Writerland is a newsletter from The Delacorte Review whose mission is to help writers tell the stories they need to tell.
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The memoir did not begin with Covid, but the past two-and-a-half years have felt like a time when people needed to find a way to tell the stories of what was happening to them.
This makes perfect sense; writing is what so many of us do to impose some order on the universe. At the Review we’ve been seeing a lot of memoirs submitted, and not necessarily about life as shaped, twisted and lived with the virus. Rather, it’s as if the pandemic – the fear, the isolation, the endless sense of dread and helplessness – has been the catalyst for all sorts of stories aimed at trying to make sense of events that feel beyond control.
Some are quite powerful. But others come up short, and not necessarily because the writer lacked the talent or skill. The ones that don’t quite work miss for several reasons: writers who avoid confronting themselves, either in how they acted, or when life happened in cruel and unforeseen ways, how they reacted; writers who did not see their stories beyond the specifics of their own experiences, and so never found what was universal in what they had lived; and writers whose curiosity never extended beyond themselves.
It’s that final point that feels especially pertinent now, given that pretty much everyone in the world has been confronted with the threat of Covid-19 and has had to come to terms not only with their own vulnerability but also that of everyone around them – both known and strangers.
Several years ago we published a remarkable memoir, To The Left of Normal, by Emily Dixon, a wonderful British writer. It is the story of living with Obsessive Compulsive Behavior, and as Emily writes, “The biggest lie about OCD is that it’s funny, though it is, at times.”
Emily was diagnosed with OCD when she was a teenager and has been living with its presence ever since. Meaning, she had a story to tell. But it’s how she chose to tell it that made it all more important and enduring.
Emily told her story by telling alongside another - the story of Alex.
She begins: “Alex and I have OCD. We’re both twenty-four; he obsesses over the number three, and I obsess over the number four. His OCD is hand sanitizer, a rollercoaster, and a lifetime of going through the motions. Mine is Facebook and eyelashes and asking questions I’d give anything not to ask.
“‘It’s something I’ll have to deal with for the rest of my life,’” says Alex. I underline this in my notebook.”
Emily first spoke with Alex over Facebook and her curiosity about his story is not simply a way to juxtapose her story with another. She is interested in what Alex has lived and suffered. The more she learns about him the more she admires him.
“Alex is kinder and braver than I am,” she writes. “I find it hard to be grateful for surviving for so long, so many times. Some days I’m so angry I feel it in the speed of my heartbeat: at the kids who bullied me in school, at the interminable waiting lists for therapy, at the friends who didn’t understand or never thought to ask. And at myself, most of all, for putting that look on my parents’ faces, over and over again. Describing that look is hard and hurts too much. It hurts more to imagine how it feels.”
She does not shy from describing what OCD can be and feel like – and not the OCD too many of us associate with our own lapses into obsessiveness.
She writes, “My friends and family wince when I pull out my lashes, telling me it looks disgusting, or it creeps them out, or my eyes look red and sore. It’s not out of malice — they know I want to stop, and so they try to make me. But deploying shame against obsessive-compulsive disorder is like spraying gasoline to quench a fire. I am ashamed with every eyelash I remove. I’ve been ashamed for longer than my memory can recount. The shame only incites me to hurt myself more.”
Emily grew up in South Shields, a town in the north of England that she has written memorably about. OCD followed her south to university at Oxford. “I took a year out of university and spent it imploding. When I returned, I graduated thanks to two factors. The first was a medication and therapy combination that finally, impossibly, seemed to work. The second, the ceaseless tenacity of my mam, who took a four-hour train to Oxford every weekend just to make sure I was eating and leaving my bedroom. Shakily, I stepped onto an upward trajectory, one I still tentatively ascend today.
“Now, I have mostly good days, with some bad ones peppered in between. At the very least, I can feed myself and leave my house, though my mam’s now an entire ocean away.”
Even as she takes readers ever deeper into her own story, she never loses sight of Alex. “Alex appears relaxed and self-assured, but as he speaks, he picks frantically at his right thumb with his forefinger. I turn to record it in my notebook and notice I am twisting my ribbon bookmark around my own right forefinger, so tightly that my fingertip is milk-white from lack of circulation. We both, it turns out, habitually contort our fingers without realizing. And I can’t sit down to a paper tablecloth or see a paper label on a water bottle without shredding it like a hamster. We’re not on the brink anymore, but neither of us is calm.”
She continues: “I ask Alex the same question several times before I realize I’m prodding for an answer I’m not going to get. I want him to tell me it hurts him, too, to hear people use ‘OCD’ as a stand-in for ‘meticulous.’ He never does. ‘I know that they don’t mean offense,’ he says. ‘It’s just ignorance.’”
Emily’s story, and Alex’s, is about a particular disorder. But in her telling it is about much more – to be young and find yourself battered by a mind that gives you no rest, a life not limited to those with OCD. “But still I wonder, if mental illness wasn’t so widely perceived as a joke, whether I would have taken so long to tell my parents I was faltering,” she writes. “Whether it would have been quite so easy for the kids at Alex’s school or mine to take the piss out of us. Or whether, after I told a doctor that I couldn’t survive in this mind any longer, he would have sent me away with a generic antidepressant prescription and a flippant comment about how long the waiting lists for therapy were. I saw him again the same week, in the hospital, after swallowing every pill he had prescribed for me.
“The paramedics who put me in an ambulance left a plastic thermometer cap in my university bedroom. I kept it there for weeks. Whenever the obsessive thoughts threatened to overwhelm me again, I touched it, and tried to remind myself that this was an illness. That medical professionals had been here, in my room. That the doctors and the medication were the truth, and the clamoring in my head was not. To me, one of the cruelest tricks of mental illness is its ability to convince the sufferer that it isn’t there at all.”
Alex and Emily are living their lives. Emily writes, and that is a gift: “Neither Alex or I can declare with any certainty that we’ll ever know a life without OCD. But for now, we are alive. For now, that is enough.”
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We wanted to share with you the results of the poll at the end of last week’s newsletter about reading preferences - specifically, whether people preferred the kinds of ambitious and often long works of narrative nonfiction in text, audio, or both.
Thirty-nine percent said they preferred to read stories
And while no one said they only wanted to listen to stories, fifty-seven percent said they liked to have a choice.
We hear you - literally…and figuratively
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Nothing good ever came from writers punishing themselves. We know writing is hard. We’re here to show that it doesn’t have to be torture. Writerland, The Delacorte Review Newsletter comes out every other week. Subscribe to get full access to the newsletter and website. Never miss an update.
I think about people with OCD or people on the spectrum that long ago would've been dismissed as weird or stupid or less than. How many people must've grappled privately with issues that were overlooked or not understood. Even mental health issues, which affects so many people -- probably everyone, really -- is only very recently starting to shed its stigma. I'm glad writers like Emily are expressing themselves and giving everyone an insight into what it's like to have OCD. I'm glad there are more spaces for that. Thanks for sharing, Michael.
Does she name the medication in the memoir? I find it personally annoying when writers talk about meds but don’t name them. Why? Are they afraid of being sued? Are they ashamed? Why not share these pertinent details that may help someone else with the same problem?