Worms Best Reads of August 2023
Clem Macleod
STRANGERS TO OURSELVES by RACHEL AVIV
TW: Suicide, Anorexia, Mental Illness
This book was an incredible look into the different environments/experiences/upbringings that result in mental health problems and more extreme psychiatric illnesses.
The case study that looked at racial discrimination in mental health research and discourse was particularly impactful - Rachel Aviv’s background research and construction of this narrative is unbelievable in communicating the nuances of societal pressure and expectations for people of colour. In particular, the responsibilities one can feel as a result of their family/cultural history, and the immense stress that this can trigger. However it was the combination of the different stories and people from different social contexts that made this such a powerful read. As someone who has struggled with my mental health for a large part of my life, I found this book simultaneously helpful and triggering. Please read it with care. I came away from this reflecting on how nuanced and varied mental illness really is.
Rachel Aviv has a history of writing for the New Yorker and this really shows in the style of writing in the book. Despite writing such sensitive personal stories, she manages to write objectively about each case study, and is able to access new levels of empathy from the reader. There are so many instances where I’ve read about mental health problems in the past and felt a base level of empathy for the person experiencing them, but never have I felt so truly a part of their struggle and have the circumstances leading to a psychotic break made so much sense. She herself was the youngest person in America to ever be admitted to hospital for Anorexia and her level of care and understanding as a result of this is so evident.
Ultimately I came away from this book realising how much needs to be done about the conversation around mental health (particularly in the US where these case studies take place). I’ll be keeping an eye out for her future writing.
I read a few articles about Jamieson Webster after finishing this. In particular this and this and would love to read her book Conversion Disorder next.
CAITLIN Mcloughlin
Hot Milk is about watching and being watched. In Almería with her sick mother, who has remortgaged her house in order to pay for a diagnostic treatment plan led by the elusive (and expensive) doctor Gomez, Sofia feels at sea. Her mother’s list of symptoms is infinite, but the mysterious malfunction of her legs is the most concerning. She has not seen her father, who has moved back to his home country of Greece where he lives with his new family, since she was 11. Sofia is her mother’s legs, but this means she struggles to find her own feet. She’s an anthropologist, though her PHD is on hold indefinitely and for the time being she is a barista selling artisan coffee; but even that is on hold while she accompanies her mother to the south of Spain. In Almería Sofia observes the people that surround her from a distance, as if she is always lurking in the bushes or behind a newspaper with two holes cut out for eyes. She tries to survey disaffectedly but, in the most human sense of all, she can’t help but project her own insecurities, memories and desires onto her subjects. I think this makes her an unreliable narrator, but it also means that she reveals more of herself than she intends to. It made me think about how the way we perceive ourselves so deeply affects the way we understand those around us. But also that perception shifts constantly as we move through life, ebbing and flowing to the tides of successes and hardships, periods of anxiety and moments of peace. We grow bolder, like Sofia, and then perhaps we will recede, only to grow bolder again with a renewed sense of ourselves. There’s so much else going on here, how identity is attached to place and parentage and how sometimes that can make it more complicated to grasp, but I was mesmerised by Levy’s strange hypnotic prose from start to finish. I’m definitely starting to get why people are so obsessed with her.
Arcadia Molinas
OUR WIVES UNDER THE SEA by Julia Armfield
Reading this poolside added an unsettling dimension to my regular heatstroke-avoiding dips. With my head underwater, I’d think of Leah, one of the book’s protagonists, and what her experience must have been, submerged so deeply underwater for six months after what was supposed to be a 3 week expedition went awry. The unique silence of water, the weightlessness, the stillness, normally a peaceful experience, was frayed with an unshakeable eeriness. What could Leah have possibly witnessed so deeply below the surface of the Earth? What if there was nothing? Could reckoning with the fact that there is nothing be a worse truth to confront than the existence of a monstrous, terrible creature? Nonetheless, swishing my feet in the pool, I devoured this book, letting myself get pulled by the currents that Julia Armfield so wonderfully weaves.
Armfield deftly takes us through the murky, viscous aftermath of Leah’s reinsertion on dry land, through Miri’s eyes as she bears witness to the unexplainable changes happening to her wife. As Miri slowly comes to terms with Leah’s new way of being she reminisces over their relationship through the years: how they met, their friends, all the small things that make Leah who she is. It’s in this last thing in particular that Julia Armfield excels at waxing lyrical. She nails those details one fawns over when in love with someone: the way they hold a spoon, the way they sneeze, that time after a late movie screening when it was raining and they offered you their jacket and although it felt clichéd you secretly loved it. She has a knack for describing life’s complexities in simple terms.
“I thought about the day it first occurred to me that, should she die, there would be no one in the world I truly loved.”
The book mulls over themes of death, loss, forgetting - but also silence and what we can bring ourselves to speak of and what we cannot. Miri thinks of her recently deceased mother, who spent the last moments of her life in a care home, slowly losing her memory. People change, they leave, they die, “the thing about losing someone isn’t the loss but the absence of afterwards”. My own personal take was that this book was a break-up ballad. A whimsical metaphor for the crushing experience of detaching yourself from someone who was once your entire world. Leah’s voyage underwater could easily be transposed into a voyage deep into herself, where she retreats and closes off from Miri, she transforms into someone unrecognisable and Miri understands she needs to let her go. This sad premise is punctuated by acute moments of body horror as Leah literally transforms into something not entirely human. This mix gave the narrative exquisite moments of breathlessness and intrigue that made the book very hard to put down.
PIERCE ELDRIDGE
In this incredible essay Heat Is Not a Metaphor, Alexis Pauline Gumbs likens a heating world to the processes of menopausal bodies. I was most taken by the relationship she forms between our failing ecological world and how kindred this global body/mass is to our own, where she writes quite frankly, we know it’s all our fault; what we inflict on the world is a violence to our own existence. As a trans person, I was really moved by the section about cortisol inflicting more discomfort onto menopausal bodies when experiencing aggressions from external stressors such as heat, pollutants, and even discrimination. The course of testosterone blockers I have been on over the last month put me through induced menopause and andropause, and to answer one of Alexis’ questions about what menopause is trying to teach us, I learnt that change within my cellular capacity deeply affected my relational engagement with the world around me. I’m learning, through her words, how inextricably linked our internal and external capacities – resonances between blood with streams of water, ocean or lake – are. As a liquid body, I move with that around me; in dew on grasses in the morning, with lifeforms unrecognisable deep within aquatic oceanic environments. I’m truly comforted by the maturity in knowing, as she suggests, that when we acknowledge the unknown we make room for deeper learning that needn’t be named. Instead, we become more capable of great change by allowing ourselves to be moved by what we don’t know. And as for the things we can understand, like hormones affecting volatility internally, we can come to feel the impacts of our touch onto the world around us. I burn inside, so too does this world. How can we better protect ourselves from these rising storms of fire? I think of Maui, I place my heart there. I think of home as they prepare for the worst fires since the 2019-20 black summer.
John Yorke is teaching me, in the book Into the Woods, how important it is to navigate creativity through the preference of: form over content. Which is to say, there are enduring and integral foundational qualities within making, or writing more specifically, that are conducive to creating timeless stories. I’m such a nerd when it comes to books like this that lay foundations, through various resources and material references, for creative capacity building. Not only do I feel like my ability benefits, but my communication about story, structure, motion, journey, character development, play, and so on, feels enlightened with new brevity and clarity. I’m enjoying it because enriching my understanding of writing itself gives me a greater sense of purpose in the world. Have you ever felt like that? It feels extremely generous, very easy to read and follow, sharp and to the point. I’ll probably be gawking about this for years to come.
Another resource I’ve paired with Yorke’s book is podcast Read This which I’m loving at the moment. It gets stuck into the lives of writers, how they think and why they write. It’s a very good listen.
