Cray-cray
Reading log: Three books about women and mental illness
I end a long absence from this platform with some hurried observations about three terrific books I read in the past six months:
Looker, by Laura Sims. This slim novella about a woman whose spiral into insanity takes the form of an obsession with a glamorous neighbor is like some unholy offspring of an Alfred Hitchcock thriller and a Patricia Highsmith novel. I think one could make a very good and interesting case for Looker as a species of stealth feminism whose central subtext is, “the quest for complete perfection and success that is baked into American ideals of femininity produces insanity” or suchlike; or the book can be read as an exceptionally delicious example of straight horror. It’s also often hysterically funny, although I have been made aware that this is not an evaluation that every reader will share. PS — cat-lovers, read at your peril.
The New Me, by Halle Butler. A perfect companion piece to Looker; the feckless anti-heroine of Butler’s acidic little time bomb of a novel could be the younger sister of Sims’s narrator, a kind of low-rent, underachieving Lena Dunham. Butler’s novel is every bit as psychologically brutal and misanthropic as Sims’s, with an added frisson of gig-economy despair making it feel especially topical and germane. Some of the things I’ve read written about The New Me make it sound like a lightly satiric piece about the foibles of office culture and self-help bromides. It’s not.
The Collected Schizophrenias, by Esmé Weijun Wang. This outstanding set of essays deserves more attention and praise than I can manage right now; suffice it to say that Wang has written a beautiful and harrowing book about her own experiences with mental illness, about how a psychotic episode feels like “breaking through a thin barrier to another world that sways and bucks and won’t throw me back through again,” about times when “the coherence of reality threatened to desert me.” The essays are characterized by their absence of self-pity and a precision and detachment that feels truly bracing. A moving, frightening, necessary book.
