The Makings of a Nobody is the novel that won Ann Z. Leventhal the 2022 Kenneth Patchen Award for the Innovative Novel. Leventhal calls the form a fictmoir, a memoir-fiction crossover, and the book traces the life of an ordinary New York Jewish woman across marriage to a lawyer, four children, illness, a love affair, loss, and survival. The method underneath it is journalistic: Leventhal frames her fiction around the four questions a reporter asks, Who, Where, What, and Why, and the fictmoir is what happens when that habit of reporting turns on a life rather than a story.
JEF Books assistant editor Penelope Gerdes, in her encomium for the novel, wrote: When I sat to read The Makings of a Nobody: A Fictmoir, I wasn't certain what exactly I was looking for. Innovative work can quite often follow similar trends; oddly enough, they can be grouped in similarities by exactly how they innovate. Yet this work is inexhaustible. To understand its complexities, to see how well the writer understands the craft, how brilliantly she builds this space of language and structure, requires not just a dip but a dive, a delve. For one cannot reach the bottom. There is innovation from the first sentence to the last.