Help, Goodreads Keeps Making Me Read About Myself.
On my 2024 Reading Challenge, magical thinking, The Mean Reds, and Languishing.
1. Reading, and then not reading
As soon as my reading comprehension caught up with my reading ambitions as a kid, I would sit up in bed for hours with the big light on until I fell asleep with my book on my face. I was terrified of the dark, we still aren’t great friends and I sleep with a light on whenever I have to sleep alone (I’m establishing trust with my readers by being vulnerable!) Sometimes when I was wee, I’d be up reading for so long that when my long-distance lorry driver Dad was leaving for a North run at 3am, he’d turn around the corner in the hall and see me, bolt upright, eyes bloodshot, not in my wee pink bedroom in Greenock, but in Narnia, or Wonkaville, or Wonderland. I’d have a gentle, whispered telling off because of how hard I would be making it for my Mum to get me up for school now, I’d get a quick hug, then the big light would be switched off and my door closed over (never totally closed, couldn’t handle that!!) Having the light switched off by someone else is fine. I’m already in bed, there’s no running through the dark, there’s no danger of monsters or ghosts getting me.
I read like this all the way through High School too, but by then I had swapped child-centred fantasy classics for The Classics. I was a deeply pretentious teenager and I took a massive amount of pride in being well-read. “Have you not read The Picture of Dorian Gray? Heart of Darkness? The Master and Margarita?” Insufferable. I have clever siblings and I wanted to be clever, so I consumed everything they had on their book shelves, and I spent all the money I wasn’t spending on being an idiot in Oxfam Books. When I say I read Classics, I only read Classics. I was allergic to YA Fiction and embarrassed by the idea of reading something meant for someone my age. The way that shops like Waterstones are laid out made it easy to be a huge snob too. Any pulpy, colourful, Summer-Holiday-looking book made me itch like I could pre-emptively feel the cheap sunblock they’d have smeared on the edges soon enough. Anything with glossy romantic portraits on it made my eyes roll back so far into my head that I could exchange a knowing glance with the rat controlling my brain while he drank a black coffee and worked on his oil paintings. Mortifyingly for me and the rat, this attitude is only one I’ve recently shook off as a result of joining Goodreads and actually learning about some really insanely good contemporary literature. In my last Substack piece I wrote about being bullied as a teenager, I hope the further insight above will help you understand why, and also make you glad to have met me at 28 and not 14.
In 6th year (the final year of school, to any non-Scots) I took Advanced-Higher English and gleefully dug my bitten nails into Sylvia Plath’s back catalogue. I loved Sylvia, I still do, I still cry over her life and her work and I know if I meet Ted Hughes in the afterlife I’ll kill him extra dead. I had a truly bizarre teacher for this class who appeared as quickly as she left, and thankfully isn’t at my old school anymore. She was the only teacher I ever shouted at, and the only one whose class I ever skipped, and the only educator I’ve ever met who genuinely seemed like she was there to harm the psyches of children. This teacher had a weird fixation with the now departed Scottish Literature legend Alasdair Gray, and insisted on bringing us, her class of 5 or 6 17-turning-18 year olds to talks and writers circles where the man himself would be. Gray was by then at the end of his life, and was being carted around like a once-dancing bear as only barely-living legends are. It was uncomfortable to watch and felt deeply disrespectful, but we were there and so was our teacher, we’ll call her Meredith, and she craved our approval as much as she craved his.
After half-teaching us the poetry curriculum, she about-turned and decided we would study Lanark instead, something which allowed her to tell more almost certainly false stories about drinking whisky with Gray and how cool and bohemian her life was. Maybe when I’m older I’ll find my way back to Alasdair Gray’s writing, but Meredith’s antics combined with the eery similarities between Lanark’s eponymous main character and my truly evil ex boyfriend who I had just escaped, made the whole period of study genuinely traumatic. On several occasions, I had to leave the class to have a panic attack in the bathroom, and eventually I just wouldn’t show up at all. If you ever find yourself as a 17 year old girl escaping an abusive relationship with an ugly, self-pitying 20 year old man, don’t read Lanark. This has been a real diversion in this essay that exists to say, I stopped reading the way little me used to around then.
Art School was more of the same, but the men who wrote (and often recommended) the books were worse scumbags than their characters, or anyone they reminded me of. I was sick of masturbatory self-congratulation, I was over being told that a man was a genius for coming up with concepts that belonged in the conversations I’d have less than sober walking through the woods with my pals when I was 14, or nodding off at a sleepover at 12, or on 2013 Tumblr. I was tired of everything enjoyable being shat on- if a white man does it, it’s referential, it’s a pastiche. If a woman and/or a person of colour does it, it’s kitsch, it’s decorative, it’s crafts. By the time I’d graduated from the Glasgow School of Art in 2018, I don’t think I had read a full book that wasn’t part of a grade in 6 or 7 years. I barely read the ones that were part of my grade.
2. Reading again, woo!
Back in December of last year, I was with my best friend Martha doing what we are often to be found doing, gossiping over ramen and pints. At some point in the evening, she told me about how many books she had read over the year, and how she managed to hold herself to this goal by doing her own Goodreads challenge. I mentally noted that this is what I should also do, because yes, if my friends jumped off a bridge I would follow them. And I would kick my feet and giggle as I plummeted. I would tell all the fish that I met when I fell into the water below that I was there with my friends, I would tell the angels too, once I’d died doing what I love - whatever my friends are doing - Then I would ask them how to get to hell, and I would go and find Ted Hughes. This January, when I started to think about my goals for 2024, I made a new Goodreads account because I couldn’t get into the one I made when I was 18 the last time I tried to like reading again, and I set my goal at 24 books. At the time of writing, halfway through June, I’m at 11/24, which feels like a huge win.
I have noticed a really odd trend in what I’ve been reading, and I wonder if I, or my Goodreads algorithm, or maybe just my miserable pals are to blame. I keep reading about lonely, angry girls.
In the next few sections of this essay, I’ll be doing some light analysis on the books We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson and Girls Against God by Jenny Hval. I’ll also touch on Morvern Callar by Alan Warner, and My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh.
3a. We Have Always Lived in the Castle has always lived on my shelf
I bought a copy of We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson when I was at uni, after seeing a display in window of the Waterstones, and reading the staff reviews of it. I love gothic fiction. I love the drama and the strange, archaic language of it, I love the romantic way that the world and people are described, no matter the time the story takes place in, I love how comforting it is in its sadness and horror, I just love it. This was something I’d forgotten, until I read Morvern Callar last year, which I don’t think is ever called gothic fiction, but it gives me the same gut feeling as Rebecca, The Fall of the House of Usher, Angela Carter’s Fairytales, and every other piece in the genre I hungrily consumed as a teenager. I’ll write about Morvern Callar properly later this year when I re-read it, because it deserves so much more attention than I can give it right now. All you need to know, is that it is the book that finally made me pick up Shirley Jackson’s final novel in the first days of January, chasing the high of how I felt saying goodbye to sweet, awful Morvern.
Shirley Jackson was born in 1916, the child of a “deeply conventional” mother who dreaded the idea of her daughter being different. By the time she died tragically young in 1968, Jackson had left behind a couple of memoirs, 6 novels, and 200+ short stories. She struggled with lifelong anxiety, for which she was prescribed insane medications, which caused her a hellscape of health issues. Jackson’s characters often reflect her feelings of otherness, and by the end of her life, she wasn’t living unlike the agoraphobic, outcast Blackwood sisters of We Have Always Lived in the Castle. According to the biography of her life by Ruth Franklin, Jackson’s husband was (and I am paraphrasing here) a foul wee leech who cheated on her with his students and stole money from her in her life, and published much of her unreleased work after her death for his own gain. I can’t help but think she was telling on him with the inclusion of Cousin Charles in the novel. He, too, will be getting the Ted Hughes treatment when my time comes.
We Have Always Lived in the Castle is described a lot as Shirley Jackson’s masterpiece, for good reason, because it’s unreal. It follows the two Blackwood sisters, struggling on in their small New England town, six years on from the deaths of their parents, brother, and auntie. Constance is a 20-something shut-in who is rightly terrified of the townspeople who mock and taunt what is left of the Blackwoods through her closed windows. Her wee sister is an 18 year old, borderline feral girl named Mary Katherine, or Merricat. The sisters care (I use this word loosely) for their sick uncle Julian who barely survived the poisoning incident that took most of their family. Julian Blackwood is fixated on his records and papers that tell his life story in chaotic circles, and becomes paranoid that they will be stolen by the girls’ cousin, Charles, when he muscles his way in to “help” the family move on from tragedy. Charles is insufferable to Merricat and her cat Jonas, but seems to have Constance under his spell.
✨SPOILERS FOR A BOOK THAT CAME OUT BEFORE ANY OF US WERE BORN✨
In a half-accidental arson incident, Mary Katherine discards of Charles’ pipe in a waste paper basket in the house to spite him, which causes a massive, gutting fire. Uncle Julian loses what was left of his life, and the townspeople take this as an opportunity to loot the home, smashing whatever they can find while the girls cower in the woods into the night. It’s during this fearful time in hiding, that we learn that it wasn’t poor Constance, the nervous, practiced, and fearful of the two who committed the murders but Merricat, who was only a child at the time. We also learn, in a touching and gut wrenching detail, that Mary Katherine chose the sugar bowl for the poison dispenser, as her beloved big sister doesn’t have a sweet tooth.
We leave the sisters and Jonas the cat, having returned after the carnage, living in the ruins of their family home, metaphorically and literally, with the most fire-damaged rooms closed off, dusting soot off their remaining cups and saucers.
3b. Did anyone else not realise Merricat was doing magic, or is it just me??
I kept forgetting that Mary Katherine was 18 years old, and imagined her for a lot of the book as a precocious pre-teen, with strange habits that she developed due to the kind of magical thinking I’ve dealt with since I was young. When I read to the end of my copy of the book, the afterword explains how her rituals, like nailing her father’s jewellery to a tree, are examples of sympathetic magic. This reading sees the youngest Blackwood sister as partaking in witchcraft, or at least that she is a child in isolation who has decided this is what she is doing to get through the conflicted feelings of grieving her family, while being the one to have killed them. Reading this, it’s not that I disagreed, but I had a sense of “Oh, that’s fully not what I thought was happening here.”
Sympathetic magic, from my understanding, relates to the notion that we can partake in actions that result in another action that we don’t physically cause. Voodoo dolls are the most common example of this in pop culture. Beliefs that certain foods can influence health exist in many forms of folk medicine, and are sometimes an example of the correspondence form of sympathetic magic, like that walnuts are great brain food because they look like brains, that phallic-looking vegetables were good for male fertility, or that beetroots help with blood-related issues because of the colour of their juice.
These ideas may seem defunct, but when we think very literally, which my neurodivergent brain often does, I feel like there is an obvious truth at the core of action causes action, like relates to like. What we put out into the world does come back to us. If you make people feel good, they do good things because they’re empowered, they impact their pals like you impacted them, and everyone’s day is a bit sunnier. If you treat someone poorly, they stomp around indignantly and stomp on everyone else’s feet. Ruining peoples’ lives makes you and everyone around you unhappy. I know this isn’t what sympathetic magic really is, but I understand how in a mind changed by massive trauma (like Merricat’s), or one that fits the mould of neurodivergent conditions (like mine, and, I assumed while reading We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Merricat’s), a jump can be made from observable fact to “if I do X then Y will happen to Z”.
Magical thinking is linked, when it becomes disabling, to schizophrenia spectrum disorders, anxiety, and OCD. I began researching OCD when my racing and chaotic thoughts were without distraction during the lockdowns of 2020-21 for the first time in my life. I knew something was wrong, but I didn’t know what, and a lot of OCD, including magical thinking, ritual fixation, and intrusive thoughts sounded familiar. The more I read, the more I realised I didn’t fit into most of the criteria though, and the kind of chaos of my brain seemed like a different thing from OCD chaos. Eventually, I was diagnosed with severe combined-type ADHD, and everyone I spoke to during that process was amazed I hadn’t been diagnosed already.
I’ll write another time about how my ADHD affects me, but for now I want to have a quick look at my own magical thinking. People with ADHD are often described as being gullible as a result of having a very literal way of understanding the world. I hate April Fools day, because of course I believed you. You told me something. I can’t assume you’re lying because that’s insane. I know that if the right cult came along, I’d join it. I bet I’d kick my feet and giggle while I did that, too. The thing is, that literal thinking and magical thinking are so closely connected in my mind, and I’m not sure that’s normal.
I wholeheartedly fear tempting fate, and will touch wood whenever someone says something like “If you kill me with food-poisoning from this dinner…” (I just touched wood after typing that, and again while proofreading), and I find it really and genuinely distressing if there’s no wood around when someone makes one of these statements. I believe we speak things into being, good and bad. I am superstitious. I’ve been close to the edge of non-religious spirituality so many times in my life, and I have a massive collection of former-friends who have faded from my life as they descended down various alarming pipelines. What was described in reviews and analysis of Mary Katherine’s rituals as sympathetic magic, felt so familiar, and some of it felt like it made perfect sense. I wear the rings of my dead family members on a chain around my neck, because I feel like they have to come with me when I do hard things, and everything is hard when you have ADHD and loads of people you love are dead. John Blackwood’s gold chain being nailed to a tree to protect the house from evil isn’t that far removed from wearing my late mum’s jewellery on a work trip to the Isle of Lewis so that she could come with me, since we never got to take that island hopping trip we talked about when I was wee. My grandad was a big bear of a man, and having his sovvy ring with me feels like protection.
Again, it’s not that I disagree with the idea that Merricat was doing her own kind of protection spells to take care of her sister, her cat, and her uncle. I just don’t think that it’s all she was doing. Many of the books I’ve ended up reading so far this year have centred strange, isolated girls on the edge of magic and sanity. I don’t love how much I see myself in them all.
4a. Girls Against God and me against the world
When I started reading Girls Against God, I felt so connected to the rage and hatred that our narrator has coursing through her veins, as a weird, angry wee girl in a place where there is one way to be normal. We are treated to, maybe even spoiled by, a deeply self-aware reflection on what it is to be the kind of kid who refuses to capitalise the word god in school, because you’re so angry at him and everyone around you. I remembered insisting on writing “god” (with the quotation marks) in my RE class in early high school, arguing ignorantly and passionately with children raised in the church about every deep breath they took. I would probably consider myself agnostic nowadays, as I’ve mellowed out and experienced the world a bit more, but it was truly beautiful to read about a child who saw her surroundings as I did mine, pissed off at the people who tried to tell me there was a reason for the chaos around us, despite belonging to different time periods and cultures, no matter how jarring it was. I felt connected to Hval’s self deprecating but ultimately loving descriptions of this semi-autobiographical character and her impotent, childlike angst. In our short time together on this platform, you might have gathered from my characterisation of my teenage self that I was that bratty, clever, dramatic teenager determined to rebel against basically anything you had going to rebel against. Jenny Hval is an artist and musician who you should absolutely look up, even if you don’t read her books, she is fascinating, and the kind of figure I would have splashed all over my Tumblr if I’d known of her then.
Jenny Hval was born in 1980 in Norway, and has made music across all genres from experimental folk, to art pop, to metal - about periods, witches, vampires, and horror films. Her work makes your brain feel like it’s being rewired in every medium she creates in, be it music, literature, or art. I genuinely don’t think it would be fair to try and summarise her in a biography, but please, fall down this rabbit hole in your own time, it’s on me.
Girls Against God seems to mirror Hval’s own life milestones, when it is connected to reality. The narrator uses her education as a means of escaping the oppressive, traditional Norwegian Christian world she was born into, and the forming of her metal band marks her rebirth when she meets other girls who hate God with whom she can create her own life philosophy, bend time and space, and know magic. There are whole sections where the girls create art exhibitions that allow them to enter other dimensions. There’s queer theory. There’s feminist theory. It might be a big poem. It’s definitely a manifesto. I don’t know how to describe this book to you, I think you should read it, but don’t moan at me if it makes your head melt or you enter a fugue state from which you never really return.
4b. Dream/nightmare blunt rotation
Girls Against God was the 3rd book I finished this year, and I read it at the same time as I was reading My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh. I don’t think there’s a single YouTube video essayist who hasn’t spoke that book, so I won’t dwell on it because I imagine you’ve already read it if you’re here, but if you do want to hear someone much more intelligent than I am discuss its themes and the time period in which it’s set, watch this Broey Deschanel video.
While I read these two very different books in rotation for a few weeks, I was struck by how they felt like they existed in a shared universe. Maybe it was just Jenny Hval opening my mind to time and space travel and the concept of bringing historical figures and their muses alive, but I felt that if Moshfegh’s unnamed narrator and Hval’s could meet at the peak of their angst and disillusionment with the world, they could hash something out together. The narrator of My Year of Rest and Relaxation is older by the time we meet her in her narrative than Girls Against God’s is, and I saw in the two of them two distinct points in my own struggles with The Mean Reds.
4c. Interlude - The Mean Reds
In the above clip of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Audrey Hepburn’s character Holly Golightly discusses what she calls having “The Mean Reds”. Before someone well actuallies me, I am well aware that Breakfast at Tiffany’s was a book before it was a film, and that the 1961 film is deeply problematic (see below), but this doesn’t erase how important Blake Edwards’ take on the story was to my teenage brain, far more than the original text by Truman Capote was. Between the ages of 14 and 17, I went through a lot. I’ve already talked about a lot of that stuff here. Add into the mix my mum being diagnosed with breast cancer, and a lot of issues with food, it wasn’t a good time to be this wee guy. I’m not sure how it happened, but at some point I became fixated on Audrey Hepburn films and binge watched them often. It might have been escapism, I might have just really fancied Audrey Hepburn, I’m not sure. But my favourite by far was Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Growing up in Greenock, there was nowhere like Tiffany’s, we were lucky if there was an H.Samuel’s. But what Holly found in the lavish jewellers- tranquility, peace, a place to still her racing, painful thoughts, I found in curling up in my childhood bed and falling asleep to Moon River.
The Mean Reds was a concept I recognised as soon as Holly brings it up in the film. It’s not quite a panic attack, not quite a tantrum, but what I would likely recognise now as being overstimulated, sometimes to the point of a meltdown. Sorry to diagnose fictional characters again, but at least in the way that I saw her and knew her, Holly Golightly shared by undiagnosed, permanently on fire ADHD brain. She couldn’t control when The Mean Reds hit either, her coping mechanisms were a bit weird too, sometimes destructive like mine, and she was there, in the small, slightly rounded screen of my bubblegum pink TV-DVD Combi, and I knew I wasn’t alone.
5. The Mean Reds universal theory no one asked for, and a conclusion
Once it stopped burning so painfully and brightly, my own Hvalian teenage rage morphed into a limp and languishing ennui in my early to mid twenties. I had no hate left for God, or whatever else is out there, no energy to fight with people about everything and nothing in particular. As the Covid-19 pandemic hit, I had a strong feeling that my life was over and I might as well wallow and sleepwalk through life like Moshfegh has her foul, mean main character do in My Year of Rest and Relaxation. I was lost in the sauce of grief, after my mum was diagnosed with a terminal brain tumour a decade after her last brush with cancer, and everything was too heavy to carry. I stopped carrying anything at all for a while, and I think I’m only just picking up my bags now.
I see, too, Merricat’s murderous acts as her own thrashing and desperate way to deal with her Mean Reds. Granted, I didn’t murder my whole family as a child, but I remember being nine years old and crying with frustration because everyone in school had annoyed me to the point that I told my mum through tears at the school gates, “I want to bite people.”
I propose, then, semi-jokingly, that I have stumbled upon a sort of Marvel Comic Universe for insane, probably neurodivergent, almost certainly magic, really fucking angry girls. Our trajectory is described here, in these works. Starting with Merricat in our pre-teens, we become strange, vengeful things who want to bite (or put poison in the sugar bowl, whatever) when we start to hit puberty. By our teens, we are rampantly searching for escape and rebellion, and embarrassing angst fills us and we can’t stop churning and creating and stomping on everyone’s toes. We are girls who hate God, and everyone around us, and ourselves. By our 20s, we’re either the poor, wounded Holly Golightly of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, urgently trying to find someone to look after us, or we’re hardened and tough, terrible to our only friends and ready to recoil from love and the knowing of others, like the narrator of My Year of Rest and Relaxation. We also might be able to do magic. I haven’t figured out where that fits in yet.
Rage has been my fuel for my whole life, even when it burned me too much and I ran from it and hid and languished instead of fighting. It is uncomfortably close to the surface, and in my grief now since my mum passed away last year, I meet it often in places I don’t expect to. When I started writing this essay, I thought it would be about loneliness and its archetypes, and the madness isolation bestows upon those of us who need people more than we want them. But the more I wrote, the more I realised that none of these women are actually lonely. Merricat and Constance choose to shut themselves away together because Merricat’s Mean Reds turned them into ghouls in their town’s folklore. They could run away and live elsewhere by the end, but they stay, and in turn stay in their perpetual state of self-righteous misery and victimhood. Girls Against God’s narrator isn’t lonely at all, she is at first, but she finds her people through a shared, communal, magical, ritualistic Mean Red state. In My Year of Rest and Relaxation, the narrator chooses, like the Blackwood sisters, to enter a limbo of her own making in order to isolate herself. Unlike the Blackwoods however, she has to alienate and destroy ties with those who love her to do so.
It’s not the blues, but The Mean Reds that run the game.