Books to Read If You Want to Get Inside My Head

[sashagoblin]

For the edification of the few and inexplicable; I'd be absolutely fascinated to hear others' equivalents!

 

Nb: this list is by no means exhaustive. Some books or authors are missing because they’re irretrievably linked with certain people in my head; it excludes some very significant ones whose influence would probably be impossible to explain or access if you’re not an overly emotional 13-year-old girl; and above all doesn’t include those I utterly adore and worship simply because for being brilliantly well-realised, for their numbers are legion and subject to frequent unpredictable increase. It’s limited to those which actually had a significant formative influence: without these, I’d be a different person. Be warned. Here. Be. Dragons.

 

1)      Neil Gaiman - Sandman

 

Esp: Brief Lives (always my favourite, not just for the panel at the end with Dream in the armchair, although I won’t deny it helps); Season of Mists (that inset chapter in the boarding school when the dead come back, and Edwin’s nightmare about running through endless corridors crushing falling bird skeletons for ’75 years, but it seemed longer…’, are how I explain my concept of hell and my experience of starvation psychosis respectively); and The Kindly Ones (because it’s about endings, and identity, and compromise, and despair, and the liminalities of the self, and is generally fucking genius. And has Rose Walker’s reflections on love – ‘you build up this whole armour, for years, so nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life...you give them a piece of you. They don’t ask for it. The just do something dumb one day like kiss you, or smile at you, and then your life isn’t your own anymore….’ - which alone make it worth the cover price…). Also Gaiman’s (non-Sandman) Signal to Noise expresses very neatly how I feel sometimes about art & narrative (‘in my films, people died. And I thought that was honest. I thought... / They were actors. And they played at being dead…’) and my experience of life and illness (‘the pain inside is a hard knot of rage. Anger at my body for betraying me. Anger at my world and my dreams and my life for not going on forever…’) But really Sandman is the thing.

 

2)      Stephen Fry – Moab is my Washpot

 

I have few words for quite how seminal this was in my conception of love and what it could mean. I read it almost constantly between roughly the ages of 17 and 23 – weekly, at least. (Bear in mind a book takes me a couple of hours if I’m concentrating, so this probably isn’t quite as drastic as it seems. But still.) It gave me many things. Partly, it gave me an obsession with what I’d now call the queer as a space within which to consider love and sex without the overwhelming burden of my own inadequacy. Partly it reassured me that love is real, and happens, and sometimes it doesn’t go right, or there isn’t a happy ending, and that’s OK, and doesn’t mean it wasn’t worth anything. Partly it suggested to me that love happens even to people who perceive themselves as frighteningly inadequate, and these perceptions, however overwhelming, might not be the whole truth. Partly it gave me vicarious experience, a place to put my own desperate and unfulfilled longings. Partly it reinscribed the fact that verbality and passion were neither mutually exclusive nor wholeheartedly iniquitous, and neither rendered one unloveable (although it took me 26 years for that one to finally sink in.) Partly it set me off on the trail of queer studies and sexuality analysis and all the rest of the stuff I bang on about now. Partly it did a hell of a lot of other things too. It didn’t save me, but it sure as hell shaped me. Fry’s Making History is pretty awesome too, but Moab’s always gonna cut it, really.

 

3) Francis Spufford – The Child Books Built

 

You wouldn’t know it, and neither did Francis until we met several years after he wrote it, but this *is* a book about me. (Me and many other reading children on the planet, but y’know, detail.) Mum gave me a copy on my 21^st, after I spent an hour in Waterstones reading the introduction over and over going ‘Yes! YES!’ under my breath because I’d never read anything that expressed so perfectly what books do for me, and always have done. It was, to use its own words, a ‘particular book that dropped into my mind like a seed crystal’ and ‘suddenly a thousand crystals of perception of my own formed, the original insight…ordering whole arrays of discoveries…into winking accuracy.’ There’s plenty about books ‘becom[ing] part of the process of our self-understanding’ that spoke to and echoed and articulated my own experience, but really, the important bit was this:

 

‘When I read stories obsessively…I was (am) striking a kind of deal that allowed(s) me to turn away. Sometime in childhood I made a bargain that limited, so I thought, the power over me that real experience had, the real experience that comes to us in act and incident and through the proximate, continuous existence of those we love. All right, I said, I’ll let a quantity of *that* stream over me, if I can have a balancing portion of *this*, the other kind of experience, which is controlled, and repeatable, and comes off the page. […] Twenty-five years have gone by since then. My life has changed, and so has the content of my reading. But the bargain holds. Still, when I reach for a book, I am reaching for an equilibrium. I am reading to banish pity, and brittle bones. I am reading to evade guilt, and avoid consequences, and to limit time’s hold on me…’. [Esp in terms of my retrospective health and psychological experiences – I was reading this pre-ana and pre-much of my relationship experience – it’s startling how accurate it is. Maybe that’s why we got on so well, Francis was practically my daddy the years around my time at UCL. I still secretly want to marry him a bit. A bit? What am I talking about? I want to marry him full stop. That bit about the avoidance of consequences is just…it.  I’m so painfully aware of emotional consequences in the real world all the time, trying to balance them, predict them, explain them to others and occasionally to myself – and altho many of the tools I use to do this come from books, it’s not what books, and particularly novels, give me. They give me somewhere I don’t have to. And a career built on exploring precisely how and why they work has maybe altered this, but never taken it away. Also, rereading Child to write this, it’s amazing how similar our means of self-expression are. I should link him to my blog. Bless him.]

 

4) Tom Stoppard - The Real Thing

 

I first saw this just as I was recovering from ME, and though I laughed a lot, I remember thinking ‘yes’, without even having the experience then to know how true some of it was. I was a virgin. I’d been in love once, with someone that fucked me up quite fundamentally, and never questioned that they were right because love wasn’t something I’d ever deserve. But watching, I learnt to yearn again, something I’d blocked out during illness for complex reasons I’ll explain in person if I trust you enough or you’re ever interested. But watching it again now, I’m struck by how perfectly it puts and explores some of my concepts and contradictions about love. The first scenes, setting up the plot, are funny and not much else. But as it comes together and explodes, the last four scenes are (I think) actually among the most moving discussions of love and closeness and what they mean I can think of. Sample quotations (because I carry it around with me, and I can):

 

‘It’s to do with knowing, and being known. [I could stop there. That’s it. That’s love for me. Knowledge and understanding and being wanted and valued for it. I have tears in my eyes now, just writing this, even though it feels like a vindication and a triumph as well as the ultimate loss and desire for me. Anyway.] It’s what lovers trust each other with. Knowledge of each other, not of the flesh, but through the flesh. [And this view of sex, as about knowledge and trust, even tho I don’t connect them exclusively to romance as Henry does, is what I’ve always wanted my sex life to be about and striven to protect, and that’s only increased with experience.] The real him, the real her, in extremis, the mask slipped from the face. Every other version of oneself is on offer to the public. We share our vivacity, grief, anger, joy…we hand it out to anybody…what’s left?...A sort of knowledge. Personal, final, uncompromised. Knowing, being known….knowledge is something else, the undealt card, and whilst it’s held it makes you free-and-easy and nice to know, and when it’s gone, everything is pain. Every single thing….’ [Now Henry’s talking about sexual fidelity here, and for me it’s wider than that, it’s the loss of love not specifically exclusive sexual rights that does that, but still. YES.]

 

‘I have to choose who I hurt, and I choose you, because I’m yours.’

 

‘You have to find a part of yourself where I’m not important, or you won’t be worth loving.’ [Henry refutes this later on, but it’s a complicated dialogue and won’t make any sense out of context. For me the part of myself has always been work. When I lost that…yeah, I found other stuff, but I think that was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. And we all know my history.]

 

‘I don’t want anyone else but sometimes, surprisingly, there’s someone, not the prettiest or the most available, but you know that in another life it would be him. Or her, don’t you find? A small quickening. The room responds slightly to being entered. Like a raised blind. Nothing intended, and a long way from doing anything, but you catch a glint of being some else’s possibility, and it’s a sort of politeness to show you haven’t missed it, so you push it, a little, well within safety, but there’s that sense of a promise almost being made…’ [Again, yes.]

Oh God, I just want to quote this whole play now. I won’t. Watch me moving on…

 

5) Marya Hornbacher – Wasted.

 

If you ever want to get inside what having any kind of eating disorder is actually like or about, read this already. Seriously. I say this to everyone. There are a vast array of memoirs out there, I’ve read a substantial number of them, and the vast majority of them don’t even come close to either explaining or conveying what the raw, immediate, constant, painful, ugly reality of living like that is like. The desperate strength that comes from starvation as self-realisation. Self-denial as the source of control over an unacceptable and utterly unworthy self. Wasted does, with an analytical intelligence that’s breathtaking. The last section, as she finally settles into anorexia, drops to 50 pounds and is hospitalised for what everyone thinks is the final time – I lived that. Nobody else has ever come close to its visceral reality. Wasted does. Wasted is the book I’d never have had the strength to write. Wasted is where I live from. Madness, her book about living with bipolar I, is also incredibly vivid and painful and moving and defiant, but in terms of my own lived psychological experience, it’s Wasted every time. Read it. Now. Most of the rest of these are personal, just about *my* head and the idiosyncratic places it’s been, but Wasted (and Hunger Strike) are the heads of every other woman who’s ever looked at food and thought ‘I can’t eat’. Wasted is the logical extreme of a world where 90% of general-interest magazines and papers carry diet articles and where far too many of us live in terror of what giving in to hunger could do.

 

            6) Susie Orbach - Hunger Strike

 

This explains in psycho-cultural analytical terms the visceral reality that Wasted conveys. It’s brilliant. Reading it was the catalyst for my finally putting my anorexia to bed, psychologically speaking, making it a thing I understood and spoke from rather than a feared and mystical enemy. It articulated both the depth of my unhappiness and perceived unacceptability and, crucially, that it was common, wrong in a wider sense and above all *not my fault*. ‘Anorexia is an attempted solution to being in a world from which at the most profound level one feels excluded, and into which one feels deeply unentitled to enter.’ YES. EXACTLY. In a single sentence she nails mercilessly to the wall my continuous experience of myself, that which I still struggle with conveying to people who simply see the energy and the passion and the drive, and proceeds to dissect it in terms which occasionally bear such resemblance to the dynamics of my family and/or sociocultural experience it’s actually painful. Chapter 5 just makes me want to weep and set fire to things simultaneously. ‘The anorectic woman has absorbed from early on, but in quadraphonic sound, the very same message that all girls take in…She has understood that she must shape her life in the image of others, She must be concerned with, and attend to the needs of, others…somewhere she has understood the danger and impossibility of being for herself. Her crime has been that she has felt needy and initiating…’ YES. Orbach takes these insights, things that I’d always felt were unique to me and a product of the very wrongness that she describes, and not only explains them in psychocultural terms but offers a therapeutic model for their treatment, one which stands in profound contradistinction to my own (vaguely horrifying) experiences of the deeply inadequate contemporary treatment system.. I have many heroines, but she’s somewhere near the top.

 

            7) John Wilmot Earl of Rochester – poems, plays, letters

 

Rochester is perhaps the first and almost the greatest love of my life. I’ve been utterly obsessed since I first came across him as a character in a novel at the age of 12 and dug some (pornographic) poetry out of a second-hand bookshop (they didn’t have the net back then.) He writes about sex and society and the body and God and frustration and love and the struggle for identity and expression. He writes fantastic politically-relevant porn. He writes poems about dildos. If you want a biography, read Germaine Greer’s little one – most of the rest take unauthenticated c18th documents on trust as reliable sources when there are any number of good reasons not to do so and when the c18th had a particular political interest in the public myth of Rake Rochester. Yes, he probly fucked around, but not with the casual and thoughtless abandon of legend: what comes through in his work and his letters are the depths of his passions, his ultimately frustrated idealism, his agonising guilt and unhappiness, his constant questioning, his frantic struggles to come to terms with his conflicted self and the world in which he had to live, with both his own human vulnerability and others’ vulnerability to him, with the tension between emotional masochism and emotional sadism, his crippling inadequacy, his articulation and defiance, his sense of being buffeted by uncontrollably powerful impulses and emotions, his unwanted empathy and the pain it caused. I love him. I think he was the first man I felt got me, for all he’s been dead 450 years(ish). I think he was bipolar: one day the paper will be written.

 

            8) Barbara Kingsolver – The Poisonwood Bible

 

It’s an odd one, this. I haven’t reread it for years, but to this day I remember thinking of myself as Ada(h) while I was psychotic, because her character expressed so perfectly both my sense of being irredeemably crippled by my own inadequacy and yet a sheer determination I both admired and wanted to emulate. And the sense of being trapped by my family, of who they needed me to be, of being doomed never to measure up but unable to absolve myself of the desire to do so and to punish myself for *not being that*. Plus it’s an utterly brilliant book about pain and damage and consequences and ideals and all the other problematic places I’m learning to live.

 

            9) John Ford – The Broken Heart; Thomas Heywood – A Woman Killed with Kindness; Middleton – Women Beware Women, The Changeling, The Maid’s Tragedy; William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure

 

You’d probably need to have quite a strong stomach for Renaissance drama if you’re going to attempt these, but they’re very much where my head is at professionally, or at least the right ballpark area for stuff that’s published and readily available. Look at the tensions between food and sex and the female body, its status as a nexus of cultural anxieties and a battleground for ideological control. Look at the constant power and terror attached to the potential changeability and generative potential of the female body; look at cultural institutions and their (failing?) attempts to regulate or suppress it. Look at female desire and will and the means by which they are expressed. I <3 my work.

 

            10) Asar Nafisi – Reading Lolita in Tehran

 

This expresses very well my possibly idealistic but fundamental belief that books = ideas – potential for change and growth and thought and resistance. To quote Francis again, a friend to whom he mentioned writing about the ‘dangers of childhood reading’ snapped back ‘oh goodness yes, before you know it they’ll be thinking for themselves.’ And that’s true, and fundamental to why I think books matter – they touch people, and change people, and teach them to question, and here, in Tehran, they enabled a group of women placed under ever-increasing restriction to create and explore independent worlds of freedom and self-constructed identity. It’s why I want to do this academia, teaching lark. Books are in some ways the ultimate expression of individuality and defiance – shaping a story shapes the world – and look, you can even read them in the bath.

 

            11) Angela Carter – Burning Your Boats (collected short stories)

 

I worship Carter. She takes ideas and she takes stories and traditions and assumptions and turns them inside out, using language so powerful and unexpected she wrongfoots even the reader’s comfortable assumptions of distance. They’re about sex and gender and power and story, but so much else as well. I want to be her when I grow up, and I’ve only got thirteen years until I reach the age she was when she died.

 

            12) Pat Califia – Macho Sluts

 

Yes, possibly MS isn’t my favourite Califia porn anymore (Boy in the Middle, in case anybody wonders), but almost, and it has the infinite benefit of containing The Calyx of Isis, which is possibly one of my favourite short stories ever, and at the root of a lot of my contemporary BDSM porn work. Some of the acts – a lot of the acts – it depicts aren’t even my bag, sexually speaking, but the power dynamics and erotic charge it conveys, not to mention its unashamed celebration of the taboo and the threatening (to mainstream heteronormativity, anyway), plus its gleeful creation of a fantasy utopia not so very far from the real world, make it a breathtaking and intensely free space for my own sexuality, even in terms of submission, to run free. And it’s a world of women, women with power and need and desire and the rights and space to exercise it and negotiate simply on the grounds of individual autonomy rather than adherence to cultural norms, and widely differing personalities and personas all of which have space to exist and exercise power and choice and will. And it gets inside headspaces I recognise, from a distance if not quite close up, spaces of self-assertion and abnegation. In another Califia book, Speaking Sex to Power I think, he quotes a friend of his, who says ‘I do this because I am a loving person. I love and respect the people I play with. And that includes being able to embrace the parts of them that are supposed to be unloveable.’ (In fact, Speaking Sex to Power should probably be on the list itself, simply for moments like that.) And Isis in particular conveys that in a very visceral, up-close-and-personal way. Some of the women can’t quite be taken seriously, some mock themselves, but their love and need for each other and the implicit assertion that these aspects, their human fallibility, their adherence to sometimes faulty emotional logics, the desire for pain or punishment or to hurt, can be given space to exist and to be loved simply on the basis of individual reality is incredibly powerful. I only hope the world outside S&M with its gender assumptions and suppressed fears can begin to measure up. Yes, my own desires aren’t Roxanne’s, and certainly aren’t any of the tops’. But Califia tells me in no uncertain terms that I have no need to be ashamed of them, and that’s precious. Because it means I have no need to be ashamed of myself.