Audition by Katie Kitamura

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🎭 Audition by Katie Kitamura — ⭐️⭐️⭐️💫 (3.5/5)

🛒 Buy Audition on Amazon (affiliate link)

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⚠️ Trigger Warnings

Pregnancy loss, abortion, emotional abuse, elder abuse, relationship tension, and grief.

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💬 My Thoughts

Some books feel like entertainment. Others feel like an experience. Audition falls firmly into the second category.

Katie Kitamura writes in a way that’s hard to describe — it’s controlled, elegant, and quietly unsettling. The story moves slowly, but it absorbs you. You don’t just read it — you live inside it for a while.

The premise sounds deceptively simple: an actress preparing for a new stage role meets a young man named Xavier, who claims to be her son. From there, the story morphs into something much stranger and deeper — about identity, performance, and the thin line between truth and illusion.

I can’t say I fully understood it, and I’m not even sure it’s meant to be fully understood. It’s layered and cerebral, and at times it felt a little too “high-brow” for me — like watching an avant-garde play where you sense there’s genius at work, even if you can’t quite explain it. But there’s something magnetic about it.

The entire book feels like standing in front of a mirror you’re not sure you want to look into. Every scene, every sentence, feels deliberate — sparse yet full of meaning. You might not “get” it, but you feel it.

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🚨 Spoiler Warning

Below is a full summary of the novel — including the ending.

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📖 Full Plot Summary

The narrator, an unnamed actress, meets Xavier, a young man who insists she’s his mother. She denies it — she’s never had a child — but his confidence rattles her.

When Xavier later gets hired to work on the same play she’s starring in, the line between real life and performance begins to blur. The actress — trained to inhabit her roles completely — starts unconsciously stepping into the role Xavier has created for her: his mother.

Her marriage to Tomas is already fragile, marked by a past miscarriage and unspoken resentments. As Xavier moves into their home, the three form a strange, pseudo-family dynamic that grows more unsettling with time.

When Xavier brings home a girlfriend named Hana, the delicate illusion unravels. The actress finally ends the arrangement, realizing that she’s lost the boundary between her real and performed selves.

Months later, Xavier returns with a play he’s written — about a woman who can’t tell what’s real anymore. The narrator performs it, understanding that Xavier is now walking the same path she once did — chasing validation, attention, and meaning through art.

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🎭 Themes

• Performance and Identity: How much of who we are is real — and how much is performance?

• Art as Self-Destruction: When does immersion in art become a kind of self-erasure?

• The Quiet Madness of Intimacy: Relationships, whether romantic or familial, blur the line between love and performance.

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💭 Final Thoughts

Audition is not the kind of book you “love” — it’s the kind you ponder. It’s smart, haunting, and strange in a way that lingers long after you finish.

I don’t know if I fully “got” it, but I admired it deeply. It feels like a masterpiece — just not a masterpiece made for me. Still, I’m glad I read it. Because even in confusion, I could feel the weight of something extraordinary happening beneath the surface.

⭐️ My Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars — brilliant, elusive, and quietly hypnotic.

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📚 If You Liked Audition, Try:

• Intimacies by Katie Kitamura — same author, same elegant restraint

• Outline by Rachel Cusk — cool, cerebral, and full of subtle tension

• Trust Exercise by Susan Choi — another story where performance and reality collide