“I remember that feeling of paranoia, a hairy texture in the corner of my eye, and not knowing whether I was seeing what I was seeing,” Kate Zambreno writes in Foam, their latest book: a series of fictions and speculative art essays that accumulate and conglomerate into a texture, one Zambreno identifies as foam. This opening quote hints at that texture, and the experience of reading Foam: the ambient anxieties and paranoia of daily life that seep through the narrative, my own anxiety and association while reading.
Kate Zambreno’s work is often concerned with atmosphere, tone, and their combined effect in a written work. Foam is the ultimate form of this study—honed through a career of more than ten published books—in a book that is made of and about textures, a written sculpture of atmospheres in place of traditional plot.
Foam opens with an epigraph from Peter Sloterdijk’s definition from Foams: Spheres Volume III. Zambreno’s following work is less interested in forming definitions than in displaying the foaminess that appears in daily life. These are the kinds of questions that excite me, questions of how a book can be a texture, and what makes a particular story or experience foamy. As usual, Zambreno’s work breaks the limits of genre, creating its own form, grappling with the daily minutiae of one writer, parent, and caregiver’s world.
Foam is not interested in genre. It is interested in iterations of foam. “Foam is nervous systems and hostilities, I write to myself, in a note,” Zambreno writes. Foam appears in repeated, physical objects: fake flowers stuck into foam in a birthing ward, that are not dead because they were never alive. The narrator’s husband’s green, foam houseslippers that allow him not to feel the floor’s detritus, detaching him from domestic life in a way that the narrator can’t. A memory foam mattress, ruined by a leak, contributing to the accumulating pressure between the narrator and their negligent and spiteful landlady. Canned insulation foam, grotesquely bubbling through a wall’s cracks. Beyond these physical images, foam acts as a container, or a soft sculpture, to hold the distinct threads of the narrative near to each other: art, gender, caregiving, child birth, academia, apartment living.
Foam is also interested in Evas. The text often refers to and engages with the artistic practice and life of the late artist Eva Hesse, whose work was committed to capturing the absurd. Hesse’s work feels very related to Foam—the ambiguous appendage feeling, the unsettling bodily aspects of Hesse’s work, its domestic weaving techniques of industrial and artificial materials. A delightful slipperiness of the text occurs in its use of The Evas—almost every character, apart from the narrator, a few friends, their husband and land lady—are named Eva. Many of these Evas are in turn interested in the work of Eva Hesse. They are most often aspiring writers, who have at a point been the narrator’s student, who are then employed by the narrator to assist in child care, domestic duties, yet often still turn toward the narrator for mentorship and caregiving toward themselves.
The Evas are constantly borrowing books from the narrator, taking notes, acutely aware of their own writing aspirations and bodies and time and disinterested in the narrator’s own. I was intrigued by the idea of all of these Evas, and how they related to foam. The Evas seemed to represent some kind of artistic, ghostly potential, posed in somewhat ambivalent relation to the domestic, within a mounting atmosphere of pressure and tension under the systems that make it so difficult to survive. I have worked as a mother’s helper and babysitter and nanny since I was ten. I’m familiar with the Eva’s experience of wanting to read and to write while helping take care of someone else’s kids, unable to so much as consider whether I might want kids of my own. The narrator states the following after they’re required to record a video introducing themself to a new class of students, immediately post-partum: “When I watch the video now, it looks like I’ve been abducted by aliens, and only recently returned, but having forgotten my original language or how to arrange my face in a translatable expression.” I’d copied down this passage because it so clearly described how I felt when working as a nanny, unable to perform simple tasks like make mac and cheese, or peel carrots in a normal way, under the gaze of the child’s parent.
“I had to become a thing again, and I had, perhaps only temporarily, become the wrong kind of thing,” Zambreno writes. As I then read the sections titled “Mother’s Helper” and “The Evas,” the narrator describes this same watched, unnatural state under the relentless observation of the Evas in their home. The Evas see the narrator as having something they want—a career as a published writer—and so cannot see what the narrator needs from them, that the narrator too is a person in need of softness and care. Like Eva Hesse’s sculptures, or foam, many parts are concurrently jammed into one crowded space. The Evas’ treatment of the narrator reminds how we forget people are malleable, and their condition and needs shift in relation to context; no one exists in a fixed state that leaves them the mentor, or the caregiver. “Maybe each of these Evas are something like memory foam,” Zambreno writes, “that when pressed returns to the shape of the previous body that I was when I knew them, that was forever changed by their pressure upon me.”
If Foam were a different kind of book, ‘The Evas’ section could have been the entire novella, exclusively focused on the pressure these varied Evas press against the narrator, something like Marlen Haushoffer’s Killing Stella, or much of the work of Elena Ferrante. And I did think of Killing Stella and Ferrante’s maternal, domestic rage while reading Foam. But Foam is a work aware of the systems and pressures that create its atmosphere, beyond dynamics between characters; the Evas are only a portion of the sensation of foam’s many textures, the sculpture of the book.
The structure Zambreno has invented for Foam allows for the slipperiness of a constantly changing self, body, relationship to the spaces they inhabit. It accounts for the fact that these conditions so regularly change, particularly for people who are renters, living in the mounting pressure of capitalism—the precarity of the adjunct, of gig workers—constantly changing apartments, leaving portions of one’s self behind. “I am still transitioning,” Zambreno writes, “but I am unsure into what.”
I read Foam while visiting relatives in a rural area, so different from the one I’ve become used to in apartments, the bulging yellow insulation sprayed from a can, my sundowning landlord below me shouting abuse at his wife. As I read a wasp stings me and my arm swells three times its regular size. I watch a dairy cow scamper up a nearly vertical hill, unsteady on her legs, then wait in a bush that still shows her to seemingly hide from her two mooing calves. Sensation seems more direct; I have space to recognize what it is I’m responding to. So often that isn’t how life feels. It feels crowded, foggy, a constant drone of anxieties and pressures that are difficult to directly identify and name. It is a texture, and that is what Foam creates; like Eve Hesse’s sculptures, the form of the work comes through an investigation of its materials—work that feels like nonwork, a something that is nothing; An actual thing, but a construct fearful of contact that yields and bursts at the slightest touch, according to Peter Sloterdijk. The result is a speculative, poetic, concretized study and object, words accumulated to form the texture of the ambient sensations we struggle to name.
FICTION
Foam
By Kate Zambreno
Semiotext(e)
Published September 15, 2026
