Autofiction as autopsy: autopsy as a Paul Auster novel. Like Sin City meets Inside Out. Or Disappeared on Discovery ID, but every episode of the series is about a separate Thea gone missing. She got wise, if misanthropic. Same diff. One second, at a standing desk, exhausting adjunct possibilities, sensory deprived. The next second, simultaneously live-streaming her doppelgangers and dissolving into existential defunctitude. This is how the project became a “procedural,” and the reader a deputized detective. Fully justified like Raylan Givens in the new City Primeval. Okay no. I’m more that conspiracy meme from Always Sunny. As the days go by, me with my fake nose-mustache-glasses and mood ring, interviewing a whole tarot deck of suspects. Collecting perspectives from the polis ventriloquists and the sad ass expats, the starlings in the polluted atmosphere and the centaur in the sewer. The evidence leads to a doorway: the doorway leads you to a shadow. Loner Forensics by Thea Brown (Northwestern University Press, 2023).
