Zine Review: Coward by Eva Gerretsen⁣ ⁣ Something important to bear in mind upon opening Coward is this: ⁣ ⁣ “All characters in this book are possibly fictitious, and any resemblance to any persons living or dead is probably not worth mentioning, yeah?”⁣ ⁣ This is funny, and I think I like this kind of dont-give-a-fuck kind of play on the colophon format because we all know Eva’s version to be true anyway. I would take a leap further than this and say it is probably a good thing to bear this in mind with many more books and zines you may open henceforth. (Nb: If you’re the kind of person who might like to believe though, that you might have all manner of stories dedicated to your name in this way, I will say this: this doesn’t mean our words are about you – just a version of you, or an outline. We’re not that obsessed) This kind of thinly veiled disguise makes this way of approaching fiction-from-life in this zine just a little more frustrated, ironic, yet lighthearted. ⁣ ⁣ Coward presents a series of sketches from the life of its frustrated, horny, grieving and kind of neurotic protagonist. It's addressed to the reader as if they are themselves going through the motions – they are the coward. Through sketches of their life working in a gallery, going on dates, etc, Coward falls quickly in line with a genre of feminist auto-fiction that has become a well-established corner of the market: Rachel Cusk’s Outline Trilogy, Eileen Myles’ Chelsea Girls, Lisa Robertson’s Baudelaire Fractal. There are more of course, but these are the first three I can think of. This kind of auto-fictitious stuff is something that I love, read a lot of, probably write a lot of, and the fragment format is alluring. There is obviously also a lot of bad writing in this genre too (and between you and me I didn’t like Outline), but the slightly disjunct separation that happens in this genre, that is ultimately mixing fact with fiction on one page, and the jarring nature of these two things grinding together makes it exciting, kind of sexy, kind of scary. ⁣ REVIEW IN COMMENTS ⁣ ⁣ ID in comments