currently reading: Passing for Human by Liana Finck
books bought:
Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward
The Animators by Kayla Rae Whitaker
feeld by Jos Charles
books received:
The Reckonings by Lacy M. Johnson (e-galley)
Passing for Human: A Graphic Memoir by Liana Finck
Nine Pints: A Journey Through the Money, Medicine, and Mysteries of Blood by Rose George
books finished:
Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata, trans. Ginny Tapley Takemori
Hey you,
I have been reading slower and slower and less and less and while I'm still reading way more than the average person (no offense, average person), this decline has been very noticeable to me, and maybe you've noticed too if you read this newsletter closely or seen me complain about it on twitter or heard me complain about it in real life. This is because I'm depressionsick* (that's really how I think of it, depressionsick, I'm not trying to be cutesy or something. I noticed a while ago when I say I'm depressed people say something like, "that sucks," and when I say I'm sick people are much more likely to offer their help but also 100% sure to assume I mean something physical, and I never knew which one to say, and I guess at some point I combined them. It's still not something I would say out loud, though), which feels very obvious to me, which is why I'm telling you, because it is an observation so easily made it feels like talking to you about the weather. In The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, Andrew Solomon writes:
"There's a sudden point when you can feel the chemistry going," Mark Weiss, a depressive friend, once said to me. "My breathing changes and my breath stinks. My piss smells disgusting. My face comes apart in the mirror. I know when it's there."
When I say it is obvious this is what I mean.
It is impossible for me to talk about depression, or books, or almost anything, without bringing up Andrew Solomon. The Noonday Demon is one of my favorite books of all time, not because it was like, a great story, but because it gave me language, a framework, nuance where there usually isn't any.
A few years ago I wrote this:
[I have a tattoo of a constellation with five stars.] The stars are a reference to the epigraph of The Noonday Demon, which actually makes them a reference to Mikhail Bulgakov’s The White Guard: "Everything passes away––suffering, pain, blood, hunger, pestilence. The sword will pass away too, but the stars will remain when the shadows of our presence and our deeds have vanished from the Earth. There is no man who does not know that. Why, then, will we not turn our eyes to the stars? Why?"
The number is because there were five times I got better. Which is to say, necessarily, there were five times I got worse, but sometimes I like the remembering. When I had kidney stones, even after the nurses shot painkillers into my veins, it hurt to fill my lungs all the way. I took to taking small, shallow breaths. Now I’ll sometimes fill my lungs to bursting just to see if I can do it. If it hurts, I know I’m in trouble. If I look down and see my five stars and don’t feel anything––not relief, not grief, not anxiety, not wonder––then I know I’m just as fucked.
I have a similar thing with bookstores––there is always an anxiety that gnaws at me when I go to a bookstore, including the one I work at, and can't find a single thing I want to read. It's another way of knowing I'm fucked.
I don't write about my depression very much because it's boring, it's fucking boring. Boring to write about and boring to read about and boring to experience. Everything I'm about to say is a generalization, but I have read a lot of books about depression, and there are so few I can recommend for this very reason––memoirs of the sort tend to either be full of platitudes to the point of meaninglessness, or they're insular, exhausting, boring (Daphne Merkin's This Close to Happy being a perfect example. I read it right after it came out because Solomon wrote a glowing review of it, and if I squint extremely hard I can see what he might find sort of impressive about it, but that did not stop me from hating it.)
Of course I cannot recommend The Noonday Demon highly enough, but if you are in a depression yourself I would suggest reading You & a Bike & a Road by Eleanor Davis, which I might've recommended here before. It's a graphic memoir of the time she decided to bike across the country that was engaging enough to hold my focus, which is no small task at the moment. And it's on the shorter side. And also she gets it:
What a long way of explaining why this newsletter (temporarily) is covering fewer books!
Your friend,
Smalls
*Here’s the requisite part where I tell you I have a therapist and a psychiatrist and take medication and it’s in the process of being managed, etc., you get it.