Helen DeWitt’s New Novel Almost Drove Her To Despair

Almost 20 years ago, Helen DeWitt started writing a strange new book.

At the time, the publishing world was waiting breathlessly for a new novel from DeWitt, who had dazzled critics and readers with her inventive 2000 debut, “The Last Samurai.” But years had passed without a follow-up, and DeWitt had all but disappeared from the literary scene. After a deal with her publisher fell apart, she had a breakdown and attempted suicide, then went missing. When police found her in upstate New York, she was admitted to a psychiatric ward.

In the aftermath, DeWitt wanted nothing more than to be left alone to work. She moved to Berlin, hoping to seclude herself and write. One day, she came across an email she’d never replied to, from a young tabloid journalist named Ilya Gridneff. They had met in 2003 at a London bar, where they fell into conversation after he teased her about a German philosophy book she was reading. She scribbled her email address on a receipt and he later sent her a note, but not long after, her life imploded.

Two years later, she wrote back. He wrote back. She loved his unhinged dispatches, and later proposed they collaborate on a book.

What began as a playful collaboration became, like most of DeWitt’s work, weirder, riskier and more ambitious. After at least 20 drafts and countless revisions, it morphed into a 600-page work that resists categorization and almost defies description.

The result, titled “Your Name Here,” is a needling satire of the publishing business, the film industry, tabloid journalism, consumerism and celebrity culture; a self-referential novel about art, language and the challenge of creating new narrative forms; a collagelike homage to iconoclasts like Italo Calvino, Federico Fellini and Charlie Kaufman; and a dizzying work of autofiction, in which DeWitt appears both as herself and as a fictional alter ego, a reclusive novelist named Rachel Zozanian, whose breakdown and suicide attempt mirror DeWitt’s troubled past.

“Your Name Here” — which is also about the daunting task of writing a novel as anarchic and loopy as “Your Name Here” — is finally being published this month by the small press Dalkey Archive, nearly two decades after DeWitt first had the idea.

But to DeWitt, “Your Name Here” doesn’t feel like a triumphant return. After all this time, she can’t tell if it’s a groundbreaking narrative experiment, or a complete mess.

“I cannot judge it,” DeWitt said, sounding genuinely ambivalent. “I can’t look at it and say whether it works or doesn’t work.”

‘I needed skills in people reading’

DeWitt and I met on a warm evening in early October, on a sidewalk in Washington, D.C., where she was staying with her sister during a visit from Berlin. She was waiting for me, puffing on an electronic cigarette — she recently quit smoking, a habit she picked up 25 years ago to cope with the stress of publishing her debut.

As we chatted for three hours at a cafe across from the bookstore Politics & Prose, DeWitt, who is now 68, seemed surprisingly unguarded for someone who was initially reluctant to meet for an interview.

She spoke openly about her career setbacks and financial struggles, her often thwarted attempts to publish experimental books, and about how her aversion to social interaction has at times made publishing executives uneasy.

“I have found it very hard to find people that understand,” she told me.

DeWitt has an insatiable mind and deep pockets of knowledge in disparate subjects; she went on tangents about bridge strategies, the quirks of Turkish grammar and her obsession with the statistician Edward Tufte, who inspired one of her many unfinished novels. She speaks French and German, can read Greek and Latin, and understands close to a dozen other languages with varying degrees of proficiency — among them Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Arabic, Hebrew and Japanese.

Lately, she’s been reading A.J. Woodman’s scholarly commentary on the work of the Roman historian and politician Tacitus, which she finds reassuring.

“It’s a comfort to read this serious engagement with the text,” she said, “to think about language at that level, rather than getting irritable.”

DeWitt was 43 and unknown when “The Last Samurai” became an unexpected hit. It sold more than 100,000 copies in English alone, and remained a cult classic even after it fell out of print for roughly a decade. It was crowned “the best book of the century” by New York Magazine, and appeared on The New York Times’s list of the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century.

“She has the high-wire walker’s capacity to totally claim your attention,” the novelist Jonathan Lethem said of DeWitt. “With every placement of a sentence and a thought, there’s an electrified intellectual sense of risk and command.”

Yet despite her reputation as one of contemporary fiction’s most innovative writers, DeWitt has found it difficult to get her ambitious books published. She has so many works in progress that when I asked for a rough count of her unpublished manuscripts, she replied that it’s “impossible to say.”

She’s scrambled to support herself financially, relying at times on overextended credit cards. Readers have occasionally stepped in to help, donating money through her website to buy her a cup of coffee, or to help pay for a new laptop or home repairs.

Throughout her career, DeWitt has often worried that her writing life gets compromised by the business of book publishing — the endless phone calls, meetings, contract negotiations and edits that take time and energy away from her work, and that she feels ill-equipped to handle. She feels much safer in the realm of the written word.

“I needed skills in people reading that I don’t have,” she said. “It’s so much easier to read a text.”

‘Shut down all the voices’

Helen DeWitt grew up in constant motion.

She was born in Maryland in 1957, and her father’s work in the Foreign Service took the family to Mexico, Brazil, Colombia and Ecuador. Everywhere she went, she felt like an outsider.

At Smith College, she started studying ancient Greek and fell in love with the intricacies and logic of the language. But she struggled with depression, and attempted suicide by overdosing on aspirin.

When she survived, she was left wondering what, if anything, would make her want to live. She decided to pursue classics, and enrolled at Oxford. There she met the classics scholar David Levene, who introduced her to film, poker, bridge and statistics — subjects that would later inform her fiction. They eventually married, and though they divorced after seven years, she credits him with shaping her as a writer.

After nine years at the university, DeWitt decided she wasn’t built for a career in academia. She turned her focus to fiction and worked odd jobs to stay afloat, including as a legal secretary, and wrote in her spare time.

In 1995, she had an idea that grew into “The Last Samurai,” a novel about a single mother in London raising a frighteningly brilliant child named Ludo, who quickly masters ancient Greek, Arabic and Japanese, and sets out to learn his father’s identity.

When she sold “The Last Samurai” to Talk Miramax Books for $75,000, DeWitt hoped the money would sustain her while she finished her other books. She had been developing 10 novels simultaneously, keeping track of her progress on a spreadsheet.

But the complicated process of publishing that 2000 debut, which involved drawn out fights about copy-edits and typesetting errors that mangled the foreign scripts, pulled her away from writing.

“I had all these voices going around in my head, and I would get them out by writing them down,” she said. “Then suddenly I’m having to deal with all this business, having to shut down all the voices, and knowing they might not come back.”

One yes after a dozen rejections

Eleven years later, DeWitt published her second novel, “Lightning Rods” — a raunchy satire about a company that tries to prevent workplace sexual harassment by allowing employees to have sex through a hole in bathroom walls. The novel, which she’d written before “The Last Samurai” was published, had been rejected by some dozen publishers before it was acquired by New Directions, an independent press.

“She’s an idealist, and I don’t think publishing is very idealistic,” said Barbara Epler, the publisher of New Directions. “Being that intelligent is kind of a curse.”

From the start of her career, DeWitt has played with language and pushed the boundaries of narrative forms. With “Your Name Here,” the guardrails completely came off.

When DeWitt first sent it out to literary agents, they were bewildered by the story — a disjointed maze of narratives that featured chaotic emails between DeWitt and Gridneff.

Told by agents that the book was hard to follow, DeWitt’s response was to make it even more disorienting. She added a series of second-person narrators. She wove in a novel-within-a-novel by her fictional doppelgänger Rachel Zozanian, titled “Lotteryland,” which used chapters from one of DeWitt’s unfinished works, a satire about a country where everything is distributed by lottery. She made difficulties that she and Gridneff had writing the book, and their arguments about where it was going, part of the story.

“The only solution, I thought, was to make the impossibility key to the book and use it for comic effect,” she explained.

As the novel evolved, it became more personal. DeWitt included documents related to her disappearance, including a web search with news headlines about the ordeal, the consent form she signed for admission into the psychiatric ward in Buffalo, and versions of the emails she sent to her lawyer before she attempted to take her life in 2004.

She thought writing about her breakdown might help people understand why she struggled to communicate and often had to withdraw. “It was very hard for me to talk to people,” she said. “I did hope I could make that comprehensible.”

In 2007, the authors found an agent who saw the book’s potential and sent it out to a small group of publishers. As the rejections came in, DeWitt grew increasingly worried that the complicated process of getting the book out would lead her to another breakdown.

But DeWitt’s fans, it turned out, were eager for it. After she posted a summary of the book on her blog, readers began asking for it, so she put a digital version of the manuscript on her website.

A critic reviewed it in The London Review of Books, calling it “a novel that doesn’t really believe in novels.” The magazine N+1 ran an excerpt, prompting a flurry of inquiries from publishers. A few tentative offers emerged; one small press acquired it, but balked when they realized how complex and expensive it would be to print the book, which featured photographs and Arabic script. (Inspired by J.R.R. Tolkien’s use of made-up languages in his fantasy novels, DeWitt hoped to teach English-language readers to read Arabic, and sprinkled Arabic text and translations throughout the novel.)

Even New Directions passed, partly because they wanted a book written by DeWitt alone.

As years went by with no book deal, DeWitt and Gridneff, who had moved on with his career in journalism, stayed in sporadic touch.

“It got to a point where it became almost like a joke between us, that it was so clearly not going to happen,” said Gridneff, 46, who lives in Toronto and is married to a journalist for The New York Times. “She was always very apologetic about this mess she’s gotten me into.”

“I was like, this is bonkers, it’s a whole different version of literature, of what writing is and what a book can be,” said Will Evans, Dalkey Archive’s publisher.

Publishers Weekly took notice, just naming the novel one of 2025’s Top 10 books. But for DeWitt, the time and effort it’s taken to publish “Your Name Here” have posed yet another setback to her writing.

She’s currently juggling five works in progress — among them a novel that tackles probability theory and risk, inspired by Peter Bernstein’s “Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk.” She wouldn’t elaborate, sounding a note of superstition: “I’d better not talk about it in case I jinx it.”

As for the countless other unfinished manuscripts, and the voices that spoke to her but were cut off prematurely, DeWitt isn’t sure she can ever recover them.

“I don’t think so,” she said, “after all this time.”