The Story That Must Not Be Told
Announcing Deena Metzger's newest book
Dear Friends,
I’m thrilled to announce the publication of Deena Metzger’s new book, The Story That Must Not Be Told: A Dead Woman’s Memoir.
I was witness to part of this brilliant novella’s unlikely origin story, which I write about in my essay below.
BOOK RELEASE: I’m happy to have the honor of introducing Deena next Wednesday, September 17, 2025 in Los Angeles at the Book Release Reading event. If you are in the LA area, please join us!
Deena Metzger is a poet and novelist with over 12 published books and a multitude of essays, articles, poems, and stories. She is also my longtime mentor and beloved friend.
PRAISE for The Story That Must Not Be Told:
“A heart-breaking, heart-enhancing ghost story of whirlwind proportions, an incantatory, ethical thriller masterfully rendered by one of our great contemporary visionaries.”
— Ariel Dorfman, author of Death and the Maiden and The Suicide Museum
Peace and blessings,
Carolyn
The Story That Must Not Be Told
(And, ALSO how I told Deena she should not write her newest book)
by Carolyn Brigit Flynn
One evening last August, just over one year ago, my friend the novelist and poet Deena Metzger and I were relaxing at her home in Topanga Canyon. I’d come down for a visit, our first in-person get-together since before the Pandemic, and we were spending our days writing, and our evenings cooking, eating, sipping sake or Irish whiskey, and talking about anything and everything as friends do—and of course also reading our work to each other.
I had completed my memoir The Light of Ordinary Days —(and, I am just about to sign with a publisher! More on that soon.) I was just then embarking on my first novel, Thyme, and reading Deena my early halting pages. Deena herself was utterly, thoroughly, entirely engaged in writing her novel Broken Lambs. She had about 100 pages, and was working on it every day. It was fabulous to hear a few pages each night.
That particular evening, we’d taken down Deena’s tea glasses in silver holders, podstakannikas, from her kitchen cabinet, for the simple reason that I was looking for the right sized glass for my Jameson’s whiskey. The glasses were from the old country, Deena said, and were her grandmother’s. They had been brought across the sea from Vilna after World War I. As I sipped my Irish whiskey from her Jewish grandmother’s glass, Deena told me a fascinating story.
A German man had writen to her two years before, during the Pandemic. His sister, Ina, had studied with Deena in 1974 at the Women’s Building in LA. In fact, Deena had appeared in Ina’s journals as an important teacher. The brother was putting together a book about Ina’s art and life, fifty years after her death by suicide in 1975. He asked Deena if she would write a few pages about her. Deena told him the truth: that she didn’t remember Ina. Still she was very moved by her story. Ina had ended her own life after previous suicide attempts. Over time Deena learned that each of Ina’s attempts had been theatrical, which intrigued Deena, and she felt compelled to explore further.
By the time Deena told me the story last summer, the German brother, Wolfgang, had traveled to LA to explore his sister’s life and her art, and had visited Deena in Topanga Canyon. Despite the fact that she told him she didn’t remember Ina, Wolfgang continued to believe that it was important for Deena to write about his sister. In fact, he was actually pressing her to do this. After all, Deena understood the place and milieu where Ina had made art and studied in 1970s Los Angeles.
Deena was torn. What about Broken Lambs? She could not take on anything new until she finished the novel. I agreed. Deena felt anguished about it, but I did not. I told her absolutely that Wolfang’s request would simply have to wait. That one can’t say yes to everything. A writer has to make choices, and to protect their work. Broken Lambs has important things to say, and was emerging from Deena’s own creative psyche. Wolfgang’s request, though intriguing, was his journey, his work. He was a publisher in Germany. He would certainly be fine putting together a book about Ina without Deena’s help.
She nodded, and we moved on to other things, and I thought we’d put issue of the brilliant feminist performance artist from the Women’s Building in the 1970s to rest. I had been stern and protective. Deena had been clear that she would not interrupt Broken Lambs.
But six months later, last December, we were scheduled to chat over Zoom. I was preparing some pages from Thyme to read to her. Deena told me that she had decided to take on Wolfgang’s request and write something about Ina after all. She’d felt pulled, tugged in that way that seemed to make it impossible to look away.
“Let me send you what I’ve got,” she wrote, and attached a document. I had scheduled an hour before our Zoom conversation to read what I thought would be a 5-10 page essay. What I received was 80 pages. Eighty fascinating, thrilling, strange and very chilling pages. Ten minutes before we were to meet I texted her and said I needed another half hour. I couldn’t stop reading, albeit quickly, until I got to the end.
The few pages Wolfgang had asked Deena to write had evolved into its own book: a tale of a German woman born just after World War II, her moneyed family, the legacies of profit and war, and the efficacy of ghosts.
The title page read:
The Story That Must Not Be Told: A Dead Woman’s Memoir
by Deena Metzger
Ghost Written by Ina Andreae
Now, only a year after our conversation last summer, the book is published. Deena describes it as Ina’s book, as an act of witness. It is a book about making amends, and it offers a warning.
For as it turns out, The Story That Must Not Be Told is being published just as the US is devolving into authoritarianism before our eyes. Things are daily happening to dismantle our nation, and events that Deena and I, nor any of us, could have barely imagined last summer are now unabashedly commonplace. Our current moment is not unlike Germany in the 1930s. And Deena, in this novella, is compelled to address our current time, as well as the story of a gifted daughter born in Germany just after World War II—that is, the heavy shadow and brilliant glare of Ina Andreae’s legacy.
Wolfgang was right, though he couldn’t have fully imagined it then. This was Deena’s story to write. And it is ours to receive, to hear, to absorb and to take with us as we daily, collectively, make our future.
You can find The Story That Must Not Be Told here.
Deena Metzger’s writing is on Substack, including her recent brilliant essay about The Story That Must Not Be Told.
When I was not yet a young writer, but trying to imagine such a life, I did understand that the devoted practice of writing was supported by the relationship between writers. I was reading about the Virginia Woolf circles, and the Gertrude Stein Circles, the Anais Nin Circles in Paris. I am delighted by Carolyn’s description of our writing week - at this time in my life I have such gratitude for the devoted practice and the deep friendship in which such practices are shared. Last night we texted back and forth in awe as a character who had come to her some weeks ago as an act of imagination also revealed himself as alive as unexpected events are developing in Europe and on the 17th she will introduce me and The Story Must Not Be Told at the Wende Museum, devoted to studies of the Cold War, which seems, tragically, to be an enormous concern once again. I have had the great fortune of being alongside Carolyn as a writer from the beginning and feel the gift of being present as The Light of Ordinary Days is coming into the world.