Meta Work exemplifies the power of personal story to evoke catharsis in a healing journey. A cross between memoir, poetry, and narrative fiction, the new subgenre of autofiction is shown here to be an entry into an individual’s inner world, allowing one the freedom to explore it without the strictures imposed by the aforementioned genres.
Anastasia Wasko shows, by sharing her own journey as a person living in recovery with bipolar disorder, the power of this immersive tool to clarify, magnify, and ultimately transform one’s own relationship with their internal challenge(s).
Review from Sundress Reads
“A memoir, fittingly, places emphasis on memory. A personal essay explores a life lesson. More often than not, these lines become increasingly blurry as a writer searches for truth within the chaos of memory. Such was Wasko’s challenge writing Meta Work as a memoir, which couldn’t “hold [her] vision of [her] world” (5); wanting to preserve the fantastical, irrational elements of her life, Wasko turned to the genre of autofiction, in which the only promise is an authentic portrayal of herself.
Through a blur of events and imagery, we readers are only offered one tangible detail: the chapter titles, denoting the location from which Wasko writes. The rest is up to her world of chaos, containing a mannequin with fiery, burning eyes; a river pooling at her ankles in the middle of Eighth Street; a depressed mother whose emotions swing like swords; a repressive father who refuses to consider writing as work; and, most importantly, unreliable time. Despite Meta Work being in chronological order, hours are missing from the story. Wasko’s time skips from 9AM to 5:45 (AM? PM?) to 9PM with no preamble, unobserved. She often breaks from her dazes to ask, “Where am I?” (Wasko 44). The gaping holes in her life are jarring to read, but these absences are intentional—we don’t know what happened, and neither does Wasko. This is, exactly, how she experiences day-to-day life.”
Praise for Meta Work
Suppose anything demonstrates that people with mental illnesses are individuals, not their mental illness. In that case, Meta Work has arrived to concretize it in the sweaty summer heat of New York’s Central Park with its sidewalks full of aquatic monsters, fire-eyed mannequins and a life-sized compass that will snatch readers along the way as the narrative leads the heroine and the audience to a place we all need, a place called home.
—Gila Green, author of White Zion, Passport Control, No Entry and King of the Class