"A Failed Saint Turns to Autobiography":Robert Glück's Margery Kempe Mary Burger I learned about The Book of Margery Kempe—the autobiography of a 15th century 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 [End Page 387] skin—a milky wash over a base of gold dust, we read both Margery's and Bob's enchantment with the lover's beauty. And, just as Margery's corporeal obsession with her god is structurally doomed to be unfulfilled, Bob's consuming desire for L. carries disappointment foretold, the book's first line announcing Love's cancelled flights. The story is in how these impossible loves unfold, and how Glück uses each story to elaborate the other. The work is a form of autobiography, told through fiction, in collaboration with another autobiographer from more than five hundred and fifty years before. Glück includes some lines from Kempe's book—I am thy loue & shal be thy loue with-owtyn ende—but mostly he animates her life through fictionalized details. Margery and the other pilgrims sat down to dinner in a tavern so bright and noisy it revolved on itself like a gyroscope. Blasts of icy air interrupted the stifling heat. Other times, Margery is an avatar, living Bob's experience of rejection as her own. "Did you miss me, Jesus?" Her question twisted him beyond endurance like the fibers of a rope. It had taken days to unwind; now he was cold and aloof again. The book's premise is a masquerade in the grandest sense, a costume ball in which the dramatic effect of assumed identities is heightened by their explicit artifice. Or, as Glück has described it, Say it's drag, and she's the 15th-century Cher. That is, projecting myself into Margery's story is part of the story (Case). Bob inhabits Margery's world without fully leaving his own. Her histrionic collisions with desire provide dialog, close-ups, settings, props, and supporting characters for his story. At times it's clear when Margery is Margery and when she's Bob, but part of the book's power is the way it blurs the lines. Whose tears are we witnessing? Whose consuming lust? At the moments when the ambiguity subsides, it's startling to see Bob step through into the 20th century. My book depends on the tension between maintaining an impersonation and breaking it. The effect is a series of suspended disintegrations. Glück allows the edges of the stories to continually erode and intermingle with one another. In fact, that erosion and intermingling is the process of the narrative, the means by which the relationship between these stories is elaborated. The narrative...