"A Failed Saint Turns to Autobiography": Robert Glück's Margery Kempe

I learned about The Book of Margery Kempe—the autobiography of a 15thcentury mystic and the first known autobiography in English—sometime in the early 1990s. Kempe was in love with Jesus. Her book documents her visions, erotic and obsessive. Her language captivated me. Our Lord said, “Kiss my mouth, my head, and my feet as sweetly as thou wilt.” I began collaging her lines into poems, alongside other overwrought declarations, like Stephen succumbing to heartbreak in The Well of Loneliness and Michael Jackson protesting his innocence against accusations of child sexual abuse. I didn’t distinguish between the exquisite and the grotesque—it was the pitch of obsession that compelled me. When Robert Glück’s novel Margery Kempe came out in 1994 from High Risk Books/Serpent’s Tail, I thought I was having a vision. I’ve been trying to divine that vision ever since—to infer the kind of reading that could encompass this work. In 2020, New York Review Books re-released Margery Kempe, with an introduction by novelist Colm Tóibín and an afterword in the form of Glück’s essay “My Margery, Margery’s Bob,” first published in 2000. With this new manifestation, my divination was rekindled. Margery Kempe interweaves two love affairs, of Margery and Jesus, and of the narrator Bob and his boyfriend L. The two stories orbit one another, collapse into one another, merge together and separate again with pieces of each still clinging to the other—mirroring the movements of the two lovers within each pair. Margery is Bob, L. is Jesus. In his translucent