Book: Senseless

Author: Stona Fitch

Type of Book: Fiction

Why Did I Read This Book: I don’t recall exactly but I think it was recommended on the LiveJournal community for disturbing books. I know I had it on my Amazon Wishlist for a while and ordered it one day when an affordable copy became available.

Availability: This book is out of print, but you can find used copies online from independent sellers:

Comments: When I first read this book, I thought it would be an excellent choice for my odd books discussion site. While the violence in this book is at times hard to read, ultimately this was not an odd book. This is not torture porn – it is literary fiction and very good fiction at that. The book is gripping and I read it very quickly. Still, as horrible as the violence was, it did not affect me deeply is because this sort of violence is pedestrian these days, unless it’s happening to you. Extremity of human degradation, the lengths some people are willing to go in order to achieve their ends, and the sense that perhaps those who live lives worthy of shame should be held to pay for their actions are not ideas that are particularly unique or shocking any more. We seem to be offended, at least culturally, when violence is committed against us or those like us, but there is no denying how inured we have become to the idea of retributive violence.

The plot of this book is deceptively simple: An American business man, Elliot Gast, is kidnapped in Belgium by extremists opposed to the European Union. Initially he is treated quite well in captivity, given books to read, plenty of food, and though he is bored and anxious, he is not in fear of his life. Then the black cables are snaked through the ceiling, recording every corner of the room where Gast is kept, recording him for audiences on the Internet. His captors then begin to deprive Gast of his senses, beginning, horribly enough, with his sense of taste. The attacks against him are paced out and one by one, basic things like touch, sound and smell are taken from him via acts of indifferent violence.

The key word for this book is indifference. Though the world around him is aware of his kidnapping, though Gast works every angle in his mind to try and escape his captors, his time in captivity is one of indifference. Not on his part, to be certain – Elliot Gast is filled with pain, terror, desperation and ultimately defiance, but his captors see him as little more than a pawn that can help or harm their cause. Gast initially feels a sort of connection with a doctor and a woman in the group, but even if they felt appalled at his treatment and how broadcasting it on the Internet makes them look, their response is not aimed at freeing Gast, but rather, battling those within their organization. Gast’s experiences at the hands of the terrorist group show that he means nothing to them even when they seemingly are on his side in terms of the abuse he suffers. Being the the clutches of his tormentors turns Gast into a thing. Deprived of most of the senses that allow a man to interact with the world, isolated from all normal human sympathy and concern, Gast is only human in terms of how he continues to perceive himself. To those who have captured him, he is no more than an important doll that bleeds.

The really senseless part of this book was not when Gast lost his senses one by one, not the seeming senselessness of the violence (because this violence did have sense behind it – all too often we confuse savagery with senselessness). The senselessness comes from knowing that all of us, with our habits, thoughts, emotions and quirks, can become that doll that Gast became in the eyes of anyone who considers us The Other and that, I think, is where the power in this book lies. We can become an example. Our suffering, while intense to us, can be depersonalized into a generic message of fear and through our pain and fear, we can become just one more horrific distraction in cyberspace. Maybe there is a message in such violence but chances are, people powerful enough to change the course of political events aren’t going to be the people watching as you forcibly lose your sense of smell.

Suffering in this book is senseless, in that is has little meaning aside from others imprinting their personal agenda on another man’s body.

Of course, Gast’s suffering has meaning to the people who inflict it. One of his torturers tells him:

“To truly change a man, you must take away what is important to him. You must take a rich man’s fortune. You must take a passionate man’s wife. You are a man of the senses, Elliot Gast. So we are eliminating them. By this method we can leave you thoroughly changed. Through your example, we can change thousands.”

This, of course, is not borne out by the events of the book. People are outraged that Gast is being held and tortured but no one is able to find him. No one is able to help him. And no one is changed by watching his suffering aside from the temporary shock one feels when watching atrocity. Written in 2001, this book had no way of knowing we would all one day be able to watch beheadings online as easily as we watch the latest silly cat videos that are part of the current informational memes. Elliot Gast was changed but the rest of the world marched on.

Perhaps the change in Gast is all that is necessary, in the context of the book. Immediately following the above quote, Gast recalls engaging in culinary atrocity. Tiny birds were force-fed buttered grains then drowned in alcohol. The tiny birds were then roasted and eaten, bones intact.

The waiters then draped each of us with a large linen napkin, explaining that these would capture the precious scent of the roasted birds.

“Or to hide your face from God,” our host joked. I looked closely at the tiny bird in my hand, roasted to a golden finish. Dipping the ortolan into a brandy butter reduction, I raised it and saw suddenly the darkened eye of the bird, no bigger than a tiny bead, glistening now with a tear of butter… Perhaps I was paying now for my various excesses…

I wonder if I am wrong, trying to seek a larger meaning behind the permanent damage done to Gast. Perhaps his personal epiphany, connecting the terrible things that happen to him with the suffering he was willing to inflict on tiny birds, on other peoples’ economic well-being, in order to engage in epicurean delight, is enough.

As I read this book, I was unsure if Gast was unreliable, or if I was missing a point because throughout the book, I seemed to understand things that Gast did not.

Although I regretted my role in this terrible game, I had to wonder what the response would be. What would it take to one-up Blackbeard? Ten online hostages? Live execution of innocents? Anything seemed horribly possible.

By the way, Blackbeard is the name Gast gives to his chief tormentor. Did Gast think the economic interests that were pushing the European Union would respond to this atrocity done him with anything other than words, possibly a trial of those who might end up arrested if it came to that? Did he genuinely think this sort of guerrilla violence would be answered, let alone countered? Why would a bank kidnap ten revolutionaries and torture them? Gast does not seem to understand that even though he has had his nostrils soldered, his tongue mutilated, that the terrorists still have little power. While in their hands, they seem like God to him, not the powerless entities they really are in the face of global banking and political systems.

However, Gast never loses site of himself even as he is made senseless. He refuses to cooperate in any manner, fighting as much as he can, refusing to do what his captors ask of him. In order to increase the theater of the torture, his captors want him to scream, to yell in pain, to fight overtly instead of rebel passively. At one point, Blackbeard tells Gast that his Internet pain show is making the terrorist group lots of money, 10% of which will be his if only he will cooperate and scream in pain. Gast, who is clueless in some respects, hopes it is true he will be permitted to leave if he does what is asked of him but doesn’t take such promises to heart. Instead, he hopes he can unmask Blackbeard in front of one of the cameras, revealing his face to the millions Blackbeard says are watching, making him a marked man. Instead of railing against his tormentors when he is left alone, he is resolute – all the ghouls who are watching will get is a man kicking a wall over and over and over. Moreover, it is hard to tell if Blackbeard is taunting Gast, asking him to participate in his own torture, or if Blackbeard genuinely thinks Gast is so craven he would think screaming in agony for a cut of the profits a good deal. In a book about senselessness, it is hard to know which character actually has any sense.

Throughout the book, Gast seems to have a connection with a woman he calls Nin (because her brown eyes remind him of Anaïs Nin, the erotic diarist), and though she seems to have a terrible time reconciling what her group is doing to Gast, Nin’s final actions are in a way the most senseless element in the book. But that is just a knee-jerk reaction. It is only senseless if one is accustomed to the idea that people who are kind always act uniformly and in ways that we can understand. Gast feels deceived, but only a Hollywood ending could have made this turn out any differently.

I wish for all in the world that I could quote the final paragraph in this book but to do so would give too much away and this complex book is one that should not be spoiled. The last line brings to mind Erasmus, whom it certainly comes from, but also Vonnegut, because Gast is changed and the world around him is not. Whether or not his suffering and permanent damage is worth the epiphany he experiences is not a question I am ready to answer. I suspect I will read this book again in a couple of years and see what I think then. If I do, I will also read again Waiting for the Barbarians by Coetzee and think hard about violence and the world. Increasingly I think the message of this book is that the world is there, but all that matters is your personal redemption. But who knows. In a few years I may think differently. This book is largely a character study, but it will make you contemplate violence, the world around you and how it is you could be the criminal in the eyes of another.

Book: Skinny Bitch

Authors: Rory Freedman and Kim Barnouin

Type of Book: Health, diet, veganism

Why Did I Read This Book: Because someone I follow on tumblr posted excerpts and it seemed delightfully and refreshingly rude. Also, because I read some Amazon reviews wherein people were shocked, shocked I tell you, that the authors were pushing a vegan agenda in their book! As if promoting veganism is a terrible, subversive, bizarre thing to do. Needless to say, I was amused.

Availability: Easily obtained, you can get a copy here:

Comments: I am a failed vegan. I fail for a lot of reasons but mostly it is because I am lazy. I was raised with a specific palate and it’s hard to change. Also cheese is an addictive substance and I will refudiate anyone who insists otherwise. I don’t give any excuses for my failure – I fail because I fail, and that’s all there is to it. So I was very interested in this book after reading some excerpts because it seemed like the authors cut their audience very little slack. It also appeared that the shallowness of the title aside, the book was about more than achieving a scrawny body, also examining the disgrace of the American food industry and the complete failure of the FDA to ensure food safety.

My first impressions were right and wrong. The book certainly pulls no punches in its approach. Take this gem, for example:

So before you say, “I could never give up meat,” realize that nearly every single vegetarian on the planet said those same words. Then shut the fuck up, look at an inspirational picture of a skinny bitch, and clean out your freezer.

Yeah, I am just enough of a masochist that those words made me dizzy a little bit. No sarcasm here. I like tough love aggression. I mean, one of the chapters is entitled, “Don’t Be a Pussy.” Seriously. These women don’t want to hear our shitty excuses.

Their refutation of the Atkins Diet made me love them a little:

So shout it from the rooftops until every one of your dumb-ass misinformed friends hears: YOU CAN EAT BREAD AND FRUIT!

And my last crumb of adoration before I start listing my objections:

Give up the notion that you can be sedentary and still lose weight. You need to exercise, you lazy shit.

Needless to say, my elliptical machine has a not-so-fine layer of dust on it. I really need a tough love friend to yell at me the way these women do, because despite their foul mouths and name calling, they also make it clear that this is a process, making these changes, and that every step you take towards eliminating animal from your diet is a step towards saving your health and your life.

But I have some pretty profound issues with this book. First, I must acknowledge that I am a person who has a crush on Morgan Spurlock. I like nothing better than someone who is willing to look into issues and tell us the truth, even if it means being smeared on Fox News. I’ve read almost every major book that discusses the American food industry, from Eric Schlosser to Michael Pollan(whom I have grown to loathe with the fire of a thousand suns or at least the heart of a woman who finds hunting wild pigs to satisfy some primal need to be distasteful) to Frances Moore Lappe. So my first issue with this book is one that may only be specific to me and those like me, but there is little in this book that will be new to people who are interested in healthy food and concerned about the increasingly libertarian, capitalist approach to regulating the food and drug industries. I read nothing in this book I did not already know.

Second, this book puts a couple of lines in to discuss the relative expense of a vegan, organic diet.

Recognize that anything worth having is worth fighting for… Fuck excuses about not having the time or the money… Certainly your health and your body and you are more important than anything else in your life.

Okay, yeah, I sort of get it. I mean, they are right to a point, health is worth fighting for. But money is a finite resource. If you don’t have it, you can’t just say, “Fuck it, I’m gonna pay more for food anyway.” So I was uneasy, but then my uneasiness was substantiated further.

Don’t be a cheap asshole. Yeah, yeah, yeah, organic produce is usually more expensive than conventional produce. But we spend countless dollars on clothes, jewelry, manicures, magazines, rent or mortgages, car payments and other bullshit. Surely our health and our bodies (we only get one body) are more important than anything else in our lives.

The authors make the point in the same paragraph that perhaps the costs will even out because the more you prepare your own meals and snacks, the less money you spend on costly eating out or impulse food shopping.

But this passage above, more than anything else, distills why many bristle at health food vegans. Veganism as practiced in America can be one of the most elitist diets ever. If one eschews animal products and animal cruelty in all forms, everything from food to shampoo to laundry detergent becomes more expensive. The vegan refusal to admit this troubles me.

You see, like many of our peers, Mr. Everything and I are precariously middle-class. I mean, I own a home, we have two cars, one of which is very old, and we can afford for me to spend money on books. We get to run the air conditioner in the hot, Texas summers. Compared to 90% of the world, we are blessed and privileged. But I don’t spend countless dollars on manicures. I’ve never had one, in fact. I wear no jewelry. I use an old computer. My purse is ten-years-old. And I find a vegan diet prohibitively expensive during the winter when the farmers markets are no longer open out here in the ‘burbs. I find vegan, organic products as a whole to be quite a bit more expensive than their non-vegan, non-organic counterparts. So to drill this idea down to its core – I am a privileged person economically and even I find the vegan lifestyle dear economically.

Of course, on paper, many vegans also adopt a less consumer-driven lifestyle and don’t have closets filled with leather shoes, silk blouses, wool coats. But reducing consumer spending can only get you so far, meaning one has to be purchasing manicures, jewelry, and clothes to the extent that such dollars can be reallocated to purchasing organic and vegan foods. I would venture that millions of Americans don’t spend money on frivolities. They are not out buying french pedicures and the latest shoe style favored by celebutantes. They don’t have the money to redirect to healthier food options and to callously suggest that they do makes it hard to make a case for veganism as a truly sustainable way of eating for everyone, not just us reasonably comfortable white chicks who live within 25 miles of a Whole Foods and a regular farmer’s market.

Let me give this as one example:

There are a ton of awesome, soy-based fake meat products on the market, which are great for transitioning away from meat…

I’m glad they included the word “transitioning” because those soy-based fake meat products are so expensive I can’t see buying them permanently. (Also, on a strictly personal level, I have never smelled a fake meat other than bean-based veggie burgers that didn’t smell a little like what would happen if you microwaved PlayDoh but I have always had a sensitive nose.) At my local supermarket, a package of Morningstar Farms Chick’n patties costs $3.49 for 9.5 ounces of product, and Morningstar Farms is a more affordable vegetarian brand. That’s $5.92 a pound. That may not sound bad but bear in mind that this is the cost for a product that would be one element of one meal for a family of four. More exclusive brands cost far more. Fake meats cost far more than regular non-vegan equivalents. People who shop on a budget, especially for families, or those who use food stamps, flat out cannot afford food like this. People without cars who live in areas under-served by grocery chains cannot obtain fake meat from the frozen aisle. Of course, the authors don’t control the food inequity in the USA, wherein the worst calories are the most affordable, wherein some urban areas are under-served by supermarket chains. But this is not the first source I have read that glosses over the financial realities of eating well, making broad statements about how it’s affordable without really explaining the details of such statements.

For example, authors include a chapter on brands they like that offer nutrition, organic goodness and veganism, and overall, I think the list is awesome. But the Peanut Butter Puffins cereal by Barbara’s Bakery cost much more than Captain Crunch by Quaker Oats. At my local supermarket, I can’t even get the former. I have to drive into Austin proper, which requires gas, then spend about $1.50 more per box. The Barbara’s Bakery cereal is far superior, don’t get me wrong, but in order to get it, I need a car, the ability to drive 20 miles round trip, the gas for the trip and the money to pay extra for the product. I have no kids, so the box would last me a while, but the same could not be said for a family with a couple of children. This may seem like I am niggling, but this is important because at some point, we have to admit that the doctrine of veganism and organic eating in general is something only some of us can afford the way the world currently works and to insinuate that it really is just an economic choice for everyone is misguided and, frankly, elitist.

The part about spending money on rent or mortgages being “bullshit” is absolutely insane. Mortgages are not bullshit. Rent is not bullshit spending. It’s how we ensure we have a kitchen to prepare our hopefully vegan meals. I cannot imagine what sort of mindset considers paying rent to be bullshit. I just can’t. It was either horribly ill-conceived or speaks of a callousness that has left the authors so out of touch with that which really matters that they have no problem lumping in the costs of not being homeless with the same money spent on manicures.

Finally, my last quarrel with this book is that it has two versions: Skinny Bitch and Skinny Bastard . In the interests of making me happy, Mr. Everything read Skinny Bastard and we compared books. They are virtually identical, with small differences for sex-specific health concerns. It’s clear the book for women got edited a little for men. At $14 a pop for a new, small format, trade paperback with margins that permit only 20 lines per page, it was not a good investment. And like me, Mr. Everything has read a ton of books on subjects covered in this book already but unlike me, he didn’t like being called an asshole or a lazy shit.

All in all, if you are completely new to veganism, how the government is little help in determining food safety and healthy eating in general, I can see how this book would be of some help. For anyone who already follows the Post Punk Kitchen, for whom Isa Chandra Moskowitz has already revealed the awesomeness of vegan food, who has a battered copy of Diet for a Small Planet on their shelves, or those who don’t like ad hominem abuse, this book may be a miss. I’m not the sort to return a book because the content didn’t come through for me, but if I had a chance to not purchase it in the first place, I’d likely go that route even though me and my big fat ass could use some scolding.

(Also, in a shameless bit of online nepotism, if you are looking for a really good book of vegan recipes, try 500 Vegan Recipes: An Amazing Variety of Delicious Recipes, From Chilis and Casseroles to Crumbles, Crisps, and Cookies, co-written and beautifully photographed by my friend Celine Steen.)

Book: The Lives They Left Behind: Suitcases from a State Hospital Attic

Authors: Darby Penney and Peter Stastny

Type of Book: Non-fiction, biography, history, photography, psychiatry

Availability: Published by Bellevue Literary Press in 2008, you can get a copy here:

Comments: This book was an unexpected comfort for me. I walked an interesting road in psychiatric medicine (I can call it interesting now with some distance – at the time it was an unrelenting nightmare from which I feared I would never wake) and the stories of the patients in this book, the psychiatric fads that doomed many of them to inappropriate care, showed me that in many ways the more things change, the more they stay the same, which may sound horrible in a sense, but really it put my own experience into perspective. And despite some similarities between my own care and the care of one of the patients in the book, I feel incredibly lucky to live in the present age, current deficiencies in mental health care notwithstanding.

This book discusses the lives of 10 people whose suitcases were left behind at Willard Psychiatric Center in upstate New York. Painstakingly researched, the identities of the people whose belongings were found in the hospital attic long after their deaths are explored not only in terms of their lives in the hospital, but also in terms of who they were before they ended up at Willard. Though we in our modern ways may see old psychiatric homes as barbaric – and they were in some respects – they were society’s attempt to deal with people who may have had profound problems, most of whom had no where else to go. Many who were considered “incurably mad” found themselves in poor houses, where their behaviors made them subject to terrible abuses. In 1869, Willard took in patients who had been deemed unsuitable for poorhouses and workhouses (and a pox on every person who thinks a return to either is a good idea).

… Willard received only patients from across the state who had already exhausted the public resources of their counties. Even paupers did not want to witness people kept in tiny cells and iron locks, being fed through openings in their doors, never let out until their limbs were crippled. Women were regularly abused by all comers, and the whole business had turned into a matter of public disgrace.

But even as the mentally ill were shipped to the countryside, it bears mentioning that the hospital’s goal was to be self-sustaining, meaning that the patients were required to work in fields or in workshops in order to fund Willard. Moreover, the institution had the perspective that they needed to provide a “morally” correct place for the mentally ill, giving them certain stigma while attempting to help them. Masturbation was cause for alarm and at times confirmation that the patient was in fact quite mentally ill. A sex life was completely off limits to the mentally ill at Willard.

Because of the psychiatric fads of the time, most of the people in this book and likely many at Willard were diagnosed with schizophrenia or various forms of hallucinatory dementia when the fact is few actually had the condition. In a similar parallel to a lack of early understanding of how some psychiatric drugs affect blood sugar and cause diabetes, many patients were put on drugs that caused them permanent neurological damage. Some neuroleptic drugs caused tardive dyskinesia and some doctors did not understand the causation between the drugs they prescribed and the uncontrollable fidgeting they saw in patients.

The psychiatrists who first introduced neuroleptics noticed rather quickly that the drugs caused symptoms not unlike Parkinson’s disease, but saw this as evidence that the medication was working effectively, rather than as an indication that it caused neurological damage… Nevertheless, decades later, when the full extent of the problem had become quite obvious, psychiatrists continued to prescribe these drugs for most patients in institutions, despite their limited effectiveness and the disfiguring and disabling side effects.

If this sounds primitive, we needn’t pat ourselves on the backs too soon for our improved medications.

Second generation neuroleptics, also called “atypicals,” were considered more effective and less likely to cause side effects than the older drugs, which are significantly less expensive. The NIMH study showed that these highly praised medications were no more effective than the cheaper drugs they replaced, while causing a new slew of side effects, including diabetes and heart disease. A 2006 British study had similar results…

People who know well those who are mentally ill, especially those with bipolar disease, often remark that they just don’t understand why sufferers don’t take their medications. Well, you see, the meds often don’t work as well as one would hope, they make you gain untold amounts of weight, can give you permanent neurological problems, diabetes, as well as creating addiction to the drug that makes withdrawal a dicey prospect. The behavioral problems these drugs are supposed to address often are dwarved by the health and further mental problems they cause. Some benefit from atypical antipsychotics, to be sure, but many walk into taking such drugs without a full picture of what the drugs may do in the long run.

Of the ten stories, several were heartbreaking. For example, the Russian emigre who escaped from a WWII internment camp with his wife to New York, where he began creating an excellent life, only for his wife to suffer and die from a catastrophic miscarriage. He broke down and became psychotic after her death, and ended up at Willard, where he spent the bulk of the rest of his life. A folk artist of no small talent, he painted scenes from his native Ukraine. In his suitcase, he kept the flowers his wife had carried during their wedding ceremony in Austria in 1945.

But the person in this book whose story most affected me was that of Margaret Dunleavy, an orphan who left Scotland and was an accomplished nurse in the United States until the intrusion and a complete lack of understanding in the medical and psychiatric world left her confined to Willard for the rest of her life. Margaret had contracted tuberculosis and worked in a tuberculosis hospital, but she suffered several setbacks in her life, setbacks that cost her the job and the lodging that came with it. She was placed at Willard for what was supposed to be a temporary stay that became permanent. She entered Willard with 18 trunks, the contents of which she was seldom allowed access to, her car was repossessed, she was seldom able to see her companion and perhaps boyfriend of many years, and all the accomplishments in her life were dragged from her as her life became that of an institutionalized patient. She described being sent to Willard as being “like a fly in a spider’s web” and she was right. She was ensnared in psychiatric faddery and a tendency by some doctors to dismiss a patient’s pain and to diminish the addictive properties of the drugs they prescribe.

Her trunks were filled with her life’s possessions – linens, carefully wrapped china, diplomas, many pictures of the road trips she took with friends. Her immigration papers, her medical certifications and letters from friends and her male friend, embroidery, patterns, and most importantly, pictures of her with her car. An independent woman, Margaret never married and rare for the time, she owned her own car, traveling on vacations with female friends, her mobility giving her freedom. And unlike many at Willard, she had friends who stuck by her until the end. The depth of her friendships, the loyal bonds that those who are extremely mentally ill enough to be institutionalized for life often have a hard time forming, should have been a clue she was not schizophrenic, but the dogma of the time said she had the disease and she was treated for it until she was a shell of a person.

Margaret, who had tuberculosis and was diagnosed with gastric problems, had a doctor she preferred, driving far out of her way to see him. She was given belladonna and codeine, both of which were addictive to some extent and made any psychological problems the chronically ill woman had even worse. Her worsening health, the worsening health of her male companion, combined with worry about her family in Scotland at the outbreak of WWII, caused her to show signs of fray. Her employers at the tuberculosis hospital intervened in a way that now seems outrageous – they terminated her care, her personal relationship with her doctor and forced her to see a more local doctor. Losing contact with her trusted physician, combined with an abrupt termination of her drug regimen, caused Margaret to break down, landing her forcibly institutionalized for life on the following, extremely insubstantial grounds:

“Annoys people. Accuses people of persecuting her and talking about her. Says switchboard operator listens in on her conversations and that people on other floors can be heard talking about her.”

Once at Willard, her physical ailments were often dismissed as hypochondria, she was diagnosed in the face of all known reason with dementia praecox (an archaic term for schizophrenia) of long-standing, and was prescribed medication that ensured her frail health degenerated more and that if she was not mentally ill before entering Willard, she was certainly mentally unwell when she died there.

Her story is so resonant with me because in the summer of 2008, my mother almost died, I lost two beloved cats within weeks of each other, and I knew I was losing my job. I was in distress, sought help, and in the face of all that I know about myself, accepted a bipolar diagnosis and began to take atypical antipsychotics. What began as an emotionally difficult time morphed into physical misery that I hope I never face again. I was placed on Geodon, within days was shaking, felt snakes under my skin, stopped eating and started hallucinating. I asked the psychiatrist for help and he prescribed me enough Xanax to ensure a terrible addiction. It all culminated in a stay at a psych ward after the voices in my head told me to kill myself. The four day stay in the locked down ward did stabilize me until the voices stopped, but I also left the place on Prozac, Wellbutrin, Xanax, Valium, Trazedone and Ambien. I developed an addiction that almost cost me my marriage because the drugs made me so crazy I wanted to leave my spouse of 15 years. I have shared my experience and while it is certainly not the norm, too many have shared similar experiences of being shoe-horned into inappropriate diagnoses (most often bipolar, the 21st century answer to schizophrenia and dementia praecox), crippling addictions, and doctors who pile medication on top of medication with seemingly callous disregard as to what such drugs may do as they fine tune their patients’ brains.

(And though it goes without saying, I must say anyway that meds help a lot of people. I would never tell anyone not to take meds if they had a realistic diagnosis, understood all the ramifications of taking psychotropics and made an informed decision. My descent into hell had none of those elements involved, and that was the problem. My experience is not a testimony against psychological pharmacology, but rather an encouragement to approach one’s mental health care with information and caution.)

In the course of reading Margaret’s chapter, I was introduced to the idea of the chaos narrative, which helped me make sense of what happened to Margaret as well as what happened to me in the bowels of the psychiatric system.

The chaos narrative is essentially an anti-narrative, because the self in the midst of chaos has no time for reflection or the ordering of narrative in a way that makes meaning. As Frank [Arthur Frank, the creator of the idea of a chaos narrative] puts it, “A person who has recently started to experience pain speaks of ‘it’ hurting ‘me’ and can dissociate from ‘it.’. The chaos narrative is lived when ‘it’ has hammered ‘me’ out of self-recognition.” Chaos stories are hard to hear, both literally, because, in their lack of sequence and causality, they may not be apparent as stories to the listener, and figuratively, because they are anxiety-producing, even threatening, to the listener, a reminder that anyone of us may find herself in this painful state.

In this age when doctors barely have time to get your basic history, it is unlikely many know a chaos narrative for what it is. They hear a rambling patient, who may be fidgeting with nervousness and tension, who cannot sleep, who is plagued by a sense of doom and may be acting out, and the narrative seems indicative of the psychiatric disorder du jour. In the midst of most of these stories, chaos narratives were at play – illnesses, life upheavals, and misfortune – and doctors did not hear the stories they were told.

Modern psychiatric life is different now, to be certain. A heavier emphasis is placed on pharmacology than long-term therapeutic care and those whose mental illness is severe will not have their possessions discovered in disused attics because many are homeless now due to the drastic termination of funding mental facilities experienced in the Reagan administration. It is hard to say which is worse – being in an institution your entire life when you don’t need such care, or being on the streets, unable to get such care if you do need it.

I suspect most people will read this book and feel a kinship with one of the people described through the possessions they left in their trunks, possessions they were denied while they were at Willard because the people in this book, all quirks and bad behavior aside, are so very ordinary, very prosaic. Each trunk represents a life truly interrupted, and in their cases, generally never to be resumed again. Truly a heartbreaking work. I highly recommend it.

Book: The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break

Author: Steven Sherrill

Why Did I Read This Book: I frequently ask friends on other Internet haunts of mine to recommend books to me. This book was recommended by the resplendent Miss Erin James, with much enthusiasm on her part. Since she has good taste, I bought a copy that same day. I initially thought it would be a good book for I Read Odd Books, but it turned out not to be so odd after all, instead quirky and contemplative.

Availability: Published in 2000 by Picador, it is still in print and you can get a copy here:

Comments:This novel, despite having the decidedly unsubtle Minotaur as its main character, is a novel of subtleties. It is a novel in which not a whole lot happens until the very end, but the small sections where the Minotaur is active – helping co-workers move, repairing his car, mending his clothes, performing chores at work, rubbing lotion all over the place where his bull upper body meet his human lower body – are the meat of the book. At times it seemed too slow, but for it to have sped up would not have worked at all, for the Minotaur plods through his life, seldom in a rush. The Minotaur, knowing that he will likely be alive many more centuries, does not need to rush about. The tedium of life, the sheer crushing weight of all the time he has been alive, has not made him nihilistic, but it has enveloped him in a sort of torpor from which only the hope of love can remove him.

The Minotaur in Sherrill’s book is indeed the figure from Greek legend, the half-bull, half-man that King Minos trapped in the labyrinth, bastard, half-breed child from his wife, Pasiphaë, the result of one of those many pranks and punishments the Pantheon meted out when their wills were crossed. But in Sherrill’s book, Theseus does not kill the Minotaur and the Minotaur emerges from the maze, forced to make his way in the real world. This book places him in North Carolina, living in a trailer in a rundown trailer court, driving a Vega that he has to repair daily, and working in the kitchen in a family-style restaurant. If you read this book expecting a magically realistic tour de force, you will be disappointed. If you read this book as a borderline Southern Gothic novel of manners, wherein social roles and customs are discussed in great detail, and you like that sort of book, then this will be right up your alley. Sherrill treats with respect the extreme lower-middle class, never making a mockery out of people who in other hands would become a loathsome Larry the Cable Guy routine.

For me, this novel operates on two levels. The first is how mundane the world is, which is a complete “Duh!” statement, I am aware. But when the world is so devoid of magic and mythos that the Minotaur is driving a Vega and working as a cook, and instead of inspiring fear he creates rather a sort of almost racial discomfort in those around him, the world is not a particularly interesting place. This is not to say the book is not interesting, but rather the world the book creates, a fine distinction but one I hope holds some clarity. The other idea the book conveyed to me heavily is that the Minotaur is used as an Other Everyman. So many novels deal with the travails of normal people in this world, but seldom those among us who are genuinely different. Freaks. Genuine outsiders. The Minotaur’s presence in this book is to show that the world really will grind down the extraordinary. While the Minotaur really does experience a mild deus ex machina at the end of the book, the Minotaur is not restored to his old glory as a menace that inspires fear. Rather, the triumph he carves for himself at the end of the book is little more than the potential love of a plump, hairy woman and a chance to work a grueling job as his own boss. The Minotaur may win, but even as we sense he may have a chance at a better time of it, we never lose fact that if he becomes his own man, so to speak, he will be a prince in a kingdom of Southern Culture on the Skids. His glory days are over. This world really is the best he can hope for.

I think the most interesting part of this book for me, aside from wondering how many years Sherrill himself must have toiled in kitchens in order to write the scenes in the restaurant, is thinking about how human the Minotaur is in how he reacts yet how it is that basic understanding of human behavior eludes him. For example, in a scene in the restaurant as he is waiting for his paycheck, the Minotaur tries to enter into conversation with some trite frat-types, using sexual vulgarity as a means to become one of the boys (in so much as he can speak – the Minotaur’s speech in this book consists of grunts and murmurs). It backfires, as we all know it will. And I wonder how it is that after centuries of living among men, the Minotaur both does not understand how the world of men works and why it is he longs to be a part of it. Of course, I suspect the answer is that as half-man, half-bull, he can understand humans only so much but he never stops longing to be a part of them. The scene where he sleeps over at his bosses’ home, an aging homosexual with an allegedly lurid past and a penchant for historical reenactments, is touching. It makes you think the Minotaur can eventually get this right, that he can eventually find a place among human beings where he can feel accepted.

But then in a scene I will not go into in too much detail lest I spoil the novel, the girl the Minotaur wants goes into a seizure during lovemaking, and his reaction to the situation is utterly baffling. There is no part of the human in the Minotaur that goes into his decision, yet the bull in him clearly is not in charge, either. Perhaps this action in comparison to the Minotaur’s emotional lethargy is what makes it hard to explain. At times, I could not determine what it was that Sherrill wanted me to know about the Minotaur or the world in which he lives.

I think that is why I found most satisfying the scenes in which much detail is given to the Minotaur’s routine. How he eats onions like apples. His grooming routines, which involve coating his long horns with clear nail polish. How he tinkers with his car. How he sleeps without the A/C and listens to his neighbors and sometimes watches them, a hopeful and hopeless voyeur.

All in all, this novel occupies an uneasy place in my mind, which may have been Sherrill’s goal. He created a being whose reactions I sort of understand and sort of don’t. He set the novel in a place in this world with which I am wholly familiar, a place I both love and loathe. I think people should read this book if only to tell me what the hell they think about it. Ultimately, I don’t know. I liked and disliked the book but it resonated enough with me that I am going to put it on my shelves and come back to it one day to see what I think then. It was a finely written book whose purpose may have been wasted on me but may become clear in a second read.