Inferno by Catherine Cho

I’ll be honest, I first came across Catherine Cho while looking for literary agents to send my novel to. That hasn’t come to anything, but it did mean that I came across her memoir Inferno – and I was so intrigued that I bought it, and I read it within a couple days of it arriving. (NB I ought it directly from Bloomsbury, which seemed like a good way to support an independent bookshop at this time.)

Inferno is one of those zeitgeisty books – a memoir of extraordinary things happening to ordinary people. And I love them. Cho’s is about post-partum psychosis – not an easy topic, but Cho writes about it so stunningly.

According to Korean tradition, after a baby is born, mother and baby do not leave the house for the first twenty-one days. There are long cords of peppers and charcoal hung in the doorway to ward away guests and evil spirits. At the end of the twenty-one days, a prayer is given over white rice cakes. After 100 days, there is a large celebration, a celebration of survival, with pyramids of fruit and lengths of thread for long life.

[…]

My son was two months old when we embarked from London on an extended trip across the US. I had come up with a plan to use our shared parental leave to do a cross-country tour of family and friends and introduce them to our son. I didn’t see why we had to pay attention to Korean traditions – or superstitions, as I thought of them. As Korean Americans born and raised in the US, my husband and I had never paid much attention to the rules, and I had always thought our families didn’t either. Except that suddenly, with the birth of a baby, the rules seemed to matter.

We had avoided any evil spirits from California to Virginia, but perhaps we’d just been running away from them, because they found us at last at my in-laws’ house in New Jersey. My son was eight days shy of his 100-day celebration when I started to see devils in his eyes.

That’s the opening of Inferno – minus a paragraph I cut for space – and I think you’ll agree it’s pretty striking. But one of the many great things about this memoir is that it isn’t sensationalist. If you’ve ever come across post-partum psychosis, it’s probably from the shrieking headlines of tabloids. Or potentially from EastEnders. Cho’s experience was every bit as shocking as those scare stories – but she contextualises it in the reality of life before this illness struck her and her family.

Structurally, Inferno moves between two periods. The days that she spent involuntarily sectioned – and the life that led to that point. In between is woven folklore and history from Korea, moving elegantly from beliefs that have been passed through many generations to the reality of Cho’s life, finding unexpected connections or juxtapositions. It means that the hours where psychosis first hit are kept until towards the end of the book – by the time we read her description of the initial experience and the days she spent in hospital afterwards, we know Cho and her history with a sort of intimacy. It means that, when we read about Cho seeing devil eyes in her son Cato’s eyes, it is not simply the shock of a psychotic episode – it is the shock of seeing a friend at her darkest moment.

Cho grew up in Kentucky, in a house that was oddly silent. Her father required silence, and had a section of the house to himself for this purpose. Cho describes his moments of anger, and the way she and her brother Teddy tried to manage them. If Inferno was nothing but the description of growing up, it would be a vivid and faintly unsettling memoir – Cho writes with an intense honesty about all the people in her life, to the extent that I sometimes wondered what it was like to sit around the table at Thanksgiving now. She and Teddy were ‘foxhole buddies’ – in it together.

Her first significant escape from the world she grew up in is to Hong Kong – spontaneously following Drew (I assume a pseudonym?). She and he had started dating not long before, and Cho was attracted because he ‘represented possibility. A dare against what was certain’. In one of the most shocking openings to a section, later in the book, Cho is naked on a Hong Kong balcony – having been forced there by Drew, who has been consistently, horrifyingly violent to her. She is living in a foreign country with an abusive partner, unsupported by his mother – who knows what he is like but insists he can change, and wants Cho to stay. It’s hard to read, and I think it’s included to show the difficult periods of Cho’s life – that left their residue of uncertainty, fear and darkness that threatened to reappear in moments of intense stress.

If Cho writes astonishingly about violence and fear, she is equally good at the arguably more difficult: writing about falling in love. Her descriptions of meeting James, and her understandable reluctance to follow another man across the world when he invites her to move to London, are beguiling and like a lungful of fresh air in contrast to the other oppressive relationships she has withstood. She is able to do that rare thing for anyone: show you why the person they love is so lovable.

I’m at risk of rewriting the whole memoir, so I won’t say more about these sections – except that Cho recreates brilliantly the nuance of each relationship she has – with relatives, in-laws, James. With the prospective baby, when she is pregnant.

And when she gets to the day her psychosis hit, her writing is truly extraordinary. She and James have been staying with his parents – talkative, anxious, kind but interfering parents. Cho needs to escape. They go to stay in a nearby hotel. And Cho can’t stop seeing devils eyes when she looks at her son Cato.

As she relates that night, and the days in an emergency ward, Cho manages to give an astonishingly vivid account of psychosis. That sounds like a paradox, and perhaps it is – but she manages to recreate the distorted logic of the time in such a way that we understand how she perceived the world – but also how those around her must have perceived the experience. The horror of her psychosis isn’t that she is uncertain about reality – it is the certainty she has. That she is in Hell. That she needs to restart the simulation. That the cameras are watching. That the nurses outside are really her brother. I recommend reading the excerpt published in the Guardian, which touches on various parts of this.

I haven’t talked much about the parallel narrative – of life while sectioned, not knowing how she is able to secure release, not knowing if she is back to normal yet or how she would know if she were. Not thinking much about Cato, and being numbed to any reflections about that. These sections are a compelling insight to the American heath system – but they are necessarily less vivid. Cho’s time there was slow and uncertain. These pages counterbalance the dimensions she gives to her life history and to the immediacy and drama of her illness – because they are the gradual re-emergence to life.

I think Cho could write an engaging and beautiful memoir about anything at all, having read Inferno. The fact that she has undergone all she has lived gives her rich material – but few people would be able to create the tapestry she does of experience, reflection, philosophy, and the weaving in of American and Korean cultures. However horribly unlucky Cho was to have post-partum psychosis, and the horrendous depression that followed, I ended up thinking that other sufferers of this mental illness had one sliver of luck in the hand they have been dealt: to have someone as eloquent, wise and thoughtful as Cho as some kind of spokesperson.