Tilda Swinton has announced her debut memoir, and it’s going to be a little freaky. In related news, what’s with all these forks found in the kitchen? Material Evidence will eschew traditional linear narrative in favor of tracking Swinton’s life through important objects. These include “a christening dress, a letter, a wooden leg, a sweatshirt, a length of embroidery silk [and] a photograph,” per publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux’s Instagram. The book wants to echo how memory actually works, “ associative, sensory, anchored in things.” If they really wanted to mimic human memory, the book would have a smell-o-vision card to go along with it. Our olfactory bulb connects directly to the parts of the brain that link memory with emotion, after all.
On the scale of quirked-up celebrity tell-alls, where will Swinton’s land? It’s certainly less conventional than recent bestsellers like Prince Harry’s Spare or even Trisha Paytas’s upcoming Crying on the Kitchen Floor. But it’s no Macaulay Culkin’s junior. Furthermore, the format is precedented. The BBC told the entire history of humanity in 100 objects. Regardless, Swinton is stoked to embark on this project. “I can tell you that when I go home on Monday to Scotland, I’m entering something that I’ve been looking forward to for about 15 years — which is a period of my life when I do something different,” Swinton told press at the Berlin International Film Festival earlier this year. “I can’t quite say what it is, but I can say I’m not shooting a film for the rest of this year. I want more time.”