HER HERE

Born in Philadelphia, Amanda Dennis is a Cambridge Gates Scholar who studied modern languages at Princeton and Cambridge Universities before earning her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley and her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was awarded a Whited Fellowship in creative writing. An avid traveler, she has lived in six countries, including Thailand, where she spent a year as a Princeton in Asia fellow. She has written about literature for the Los Angeles Review of Books and Guernica, and she is assistant professor of comparative literature and creative writing at the American University of Paris, where she is researching the influence of 20^th-century French philosophy on the work of Samuel Beckett. Her Here is her first novel.

Author website

“Dennis’s elegant yet propulsive debut becomes much more than a missing-persons search. . . . Elena’s narrative-within-a-narrative nicely reveals the creative process, while Dennis’s larger story confirms the value of living boldly.” —Library Journal (starred review)

“Wrenching and revelatory.” —Foreword Reviews (starred review)

“Dennis’ sensory prose leads to a fascinating exploration of identity, grief, and time.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Spellbinding. . . . Wholly engrossing. . . . This hypnotic and deeply cerebral exploration is a seductive escape. Through Ella and Elena’s efforts to reconstruct a sense of self—outside family, beyond academia and expectation—through language, Dennis confronts the various ways we try to understand ourselves and others.” —Washington Post

“A young woman has disappeared, and her mother asks a dead friend’s daughter to reconstruct the young woman’s life from her diaries, in the hopes of stumbling on clues to where she may be. It’s a premise that would be a stretch for any novelist, but in her experimental debut Amanda Dennis wields that stretch the way a candymaker pulls and thickens ropes of sugar on hooks.” —Literary Hub

“In Her Here, Dennis has written a metaphysical investigation that is also a wonderfully personal account of a daughter coming to terms with the loss of her mother, and a mother coming to terms with the loss of her daughter. As Elena conjures Ella’s last days, the richly imagined narrative moves back and forth between Paris and Thailand, carrying both characters and readers to a vivid and suspenseful conclusion.” —Margot Livesey, author of The Flight of Gemma Hardy and The Boy in the Field

“Dennis is in possession of hypnotic narrative gifts and a ferocious intellect. With Her Here, she has claimed her place in the literary world.” —Rebecca Makkai, author of Music for Wartime and The Great Believers

“Evocative and meditative, Her Here is a ghost story without a ghost, a marvel of incantatory wit. Amanda Dennis weaves a mesmerizing web around her subject, drawing the reader into an intricate, volatile mystery whose end is always and never within reach.” —Alexandra Kleeman, author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine and Intimations

“Dazzling. Dennis is a writer that awakens the senses. From the first page, this gorgeous, haunting story about two lost girls ensnares the reader with such expertise, such intelligence and heart, that before long you’re lost inside the eerie sensuality of youthful dreams, witnessing obsession unravel identity.” —Dina Nayeri, author of Refuge and The Ungrateful Refugee

“Her Here is a stunning debut from author Amanda Dennis. I was brought to the very edge of my sanity right along with the protagonist, Elena. The women in this story are complex and the ways their stories interconnect even more so. There were so many twists and turns I don’t think I accurately predicted even one plot development. It was suspenseful, raw, and every word absolutely crackled with intensity. Fans of Gillian Flynn take notice!” —Audrey Beatty, River Bend Bookshop (Glastonbury, CT)

“Beautiful debut about relationships between mothers and daughters, the intersection and fragmentary natures of memory and identity. Dennis’s writing is impressive—both precise and empathetic.” —Molly Harbage, Politics and Prose Bookstore (Washington, DC)

“I loved [Her Here]. . . . You get caught up in the book very easily.” —Sandy Jones Boyd, Mountain Regional Public Library (Young Harris, GA)

1. The first chapter opens with a case of mistaken identity: a stranger believes Elena is a woman she used to know. “If it was you, you wouldn’t tell me, she says, squeezing my hands.” How does this scene encapsulate and echo the themes of memory, loss, and the longing for connection throughout the novel?
2. The title comes from a line early in the novel, when Elena first discovers Ella’s journals and thinks to herself, “I’d rather be her than here.” The author has described Elena’s task of “translating” Ella’s journals as a “quest for identity.” What is Elena searching for, about both Ella and herself? How does her immersion in Ella’s past influence the decisions she makes in her own life?
3. The story takes readers on a journey through the narrow streets of Paris, among the mango trees and monsoons of Thailand, and to a remote island village. How does the author use sensory details to immerse you in a place? When the settings changed, did the tone of the book remain the same?
4. Even though most of the journals she’s rewriting take place there, Elena has never been to Thailand. Is the Thailand she envisions a real place? Can you find any echoes of Elena’s experiences in Paris written into the reconstructed journals she’s creating? What are both Elena and Ella seeking to discover—or run away from—through travel?
5. In many ways, Elena and Ella’s circumstances are exceptional, but in others, they reflect what many young women endure in early adulthood. In what ways does this story describe universal experiences that young women have coming of age?
6. How do female friendships in the novel influence the main characters’ lives? Are these relationships more powerful than the romantic ones in the story?
7. The author recounts that a reader once told her “sometimes the mother-daughter bond can hold more tension than a love affair,” and much of the book centers on the theme of motherhood. Who are the mother or surrogate mother figures in the characters’ lives, and what roles do they play? How do you think Elena’s relationship with Ella’s estranged mother, Siobhán, might evolve after the story ends?
8. The author chose to punctuate dialogue with dashes instead of quotation marks. In an interview, she revealed that this subtler method of marking speech was a way for her to play with the different voices in the novel: Elena’s, Ella’s, and the blended voice of Elena retracing Ella’s journals. Were you able to keep the voices and characters separate as you were reading? How did this stylistic choice affect your reading experience?
9. What happens to Ella in Elena’s telling of her story? What really happens to her? Do you think the two versions are the same?
10. The publisher describes Her Here as “an existential detective story,” author Alexandra Kleeman calls it “a ghost story without a ghost,” and a bookseller compared it to the suspenseful fiction of Gillian Flynn. How would you describe the plot twists and psychological revelations within the novel? Did you anticipate the ending?

FROM THE AUTHOR

As a child, I liked to read things that I had little hope, at the time, of understanding. I was lucky to grow up in a house full of books, with a mother who would narrate to me the plot lines of great works of literature (The Odyssey, for instance), and I would go and find the book and try to make sense of it. I so much wanted to encounter that story for myself! Probably I carried the books around with me very proudly. But the books that really riveted me as a child were mysteries, books like Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone, all of Agatha Christie and Nancy Drew, plus Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. My first writings, as a child, were plays—Oedipal murder mysteries. My middle name comes from Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Spring and Fall”: “Margaret, are you grieving/Over Goldengrove unleaving?” It’s a poem I knew how to repeat before I could understand it, and it has changed in meaning for me over the years, as I grew up. And that’s what I love most about good literature, how it changes, chameleonlike, with you as you grow.

At age 21, like one of the main characters in Her Here, I boarded a plane for the other side of the world. There’s a paradox in travel, which exists also in reading: you plunge into what is unknown with the hope that what you find will rebound on your own life, enriching it. I spent a year in Southeast Asia just after college, teaching, volunteering, and traveling. After my return from Thailand, I remained interested in the impulse that had led me there: a blend of curiosity and escapism. I found this impulse in others, too, in the expatriates I met, and in certain Thai friends (not all) who felt that life would be (or had been) better elsewhere. The impulse is not so unusual; it inspired the title of Milan Kundera’s novel Life is Elsewhere. This blend of desire and curiosity and self-avoidance intrigued me, and a dial turned when I started graduate school and was introduced to Jacques Derrida’s work. It left a deep impression on me. This Parisian-Algerian philosopher described so clearly the otherness at the core of the self—an obscure region of the heart that holds motivations, desires, and even memories we may not recognize. Because there is a trace of otherness in us, self and other are more intertwined than we realize.

In Her Here, I wanted to explore the micro-politics, the possibilities and implications, of slipping into another skin—imaginatively. I also wanted to explore mother-daughter relationships. Early on, a reader said to me that sometimes the mother-daughter bond can hold more tension than a love affair. The project Ella’s mother Siobhán devises—an odd task requiring Elena to “translate” Ella’s journals—feels to Elena like a quest for identity: for a mother she has lost without knowing why, for a way forward, for a way out of a romantic relationship in which she feels more indebted than committed. She’s the victim of an anomie born of radical uncertainty. She doesn’t trust herself, since even her memories aren’t reliable. She yearns to escape the self, but her encounter with Ella through her journals tosses her back upon herself, with great élan.

This novel, then, explores identity, the relation between self and world, the fallibility of memory (so important for constructing a self), and modes of projection we employ when relating to others. So often we make people into who we need them to be, and the novel includes this game of changing identities: a play of surrogate mothers, daughters, and lovers. Desire (not just sexual desire) is a big part of what makes up the self, orienting us in relation to others and to the world, so it’s very much present in this story that explores the intimate intertwining of self with other.

The title, Her Here, comes from a line early on in the book, when Elena first discovers Ella’s journals. She thinks, “I’d rather be her than here.” At this moment, she’s ready to jump ship on a life that feels painful to her. The title, however, points to the impossibility of escapism, to the false binary of the alterative, her or here.