. (I read "The Archive of Alternate Endings" first and was more in the "looking for breadcrumbs" mindset.) It is extremely removed from the world we know, which gives it this dystopian, satirical undertone, but wraps back around to things that are familiar to us. Very strange. Very smart.
I found myself admiring the endings in these narratives -- I think Drager has mastered multiple narratives -- but also individual, more philosophical lines. "Fear is the bedmate of truth" is such a raw line. This is one of those "if you blink, you miss it" books, where you really have to be paying attention. There is so much detail and there are so many narratives that every line matters. And the form -- that was brilliant.
The only reason it gets four stars and not five is for the language: everything is said like a riddle and never outright (though this is absolutely more of a personal preference).
I found myself admiring the endings in these narratives -- I think Drager has mastered multiple narratives -- but also individual, more philosophical lines. "Fear is the bedmate of truth" is such a raw line. This is one of those "if you blink, you miss it" books, where you really have to be paying attention. There is so much detail and there are so many narratives that every line matters. And the form -- that was brilliant.
The only reason it gets four stars and not five is for the language: everything is said like a riddle and never outright (though this is absolutely more of a personal preference).
June 26, 2017
I freaking loved this book. It is one of those books that is ephemereal, magical, terrifying, real, palpably sad, poetic, prosy, important, and just impossible to describe. It may be short but it is long mentally. Just read this book if you want to feel so many things on such a deep level..
January 14, 2018
Haunting and cryptic dystopian future. A quick read but a profound one. I can't decide if I like the Archivist's secret - it felt a little out of place. Also, parts were a little confusing or recursive..
May 3, 2018
Meh. It was interesting for it's poetic style, but *painfully* didactic. I can't say I'd recommend it unless you're looking for vaguely macabre and artsy; would you like to watch a black and white German film about gilted lovers and lost innocence? If so then, sure give it a go.
March 17, 2020
This is my second novel by Lindsey Drager, and, barring a change in her style, it'll be the last. I do enjoy experimental fiction, but hers leaves me cold. I yearn for a touch of humanity.
March 22, 2022
Wow wow wow. This is a glimmering labyrinth of a book, richly allegorical in every which way and teeming with rage, desire, tenderness, loss, alienation, and fear. I devoured it quickly, and reading it feels akin to completing some ancient, quickening ritual that might feel innately familiar to anyone socialized as a girl or woman (especially, especially, when you don't identify with those terms anymore/never fully have!). Drager's form here best mirrors the experience of "daughterhood" and all of its cruelties, pangs, needs and ruins to me: slippage, ice melting, fragmentation, words unhinged from their bodies and metaphor made into punishment or god. I only note that this could've, imo, used a bit more editing/cutting out of superfluous or arrythmic prose moments that didn't quite land for me, to sharpen what DID even more. But overall a fantastic work, an incantation and bloodspell if there ever was one <3
October 19, 2018
I haven't enjoyed a book as much in years, probably going back to when I read "Stoner" a decade ago. It's a difficult book (very post modern if you want to put a label on it), but the writing is scintillating and the idea behind the book is endlessly fascinating. Rigorous, intelligent, pellucid prose- all the things I require from a book. The uncanny thing was the ending was almost exactly as I hoped it would be. I emailed the author (another thing I hardly ever do) telling her how much I enjoyed it and received a very gracious reply, which is rare indeed. If I had my way it'd win every award out there.
August 19, 2024
just a goddamned near perfect book before the big twist near the middle that pushes it into an even more meaningful but (i imagine) divisive (maybe not?) direction that results in a much more impactful & ultimately satisfying & very much earned ending. very possibly the most organic combination of deep sorrow & believable hope i have ever read & i've read a sad book or two. the archive of alternate readings was my introduction to lindsey drager & probably still my favorite, but either way, (imho) she is a very special talent i will continue to read anything by as soon as i can get my hands on it.
August 28, 2022
An adult fairytale. A whimsical fantasy with the harshness of reality. I loved reading this book.
It outlines fathers telling bedtime stories to their daughters, but it starts to become its own bedtime story, with witty wordplay and a world that uses myth as facts.
The allusions to familiar childhood stories will make you smile like a kid, but the language and allegory will make you think like a professor. I recommend this book to anyone that is looking for a quick read that keeps you thinking.
It outlines fathers telling bedtime stories to their daughters, but it starts to become its own bedtime story, with witty wordplay and a world that uses myth as facts.
The allusions to familiar childhood stories will make you smile like a kid, but the language and allegory will make you think like a professor. I recommend this book to anyone that is looking for a quick read that keeps you thinking.
December 20, 2019
A SIMPLE MAN'S REVIEW:
...um..? I'm not sure what to make of this one. The writing style is familiar to anyone who has read this author's work, but maybe it was too abstract for me to appreciate?
There isn't really a story, yet it is set within a story. It tells of a life yet doesn't really go anywhere. Daughters either die or go missing because... their fathers were inattentive?
There is literally not a single good feeling to be found in this book, so...
Skip it!
...um..? I'm not sure what to make of this one. The writing style is familiar to anyone who has read this author's work, but maybe it was too abstract for me to appreciate?
There isn't really a story, yet it is set within a story. It tells of a life yet doesn't really go anywhere. Daughters either die or go missing because... their fathers were inattentive?
There is literally not a single good feeling to be found in this book, so...
Skip it!
January 15, 2021
There is no doubt that the author is brilliant, but that does not guarantee a heart warming read. Unsettling, brilliant, a metaphor upon a metaphor crocheted into a metaphor blanket. Metaphysical, yes, but please, give me At the Back of the North Wind or anything that grants a large dose of emotional release. This is a good book for a literary classroom discussion, definitely.
May 24, 2021
I think this would have gotten a higher rating from me and been more impactful if I had finished it all in one sitting. I wish I would have had the time to do that instead of spreading it out over a few days. The part I read all at once was very striking, I just lost some momentum when I sat it down.
April 9, 2024
lindsey drager can bottle grief like lightning. her prose is dreamlike in a way that makes you feel like you’re walking through someone else’s nightmare. this book is experimental and philosophical, and while short enough to be devoured in one sitting i think it rewards you if you take time to chew on it.
July 9, 2024
Drager’s themes of stories and the oral tradition of passing down tales permeates this book. I loved The Archive of Alternate Endings because it explored this idea as well. While I found this story to be a bit less coherent than TAOAE the intimacy and understanding of the human condition is just as strong in this one.
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