Gender and Authorship in Trust: The Erasure and Reclamation of Women's Voices

Hernán Díaz’s Trust is a novel about who gets to tell a story and whose stories are buried. Through its layered structure—a fictional biography, a memoir, a diary, and a ghostwritten manuscript—the book relentlessly interrogates how patriarchal systems silence women and claim authorship. The central thematic claim is that women’s voices and intellectual labor are systematically erased by male-dominated narratives, yet these voices persist through subversive acts of reading, writing, and reclaiming narrative agency. This theme plays out most powerfully in the intertwined stories of Mildred Bevel, whose life is fictionalized by men, and Ida Partenza, the young woman hired to write Andrew Bevel’s memoir. By tracing the theme across Ida’s childhood, her ghostwriting work, and her eventual discovery of Mildred’s hidden diary, we see a complex portrait of complicity, resistance, and the fraught search for authentic female voices.

The Gendered Origins of a Writer: Ida Partenza’s Formation

Ida’s path to becoming a writer is shaped by loss and the gendered expectations of her Italian-American household. After her mother dies in childbirth (a common fate that erases women throughout history), Ida is left to manage the home at age seven while her father runs a printing press. She stumbles upon the Brooklyn public library and develops an obsession with detective novels—particularly those written by women: Dorothy Sayers, Carolyn Wells, Mary Rinehart, Margery Allingham. These authors become surrogate mothers, teaching her that “I could write something dangerous” and that pleasing readers was not the goal. This early reading gives Ida a model of female authorship that is subversive, orderly, and powerful—a stark contrast to the domestic role she must play at home.

Ida’s father, an anarchist printer, disapproves of her learning stenography and typing, calling secretarial work “a promise of independence that was only one more knot in the millenary subjection of women to the law of men.” Yet he simultaneously relies on her unpaid domestic labour, revealing the hypocrisy in his ideals. The typewriter with a missing “M” that Ida borrows becomes a symbol of incomplete tools; she must make do with what she has, much like the women writers she admires. Her mother’s erasure is even more profound: the only photograph reduces the mother to a single outfit, and Ida’s failed novel about her mother becomes “the greatest error of my writing life.” This personal erasure foreshadows the larger historical erasure of Mildred Bevel.

Ghostwriting and the Male Appropriation of Female Creativity

When Ida is hired to write Andrew Bevel’s memoir, she becomes a ghostwriter in the most literal sense: her work will be published under his name. Bevel wants to restore his wife’s image, but he dictates a sanitized, “accessible” version of Mildred that strips her of complexity. Ida is forced to invent scenes using her “feminine touch.” She draws on her own childhood experience of recounting detective novels to her father at dinner. When Bevel later describes this very scene as a genuine memory of Mildred, Ida realizes he has plagiarized her invention—and does not even know it. This moment crystallizes the theme: men absorb women’s creative labor, claim it as their own, and erase the source.

Ida’s research into Mildred reveals the difficulty of finding female role models for her character. She reads women writers from Edith Wharton to Dawn Powell, but none capture the “atmosphere of discreet wealth” she needs. Bevel’s own descriptions of Mildred are deliberately vague, and Ida must suppress her sense of Mildred’s real suffering—“the suffocation, the solitude, calculating every action”—to produce a pleasing portrait. She later acknowledges her guilt: “I find it hard to forgive myself for having helped him perpetrate this fiction.” The blotter that Ida steals from Mildred’s room becomes a physical trace of the erased woman, a record of what was written and then hidden.

Reclaiming the Silenced Voice: Mildred’s Diary and Ida’s Theft

The climax of the theme occurs in Part IV, decades later. Ida, now an older writer, returns to the New York Public Library to research Mildred. In a ledger, she discovers a small notebook titled “Futures” written in Mildred’s hand. The notebook contains a diary, and Ida immediately steals it, rationalizing the theft as “a conversation that begins after a delay of several decades. A message finally arriving at its destination.” This act is deeply ambiguous: it is both a rescue of Mildred’s voice and a continuation of the appropriation, as Ida will now interpret that voice. The diary itself, with its missing pages and tiny violet ink, suggests that Mildred’s full story may never be recovered. Yet the chapter heading “Futures” (Mildred Bevel) finally gives the woman her own name at last.

The discovery is prepared by earlier symbols. The missing dots on “i”s that Ida noticed in her father’s anarchist tracts tie back to the over-inked “e” and missing dots in the mysterious typed sheets she found in his flat file—hinting at a hidden network of suppressed documents. The knife that Ida buys for her father, which he refuses as a gift and buys for a penny instead, represents both a severance and a reconciliation: he will not accept it as a gift, but he uses it to share a meal with her. The knife also recalls the violence that women writers like Allingham controlled in their books.

Complexity and Contradiction: Complicity and the Unfinished Narrative

Trust does not offer a simple redemption. Ida is complicit in Mildred’s erasure; she writes a fiction that Bevel then claims as truth. Her theft of the diary may be another form of appropriation, as she admits: “My arrogance disturbs me—the feeling that the words in this notebook are addressed to me.” The novel’s structure itself questions authorship: the opening chapters “Du même auteur,” “Dédicace,” and “Table des matières” are metafictional frames that destabilize any single authorial voice. The final chapter, “Remerciements,” thanks a long list of supporters, reminding us that even the “real” author, Hernán Díaz, is part of a collaborative network. Mildred’s voice in “Futures” is brief and fragmentary; we cannot know if her full story will ever be heard. Yet the very act of Ida’s search and the reader’s engagement with the novel becomes a form of reclamation.

Study Questions and Answers

1. How does Ida’s childhood reading of women detective novelists shape her understanding of narrative and authority?
   Ida learns from women writers like Dorothy Sayers and Margery Allingham that stories can be dangerous, that readers’ expectations can be subverted, and that order can emerge from chaos. These authors become surrogate mothers who model a female authorship that is powerful and intelligent, in contrast to the domestic role thrust upon her after her mother’s death.

2. What does Bevel’s unwitting plagiarism of Ida’s detective story reveal about the dynamics of gender and creativity?
   Bevel recounts as his own a scene Ida invented—about Mildred narrating detective novels at dinner—because he has absorbed it into his self-image. This shows how male figures often unconsciously appropriate women’s creative labor, erasing the female source while claiming originality and authority.

3. Is Ida’s theft of Mildred’s diary an act of liberation or another form of appropriation?
   The theft is both. Ida rescues Mildred’s hidden voice from oblivion, but she also takes it without permission and plans to interpret it. She herself questions her arrogance, wondering if Mildred would have approved. The novel leaves the moral ambiguity unresolved, highlighting the difficulty of recovering silenced female narratives without replicating the original erasure.

4. How do recurring symbols like the typewriter with a missing “M” and the blotter reinforce the theme of erased female authorship?
   The typewriter’s missing “M” (for “Mildred”? “Mother”?) underscores the incomplete tools women must use to write their own stories. The blotter, which Ida steals from Mildred’s room, captures the traces of writing that are then covered or thrown away—a physical metaphor for how women’s contributions are often recorded only as hidden impressions, not as permanent text.

5. In what ways does the novel’s fragmented structure challenge the traditional association of authorship with male authority?
   By presenting a fictional biography, a ghostwritten memoir, a diary, and metafictional paratexts, Trust undermines the idea of a single, authoritative author. The opening “Du même auteur” immediately questions who “the same author” is. This polyphonic structure shows that authorship is always contested, and that women’s voices—like Mildred’s—must be pieced together from fragments, resisting easy ownership by any one figure.

For further exploration, see the main Trust page or character profiles for Ida Partenza, Andrew Bevel, and Mildred Bevel. The symbols of the blotter, the typewriter, missing dots on “i”s, and the knife offer further insight into the novel’s meditation on gender and authorship.