2020s

White Spines by Nicholas Royle

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About a minute after reading Susan’s review of White Spines by Nicholas Royle, I had ordered my copy – directly from the publisher Salt, which perhaps explains why it came with a surprise author signature on the title page.

It is exactly the sort of book I like: a book about reading, about buying books, and a love for literature that is more idiosyncratic than a slavish devotion to Lists of Great Works. The ‘white spines’ of the title are those that Picador used from the 1970s to the 1990s. If I’m honest, they’re exactly the sort of books my eye flashes past in a charity shop. It’s an era of literature that I know very little about and, except for a few stand-out names, I am pretty poorly read for those decades.

Royle does love some of the writers he buys from this period, but he buys books without necessarily ever anticipating reading them. He is a completist: he wants all of the titles. He wants the anomalies, from when some of the books had black or patterned spines. He wants a ‘shadow collection’, where he duplicates books already on his shelves of white spines. And his buying goes in tangents – an admiration for a cover artist will lead to him buying everything he can with the same artist on the cover, for instance. Almost anything can form the basis of a collection, and you get the sense of Royle’s – surely enormous? – house being a melting pot of different fascinations, grouped in overlapping collections.

Despite not sharing Royle’s particular tastes, and seldom buying books unless I have at least vague intentions of reading them, I loved reading about his bookish adventures. Next to going on a book buying spree, I enjoy experiencing them vicariously – and a lot of White Spines is about his book shopping. Sometimes far afield, sometimes in bookshops or charity shops that are regular haunts. He seldom comes away empty handed, and manages to convey both the excitement and the curiosity of the perennial haunted of bookshops. Here’s a trip to The Bookshop Experience in Southend… which I just kept writing out, because I enjoyed the journey we go on as he scans across the shelves.

As soon as I enter the Bookshop Experience, I know I’m in luck. I’m immediately taking the books off shelves. Paul Bowles – two Abacus collections, A Thousand Days for Mokhtar and Call at Corazon, in the same series, with excellent photographic covers, as two titles I already have. Calvino’s The Literature Machine, in the Brothers Quai (sic) series of covers from Picador (a separate series is credited to the Brothers Quay). And then – increasing heartbeat – I spot an early Sceptre paperback of Siri Hustvedt’s first novel, The Blindfold.

I love The Blindfold. My edition is later and features a woman’s midriff in a crop top that has always felt wrong to me. I like this earlier, uncredited cover with its blindfold, its disembodied eyes, Chrysler Building and 109th Street sign. Next, a King Penguin edition of BS Johnson’s best-known novel, Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry, that, as with The Blindfold, I hadn’t even known existed. Finally, I can’t quite believe it, but, yes, there, under K, a copy of the white-spined Picador edition of Kafka’s The Trial, which I have only seen once before, in the home of writers David Gaffney and Sarah-Clare Conlon.

When I saw it at the Gaffney-Conlon residence, I was tempted to become a book thief. The Trial exists in many editions, from different publishers, with different covers. This Picador cover, by Steven Singer, has the distinction of having previously been, to me at least, invisible. Normally, if there’s a Picador I know I want, I don’t order it, as previously discussed. In the case of The Trial, however, I weakened. Having seen it in the wild, having even handled it, I couldn’t resist and did go online and did order, off eBay, what appeared to be the same edition. When it arrived it was a Picador Classics edition. The same translation, by Douglas Scott and Chris Waller, but in the black spine of Picador Classics, with a cover illustration by Peter Till. The search for the white-spined edition would continue, but my lesson learnt, only in the real world.

If this sort of thing is your jam, then this is the book for you.

There is a lot else of interest here, including Royle’s own writing career and his experience of sending stories to small magazines, his interviews with people connected to Picador and other publishing ventures, and an entertaining tangent into authors with the same names. He has reason to find this interesting: there is another Nicholas Royle, and they even both appeared in a collection I read about writing. The other Royle wrote a novel called Quilt that I found impenetrable and a book called The Uncanny that was rather too self-indulgent to be useful as the critical text I was hoping it would be for my DPhil. Safe to say, I prefer this Nicholas Royle.

Personally, I seldom care what edition a book is, and the only books I’ll get simply for the series they’re in are Persephone Books and Slightly Foxed Editions. But Royle still conveys much of what most of us will recognise in ourselves: someone who is not simply an occasional reader, but someone for whom books mean an enormous amount. We love reading them, but we also love being around them, choosing them, collecting them, and hunting them down. Royle is a witty, friendly writer, and it was a delight to go on this voyage with him.

The Painful Truth by Monty Lyman

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As I probably said when I wrote about The Remarkable Life of the Skin, I would probably never read popular science if it weren’t written by Oliver Sacks – or by one of my friends. And it would be my loss, because if I didn’t read my friend Monty’s books then I’d have missed out on a lot – and I found The Painful Truth even more fascinating and engaging than his previous book.

As the subtitle says, this is about ‘the new science of why we hurt and how we can heal’ – but it’s also how everything we think we know about pain is wrong. Or, rather, everything I thought I knew; I shan’t tar all of you with the same brush of my colossal ignorance when it comes to science. I’d also blithely assumed pain was largely connected with nerve and tissue damage. Of course, I knew other factors could be at play – pain always hurts more when you don’t know what’s wrong and you’re really anxious – but I hadn’t realised quite how big a role expectation and comprehension play in how much pain we feel. (While being ‘all in your mind’ doesn’t, of course, make pain any less real.)

Vision is not a measure of light and colour: it is designed to make meaningful sense of objects in the outside world. Pain is very similar: it is not a measure of damage or danger but is instead the brain’s unconscious opinion on whether our body is damaged or at risk.

Lyman (it’s easier for me to write objectively about this book if I imagine the author as Lyman rather than Monty!) doesn’t stop at this rather profound re-education on what pain is, of course. The Painful Truth often returns to this fact, and to the idea that pain is there to help not hinder us, and spreads outwards from this starting point. It is so chockful of extremely interesting experiments and facts (for instance – an experiment where strong opioid pain relief was given, but only had significant effect when the patients were aware it was being given; when they were told it hadn’t yet started or had stopped, the pain relief didn’t work). Lyman must have done an astonishing amount of research, and this is the anecdote I keep telling people, about hypnosis:

Highly hypnotisable people are able to respond to questions by ‘automatic writing’, where one hand writes answers to questions without the subject’s awareness. In 1973, the renowned Stanford psychologist Ernest Hilgard tested this out on a young woman – le5t’s call her Lisa – by first asking her to rest her hand in ice-cold water. Unsurprisingly, she found this intensely painful. Lisa was then induced into a hypnotic state, and again her hand was placed into the ice water. This time she reported feeling no pain whatsoever, but while she was verbally describing how relaxed she felt, her own hand continued to automatically write, reporting that she was feeling agonising pain – the same pain she felt when she was not hypnotised.

Yes, I find this rather creepy. But also completely enthralling, and helping shift everything I thought I knew about pain. Elsewhere, Lyman is really interesting on the placebo effect. I think, colloquially, this perhaps dismisses things that are ‘only the placebo effect’ – whereas when it comes to pain, this could be a very powerful solution. And how does it work? I shan’t summarise a whole chapter into a paragraph, but I did find this quote really interesting:

This isn’t the placebo – an inert substance – doing the work; let’s give our brains the credit. It is our belief in the treatment that opens up the brain’s drug cabinet. The active ingredient is expectation. This is neatly seen in the hierarchy of fakery; not all placebos are created equal. Saline injections tend to have a greater pain-relieving effect than sugar pills, and it wouldn’t be surprising if fake surgery is significantly better than both of these. An expensive placebo is more effective than a cheap none. The more dramatic the intervention, the more meaning the patient attributes to the treatment.

It reminded me of a book I read about why people believe conspiracy theories – and it is partly because we can’t cope with the disparity between enormous effect and trivial cause. Nobody has conspiracy theories about assassinations that just missed, but people find it hard to think that an invent that changed the world could be caused by one person with a gun. In sort of the same way, if I’m understanding it properly, our brain expects big results from big actions. And since the brain is the one determining our level of pain, it can answer its own expectations.

This is only a taste of the wide variety of topics covered, each covering a range of Lyman’s own experiences, notable experiments, and a little bit of technical info (which I didn’t always fully understand, but it is far from overwhelming in the book). Among other things, Lyman writes about people who don’t experience pain at all, pain and PTSD, pain after amputation, and the ordeal faced by patients with chronic pain – particularly chronic pain where there doesn’t seem to be any diagnosable cause. What makes Lyman’s writing appeal to me so much is the same thing I love about Oliver Sacks’ books: the compassion. It does help that I know him and know what a lovely guy he is, but I think it would come across anyway. The people he writes about aren’t simply scientific curios, or even patients. They are people with complex lives who are often suffering deeply, or bewildered by the tests they have undergo, or frustrated by no solution being in sight. The only times Lyman is clearly frustrated himself is when writing about medical professionals who don’t have compassion, won’t try to find solutions, or underestimate the consequences of pain.

I was initially wary of telling friends with chronic pain that I was reading a book about pain. I am sure people who suffer in this way are sick of being recommended remedies, usually from people with far less expertise than them. But I think this book would be helpful. While Lyman is very keen to emphasise that The Painful Truth is not a self-help book, it does include some really useful things people who experience persistent pain can do – recognising that, though the responses he lists have a weight of research behind them, the medical profession is often very behind in treatment recommendations. I’ve experienced difficult-to-treat pain over two periods – intense and constant tension headaches one year, and severe RSI over several extended iterations – and I know how exhausting it is to keep going back for diagnosis or treatment when neither seem forthcoming – and that was only over short-term periods. I really hope a book like The Painful Truth can offer some help, even if it isn’t a self-help book. At the very least, Lyman recognises the severity of persistent pain and the impact it has on millions of people.

But whatever your experience with pain is or isn’t, The Painful Truth is an engrossing, well-written, and wide-ranging book. Even if you’d never normally pick up popular science, I think almost anybody would get a lot out of this. It’s always a relief when a friend’s book is genuinely excellent, but even better when they’re as brilliant as this book is. And Monty has my rapturous Instagram messages to prove that I’m saying the same thing in public and private!

Ghosted by Jenn Ashworth

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Novels about missing people seem to be a genre in themselves. So many crime novels that I read about (and never read) are about missing children or missing women – massive turn-offs for me, partly because I’ve heard that they tend towards the gruesome, but also because I am fully Team Staunch Book Prize. Which is one of the reasons why I was keen to read Ghosted by Jenn Ashworth (2021 – a new novel!!) – because here it is the man who goes missing. Also it’s a novel by Jenn Ashworth, and I always want to read those.

The narrator is Laurie, a cleaner at a university who has been married to Mark for some time – they initially met at a wedding, where a psychic called Joyce thought they were already a couple. The novel opens with an ordinary scene of the two waking up together – talking about a broken curtain, about staying up too late. Unspokenly considering morning sex, and unspokenly deciding against. Getting up to make a cup of tea.

It’s hard to know how other couples live their lives, but all of this had become utterly ordinary for us. I told the police as much, later. I left for work while he was still in the shower. I don’t know what he was wearing that day. No, he hadn;t seemed unusual in any way that morning. 

The officers – they sent two, a man and a woman who both refused a hot drink and made notes on a tablet instead of in a notebook – seemed frustrated by the fact that no matter how they phrased their questions I had nothing to add – no suspicious or out-of-the-ordinary behaviour on his part – to my account. I didn’t tell them I was pissed off with him, but I am telling you now.

One of the unsettling things about the novel is that we don’t know who’s the ‘you’ that Laurie is speaking to, or even when the ‘now’ is. Mark might not have displayed any out-of-the-ordinary behaviour, but Laurie certainly does. Her emotional reaction to Mark disappearing is subdued. She is speaking directly to us, but holding back from any outburst or breakdown. She doesn’t tell people that Mark has gone missing – whenever his mother Mavis phones, she says he’s in the shower or otherwise unavailable. It’s several weeks before Laurie even contacts the police.

This is nothing as conventional as the unreliable narrator – except inasmuch as every narrator is unreliable. Laurie isn’t really connected with her own thoughts on and responses to this seismic event. Ghosted reminded me often of My Phantom Husband by Marie Darrieussecq. Laurie doesn’t unravel in the same way as that wife-of-a-missing-husband, but there is the same eerie inability to conform to anticipated reactions. Laurie certainly isn’t ignoring Mark’s disappearance, but her thoughts about it always skirt around the conventional. Everything in this novel skirts around the conventional, in fact. There is no desperate hunt to find him – but rather a sort of dispassionate paranoia and anxiety.

I know now the reason I was so reluctant to tell her that Mark had left me was because I feared she would blame me for driving her adored son away. Whatever made idea was currently gripping him and sending him across the country, it would be me that had planted it in his mind. My responsibility, at least, to pluck it out before it could take root. My task, as his lover and wife, to make home a sanctuary and a paradise that he could not bear to leave. If he’d found another woman – someone better groomed, more sympathetic, more likely to store colanders in the correct cupboard – well, he couldn’t be blamed for that. And underneath all that, the fear: once Mavis had decided this was all her fault, she would leave me too.

Mark’s isn’t the only disappearance in the novel. A second plot is Laurie’s relationship with her father, whose mind is gradually disappearing – and also his cleaner-turned-helper Olena, who is closer with him than Laurie is. Ashworth shows the shifting and sad relationship between father and daughter with the same subtle complexity that she does everything, pieced together with memories of the past and anxieties about the future. Other threads are Laurie’s obsession with a young girl who was murdered years earlier, tracking down psychic Joyce, and some money that Olena might have stolen. All are wound together naturally and cleverly, never quite going in the way you expect.

And that’s the brilliance of Ashworth’s writing, I think. Her novels are often unsettling and odd, but every moment is plausible. As soon as it happens, it feels exactly right, even as she resists the natural next steps and anticipated reactions. Overall, Ghosted leans towards the ambiguous and uncertain, but in a way that makes any alternative pathway from her initial premise feel unnatural and stilted. It’s another excellent and consistently interesting success from one of the few still-publishing authors whose books I will always look out for.

The Butterfly Lampshade by Aimee Bender

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The Butterfly Lampshade by Aimee BenderMy dear friend Lorna got me The Butterfly Lampshade (2020) for my birthday last year, after the bookseller in Kramer Books, Washington DC, told her it was similar to our beloved Marilynne Robinson. Having finished it, I am not sure that is true – but the novel is nevertheless excellent, and I can sort of see where he/she was coming from…

The novel is about Francie – looking back on her childhood as someone in her late 20s. Her mother has had repeated psychotic episodes, and the last of these means she cannot care for Francie anymore. On that particular night, Francie is eight and has started staying with a babysitter as she prepares to travel to Los Angeles to stay with an aunt and uncle and their new child. In the midst of an episode, Francie’s mum has told her that there is a bug inside her.

But it turned out that my mother was right about the bug. She was several days too early, and mine had not been crawling, but there would end up being a bug in me after all, just a few days after she checked into the hospital, my fated bug, a butterfly I’d found at the babysitter’s apartment, floating like a red and gold leaf so prettily on the top of a tall glass of water. I did not have any other way to hold on to it, and I could not possibly leave it in the babysitter’s apartment, and the only contained handy was myself. Time was short. I drank it down because I had to.

This butterfly exactly matches the one on the titular lampshade – and this is the first of three instances of something emerging from its background. Though Francie never sees the moment at which the thing emerges from 2D to 3D, and nobody else ever sees the aftermath. There is the butterfly from the pattern of butterflies on a lampshade, the beetle from the picture of a beetle, and roses that have fallen out of a curtain patterned with roses. As the narrator looking back, Francie often lists these three events together as a sort of mantra – the lampshade, beetle, and roses are an iterative pattern long before we hear about the second and third events in detail. Initially, indeed, I thought I’d somehow missed these events being described. That’s just one of the ways that Bender’s narrative disconcerts the reader. She doesn’t give us all the information, or let us settle in one spot for too long.

In the present, Francie makes her living by buying objects at garage sales, cleaning them up, and selling them online. It sounds like one of those careers that people only have in sitcoms, but that sort of suits the uneasy relationship with reality that The Butterfly Lampshade has. The novel is not going to come out on either side of the ‘is this really happening?’ debate, when it comes to butterflies, beetles, and roses. It feels like that is somehow the least interesting question to ask. Instead, it asks questions like why does Francie fixate on it so much, or what does it mean about her relationship with her mother.

Francie is still in touch with her mother – mostly by phone, but sometimes in person. Her aunt and cousin have become more like mother and sister – just another way in which truth and fiction are intertwining entities. The same thing comes through in Bender’s writing, casually laden with metaphors and other imagery. I love this idea of ‘bumped around our sentences’ here:

It was awkward without my aunt there; we bumped around our sentences as if we’d just met, and when my mother asked again about the flight I told her every detail I could think of, hanging on to the tiny pieces of information like they were stepping-stones between us, which they were, including telling her my drink choice, and information about my seat companion, and how long I had waited for the bus (twenty minutes) while she listened with her large and hungry eyes.

For a novel with a fantastic premise, The Butterfly Lampshade is not really interested in plot. It is a slow-paced, thoughtful, and moving examination of family relationships and mental illness – as well as how memory does or doesn’t work, and how we form our own senses of identity.

In fact, the more I describe it, the more I can see what the bookseller was saying. While the writing style is nothing like Robinson’s, it suits similar reading moods – where you want something to read slowly and almost meditatively, to explore the depths and details of human relationships. It was a very good book – and I can sense that it would be even better a second time around.

Dear Reader by Cathy Rentzenbrink

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I will read any book about reading, as you might be aware if you’re a regular reader of Stuck in a Book. Some of them are among my all-time favourites, and some of them are a little more – if you will – by the book. But I’d heard wonderful things about Dear Reader by Cathy Rentzenbrink, published last year, given to me by my bro, and which I read on Christmas Day. It turned out to be the perfect Christmas book – and one of my favourite books about books that I’ve read for years.

As I lie there, surrounded by boxes, looking up at the half-filled shelves, at the books that have followed me from place to place, I find my answer. I will be my own doctor and prescribe the best medicine: a course of rereading. I will make piles of my most treasured books and read through them, taking comfort not only in each book itself but also in the reassuring knowledge that there are many more to come. Something shifts in my body. I feel better already, just at the thought of turning off my phone and spending my evenings curled up with a good book. This what I have always done. When the bite of real life is too brutal, I retreat into made-up worlds and tread well-worn paths. I don’t crave the new when I feel like this, but look for solace in the familiar. It is as though in re-encountering my most-loved fictional characters, I can also reconnect with my previous selves and come out feeling less fragmented. Reading built me and always has the power to put me back together again.

I didn’t mean to quote that much, but I couldn’t stop once I started. I’m not a big re-reader myself, but I definitely retreat to familiar genres and authors, if not particular books – and I love that final line, there.

Despite this intro, Dear Reader isn’t really about a series of re-reads. It’s more of a memoir of reading life – one that feels universal, while also obviously being specific to Rentzenbrink. And her life has been fully surrounded by books. We see her first forays into discovering narratives and characters, and realising the joy that they could bring – and when she was having difficult times at school, books were a refuge. Many chapters end with a series of recommendations for books relating to the period of her life in question, and they are great lists, recommended with the happy fervour of any enthusiastic reader. Some themes are enjoyably unusual – like the list of books about pubs, when her dad became a pub landlord when Rentzenbrink was sixteen.

But books aren’t just part of Rentzenbrink’s social life. She goes into working in bookselling – and it’s a fascinating look behind the curtain. She starts in the book department of Harrod’s, and it’s always fun to read behind-the-curtain experiences of working in customer service. There are certainly stories of silly requests and unreasonable members of the public, but there is also a warmth to Rentzenbrink’s writing. We all love Shaun Bythell’s biting memoirs of bookselling, but this is not that – Rentzenbrink is thrilled whenever she can engage with an interested reader, and her favourite thing is to recommend books. We can all empathise.

The book follows her bookselling journey as she takes on more responsibility at other shops – organising events, arranging displays, choosing books. She goes up and up, and has such fondness for her colleagues and her experiences. What survives throughout is her passion for reading and for encouraging others in their reading lives. She is not a pollyanna, and there are difficult stages to her life too – but this is still a delightful read. The subtitle of Dear Reader is ‘the comfort and joy of books’, and there are few books about books that are more comforting or joyful than this.

Seven Kinds of People You Find in Bookshops by Shaun Bythell

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I imagine you’ve probably read Shaun Bythell’s very funny accounts of running a secondhand bookshop in Wigtown, Scotland – Diary of a Bookseller and Confessions of a Bookseller. I love them and I’m hoping they go on and on. While we wait for another diary, though, there is Seven Kinds of People You Find in Bookshop – published last year, probably with an eye on being a stocking filler. It’s 137 pages and a pocket-sized book, so only takes an hour or so to whip through – but it’s a delightful hour.

As the title suggests, Bythell divides up his usual clientele into seven categories – though each of these has several sub-sections. For example, here is the genus Expert, species Bore:

This type of person often considers him- or herself to be a polymath, and will inveterately share their thoughts with you on any subject you choose to mention, or accidentally mention, once you are aware of their proclivity. It is best to maintain complete silence in their presence, as the slightest thing can trigger a lengthy tirade on the most unexpected of subjects, although often you don’t discover that customers fall into this taxonomic category until it’s far, far too late. They are not averse to listening in on conversations between other customers and interjecting with their (often wildly offensive) opinions, and on many occasions I have had to apologise to innocent bystanders who – having been quietly discussing something – have subsequently been subject to an unsolicited (and possibly racist) rant from a complete stranger who happened to be within earshot.

Bythell is always wonderful at spearing people who have no self-awareness about how difficult they make life for others – though he breaks his curmudgeonly persona every now and then to talk about kinds of people who are very welcome in the shop. He treads the line between wittily grumpy and mean with expertise, never falling on the wrong side of it – but these moments of appreciation are still like the sun bursting through clouds.

Naturally, as a frequenter of bookshops, I read nervously – trying to identify myself. The nearest I came was the posh old lady from the city, with whom I have little in common except for her taste: ‘She would never dream of taking the dog for a walk, and her interests, when she comes into the bookshop and wafts dreamily around, are a light touch of Bloomsbury (particularly Virginia Woolf) with a smattering of the Mitford sisters.’ Ouch!

I will read anything Bythell writes about bookshops and, though this isn’t a proper instalment in the series, it’s enough to keep us going for a while. If it wasn’t in your stocking at Christmas, then treat yourself to a copy to make January a bit more fun.

A moving memoir of racism, poverty, and abuse

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I recently finished a memoir, read by the author as an audiobook. It was a really striking portrayal of growing up as a mixed-race child in America in the ’70s, with violence, poverty, and uncertainty.

The narrator was the youngest of three, and can barely remember a time when her parents were together. Their relationship was volatile, and they had divorced by the time she could remember – leaving her with some resentment of her older brother and sister, who had got to experience something close to a happy family. In turn, they resented the narrator – not least because of her paler skin. Though they had the same parents, the narrator was lighter skinned than her siblings – and could often ‘pass’ as white, or perhaps thought to be Latino. This meant she dodged some of the racism that her siblings experienced – though certainly got her fair share too.

She recounts one of the first times that she remembers her race being an issue – taking a white schoolfriend to visit her Black dad. The schoolfriend had only known the narrator’s white mother before – and when the door to the apartment building was opened by a Black man, started crying and screaming and refused to go in. The narrator, a young girl at the time, was confused and hurt – not least by seeing the hurt on her father’s face.

Sometimes the pain she faced came from within the family too. There are extraordinary, vividly written scenes where she relates her sister – whose life had somehow derailed so that she was addicted to drugs and was selling her body – trying to pimp her out when she was only fourteen. Luckily someone the narrator knew happened to stumble across the scene, saving her from who knows what. And her brother became increasingly violent, so that the narrator never felt safe at home. Sometimes her mother would have to call the police, and the narrator would have the terror of a Black brother being at the mercy of cops. All she dreamed of was a time of safety and love at Christmas, a day that seemed more than any other to mark the difference between her family and a perfect one. It never came.

Perhaps a third or a half of the autobiography consists of this examination of childhood. It is revealing, painful and so well written. You long for her to get somewhere safe where she can begin to live properly. And her career does start to take off with incredible speed – her hard work and some luck making her more successful than she could imagine. She charts every moment that led there, so it’s hard to remember she is only in her late teens when it all begins to fall into place – albeit against the backdrop of the legacy of that childhood.

But things don’t fall into a happy ever after. She finds herself in a controlling marriage – richer than she ever imagined, but without any freedom. Her husband won’t let her see anyone or decide her own time. There are cameras in every room of the house. She is followed by security wherever she goes. Her husband is never physically abusive, but she is subjected to emotional and control abuse for years.

She does manage to get out, and the second half of the autobiography is much more about her career. After this, you probably do need to have an active interest in her work, otherwise the details are not very captivating – but the first half of the book is an extraordinary insight, whether or not you care about her career. And the problem is that this will probably be largely overlooked by people who’ll see the name of the author and decide the book isn’t for them. Which is why I’ve waited until the final line of this review to tell you that the autobiography is The Meaning of Mariah Carey by Mariah Carey.

Inferno by Catherine Cho

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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.