Book Review

Aurora Mattia’s first novel, The Fifth Wound, is many books in one. Sarah Gerard calls it “a densely embroidered autofictional mythography,” and Mattia herself has described it as “a scrapbook in the form of a hymn.” The text is filled with literary echoes, pop culture references, and forays into criticism and history that make clear where she comes from, what has formed her, and how she defines herself. In an interview with Bomb magazine, Mattia said she was in search of “the superreal”—that she writes autofiction “not to assert, confess, or bear witness, but to riff, to perform, and embody many versions of [herself] in one space.”

Call me Aurora, or call me @silicone_angel. But you have to promise not to fall in love with me. If this is a testament, it is not good news: instead of revelation I give reverb.

This is how Aurora introduces herself in the first lines of the book, with multiple names, multiple selves, a reference to Moby Dick, a nod to the Bible, and reverb, which is a kind of echo. You may feel compelled, as I did, to begin by cataloging these elements as though you’re working your way through Ulysses, but trust me, there’s no need. Mattia is a storyteller first and foremost; she tells you what you need to know, and the footnotes, endnotes, and appendices are there to clarify.

Aurora, when we meet her, is in the midst of various transitions. She’s left her native Texas for New York and is missing her ex, Ezekiel, with whom she’s lost contact. She’s undergone four surgeries to medically transition and is exploring her ideas about femininity and gender. But mostly, she’s writing about Ezekiel:

…were I writing to him now, that man who vanished in a cloud of devilish dust, I might say ‘a garden is a question of relation, not a single sprig or blossom,’ and that would explain, with a little arch wink, as if we were hiding between the lines of a 19th century novel, how we made a language together: by gardening, not by offering orchids in glass domes—but I am not writing to him, or not as he is now: I am writing to the imprint Ezekiel made on a bedsheet and a body in the apocalyptic era of our Romance . . . .

When Aurora says of Ezekiel, “we made a language together,” she means it figuratively and literally. She describes, and sometimes transcribes, how they quote poems to each other and collaborate by text message, “chas[ing] each other through fables about windmills or ghosts or galaxies, breathless with inspiration, our phrases spilling down the screen like water struck from a rock . . . .” The language of the book is rooted in the lyric, studded with quotations, collaged and layered, always “reaching for beauty,” as Mattia described herself in a September 2023 interview with Electric Lit, by which, she said, “I mean a reaching for communion.”

Aurora is always looking to connect. She addresses the reader, all readers, or anyone she’s writing about who might be out there reading, as though she is posting, tweeting, and publishing online, then folding those versions back into her book. There’s a lot of room in autofiction to blur the boundaries between self and character—The Fifth Wound reads like memoir, but it’s not bound by the same conventions. Mattia broke ground in self-publishing in 2021 by selling electronic editions of her short story “Ezekiel in the Snow” through her OnlyFans and Twitter accounts. Excerpts also appear in The Fifth Wound, along with text exchanges, comments and letters from friends (about an earlier manuscript, or this one), and rejection letters from agents, all of which gives it the many-layered, meta quality of a palimpsest.

Mattia described her process in an interview in the Superstition Review #31 (Spring 2023):

If something occurred to me while I was writing—a phrase from a poem or song, a fragment of myth or movie, an old text message or Instagram caption—rather than sublimating it into a monophonic ‘literary’ accent, I grafted it into the text. I wanted the text to teem. I wanted to allow the natural polyphony of my mind—referential, reverential—not only into the process of writing, but the experience of reading.

It’s a testament to the tensile strength of Mattia’s sentences that the text can hold all these fragments together in delicate balance, while “binding the dreamworld” to the events Aurora recounts, which offers both a respite from the life she’s living and an attempt to see beyond it, to imagine a better one.

The Fifth Wound is, after all, a book about wounds. Violence takes many forms in Aurora’s life, some chosen, some—like her four surgeries—even creative. (“Whatever my genitals are,” Aurora says, “they once were a wound.”) The fifth wound is different. A man with a knife attacks Aurora on the subway and injures her eye, which sets in motion a reckoning that shifts her perspective dramatically.

The violence doesn’t end there. Aurora is seriously wounded again during a hookup that goes beyond rough sex. She’s traumatized repeatedly by how she’s treated by the police, hospital staff, and even her own trusted surgeon. Mental health crises follow, and Aurora spirals—not for the first time—into self-destructive behaviors. Mattia is spare in her depiction of these episodes. She has no interest in making a spectacle of Aurora’s suffering. It’s simply the context for the larger story, which is how Aurora’s vision expands to encompass multiple truths, including some she’d rather not see:

…the wound is not a question of beauty, or the record of an event, or even a way of revealing, nonconsensually, to each passerby and every mirror, that a stranger made me vulnerable to himself; that wound, sealed into a scar, is forever the beginning of another way of seeing. The vision proceeds from the wounding which echoes, pulses in my eye. In fits and starts my eye registers glimpses of dimensions; in mirrors and windows I sometimes see the faces of demons.

After each instance of transphobic violence, Aurora refuses to file a police report. She rejects that reductive form and its reductive language as instruments of the colonizing, capitalist forces that she calls, simply, “Empire” (a term Mattia borrows from the French Caribbean novelist and critic Édouard Glissant). “Sometimes,” Aurora says, “I’m halfway through a sentence before I realize I’m transcribing another one of its traps.”

One of the pleasures of reading Mattia’s work is her fluency in cultural theory and criticism, and her ability to illustrate these systems at work in her character’s life. In long digressions, she writes about mythological or historical figures like Aphroditos, Catherine of Siena and Eleanor Rykener, linking Aurora to her lineage:

Empire tells a simple story about so-called transsexual women: that we do not exist because we’ve never before existed. Meanwhile, all the primary sources—texts, histories, diaries—have been destroyed or ignored to transform a lie into truth, so that what has never existed before can exist for the first time: a past without us.

Mattia’s unsparing critique of Empire extends to the publishing industry as well. She quotes messages from multiple agents who praise Aurora’s writing for its originality and reject her manuscript in the same breath. She slams “the rhetoric of the never-before-seen, the rhetoric of sui-generis by which so-called marginalized storytellers are tokenized, dehistoricized, and therefore isolated by the industry’s manic, outraged obsession with the so-called discovery of so-called fresh talent,” and observes that severing a storyteller from the idiom of the community is a way to “neutralize, while pretending to emphasize, the destabilizing potentiality of vision.”

Aurora’s story is dedicated to undoing this severing, instead creating a vision that names, includes, and connects:

Rather than attempting to accomplish the monomaniacal illusion of originality, I wanted to make my book a dwelling-place, an oasis where voices parched and myriad could take shelter from the heat of time. I wanted to be the Clarissa Dalloway of my own private universe. I wanted Townes Van Zandt and Clarice Lispector to sit at the same dinner table. I wanted Catherine of Siena and Severo Sarduy to break bread. I wanted you to feel the lineage of my love and longing; I wanted you to know my kin. (Superstition Review #31, Spring 2023)

Mattia is a maximalist; her method is accumulation. There’s a linear narrative that moves through the novel, but its form is a web of images and associations that moves out in all directions (reverb, again). As a book intent on overrunning its boundaries, The Fifth Wound has precedents, several of which Mattia mentions: the poems of Li He; the Etymologiae, an encyclopedia of ancient knowledge compiled by Isidore of Seville; The Pillow Book by Sei Shōnagon. But for all its wild ambition, erudition, and accomplishment, what ultimately makes The Fifth Wound so satisfying to read is simply Mattia’s writing—her way with an image, a sentence, a scene. She can describe anything and make it new. Here, for example, Mattia depicts a style of speech and gesture so familiar as to be almost cliché. She slows the tempo to let us take in its beauty, its meaning, the way it surrounds and holds Aurora and Ezekiel, the two of them, together:

Ezekiel wasn’t a man . . . and I was not a woman. We shared what could be called a gender, but what I like to call an atmosphere, whipped up slowly as we rowed the air, gesturing, glossolaling, the palms of our hands rising and falling as firm and graceful as oars.

To put it simply, we were both fairies.