Anti‑Memoirs of a Muse is a visceral, hypnotic journey into the underbelly of artistic life — a world where beauty is currency, madness is ritual, and the line between inspiration and possession dissolves.
Regreta, the reluctant muse of a circle of bohemian artists in Bucharest’s Old Town, moves through a labyrinth of workshops, parties, addictions, betrayals, and ecstatic creation. Around her orbit sculptors, painters, numismatists, watchmakers, failed geniuses, and dangerous lovers - each demanding a piece of her flesh, her attention, her soul.
When her long‑dead grandfather Alfred appears during an earthquake, offering her a mysterious contract and ten borrowed years of life, Regreta is thrust into a surreal pact that blurs memory, hallucination, and destiny. What follows is a decade of artistic delirium: nights with sculptors who drink themselves into oblivion, women who fight like mythic beasts, men who worship and destroy their muses, and a city that trembles under the weight of its own stories.
Blending psychological realism with magical intrusions, erotic tension, dark humor, and a fierce tenderness for the broken and the brilliant, this novel becomes a confession, a chronicle, and a spell.
A cult‑literary portrait of art, addiction, and the dangerous intimacy between creator and muse.
For readers of:
Herta Müller
Clarice Lispector
Elfriede Jelinek
Olga Tokarczuk
Anaïs Nin
And anyone drawn to raw, mythic, psychological fiction.
Genre: FICTION / PsychologicalOriginally published in Romania by a publisher with a strong interest in psychology, art, and contemporary fiction, Anti-Memoirs of a Muse was launched in October 2016 and promoted through literary events, libraries, and art galleries. Nearly a decade later, the Romanian edition remains available for purchase online, demonstrating the book’s enduring presence beyond its initial launch. In 2020, Julia Kalman was featured by PRO TV among the Top Ten Romanian Women Authors, bringing further national visibility to her work. The English-language edition became available online in January 2026, marking the novel’s first step toward an international readership.
The book offers a particularly rich opportunity for translation: its language moves between psychological realism, surrealism, dark humor, erotic tension, and poetic imagery, while its setting in Bucharest’s artistic underground gives it a distinctive Eastern European cultural texture. Translating Anti-Memoirs of a Muse means bringing an already published and recognized Romanian literary work into a new linguistic and cultural space—one with potential to appeal to readers of contemporary literary fiction, magical realism, psychological fiction, and transgressive women's writing. The English edition is being actively promoted through Medium, WordPress, Facebook, and other digital platforms, with further international promotion planned, creating an expanding foundation for the book beyond Romania.
2007
That year, I read a lot, and it was also the year I started writing. [...]
In December of the same year, I was doing nothing—just lying on the cushions of a sofa, head down, blonde curls tousled by the undulations of a scruffy Burmese cat that vibrated its whiskers seductively. I listened to Led Zepp, Deep Purple & Sopor Aeternus, amidst the screams of the eternally hungry feline that hunted shadows coiled in corners. The rooms were crammed with antiques, books, and toys; the walls were paneled with works of art. Only the television had a separate opinion, but its dissonance really didn't matter after a few glasses.
For hours on end, I would gaze enchanted at the coffee table in front of me, where everything I could have wished for at the time was in a delightful mess: cups with fruits macerated in vodka, a round bottle of South American vodka, chocolate cream, crumpled books, an old wooden box that spat out cigarettes, nail polish, cheese biscuits, a remote control, crossword puzzles from the eighties discovered by Dan in some attic, and probably the only casserole dish in the house, holding the day’s specialty: lasagna, chicken in white sauce, or leeks with rice.
I was living as simple and comforting a life as possible for an introvert: I read, ate, drank, and smoked between two houses, a few art studios, and galleries. I was never talkative, and alcohol made me even more mute; it depressed me. But since time had suddenly become very lenient with me, and the bohemians overwhelmed me with compliments, I lived surrounded by art, like in a kaleidoscope made of seven mirrors, not just two or three.
“This is your writer's pen,” Dan told me one day with a wicked smile that boded ill.
