Lucinella by Lore Segal, book of a lifetime: A vivid, bizarre novella

First published in 1976, Segal's charming novella is Rachel B Glaser's favourite book about writers

Brilliant energy of invention and possibility: Author Lore Segal (AP)

Melville House's reprint of Lore Segal's Lucinella has a shining text-only cover of white, pink, and black. I flipped it over, expecting blurbs, but all it said was: "Intelligence turns me on." First published in 1976, this charming novella is narrated by a poet named Lucinella living in New York City. It's my favourite book about writers. Like the best books, it befriends you. For a short while you need no one else.

Have you ever read meta-fiction? I think my introduction to it was in John Barth's short story, "Lost in the Funhouse". In that story, its very story-ness is revealed and examined.

Lucinella takes us to a dreamier, more literary place. The poet protagonist tells the readers of her poem ideas and talks process too: "My invention needs a body to get it going, but I will set my own head on it." The reader gets to inhabit the world around Lucinella and the world within her too. "I rub the Contact paper salesman's back with glue and stick him in a poem called 'The Contact Paper Salesman."

Portions of the book float in a heightened reality. At a party, Lucinella explains her theory that people walk around holding out buckets to collect compliments, but the buckets have no bottom. The woman she is talking to agrees, then holds out her bucket. Segal makes Lucinella's ideas happen. Instead of Lucinella idly remembering her past or envisioning her future, Segal creates the characters young Lucinella and old Lucinella and writes them interacting with Lucinella herself. Scenes like this contain a brilliant energy of invention and possibility, a kind of flickering cognisance that Ben Lerner's recent novels explore. Sometimes it's dizzying: "I tell Pavlovenka about my poem called 'Euphoria in the Root Cellar', which I've just now finished. She shrieks with the deliciousness of the coincidence: a student in her freshman class is writing just such a poem, about a poet writing a poem in his poem! 'Mine's different!' I cry..."

Segal boldly dances through new territory by diving deep into the everyday and the ever-changing mind. Lucinella is both a whimsical journey of thoughts and fantasies, and a study of the ego. As Lucinella says: "We live on a see-saw between arrogance and abjection."

This book reminds the reader that there are no rules in fiction. It is a vivid, bizarre novella I recommend to all writers (and readers eager for something new).

Rachel B Glaser's novel, 'Paulina & Fran', is published by Granta