I vowed: I would never forgive her.
I hauled myself out of the university chair. I lay on Mrs. Slaven’s couch. I instructed her to take notes.
I described to her what I wanted. A seventies-era A-frame home drastically reduced in price and uninhabited for over a year, formerly owned by a beautiful, sexually promiscuous woman and filled with the residue of a once-fantastic life such as might provide a sort of psychic compost for the next owner, namely me, a person who’d lived in pasts that didn’t belong to her and forfeited to feminist pornographer filmmaker performance artists the one that did, a person whose soul was so encrypted by pain that she had come to miss it with an intensity that had mutated into pain (this absence of pain registering as pain), and maybe it was the spirit of her dead mother sickening her, or maybe it was her inability to grieve a person she should, by biological rights, have grieved, but as with so many diagnoses it is, in the end, the symptoms that matter, not the cause, because this is what being alive means, this is what being a person means, to be sickened by an illness known as you.
Also I wanted, while in the study, to be able to hear the baying of coyotes that could be mistaken for wolves. And a Faraday cage in the basement. And a crappy Internet connection so that I could watch, in evocatively slow motion, e-mail video attachments of my mother in the fog. And Barcelona chairs that conveyed, so that I could maybe, on occasion, keep her company there.
Mrs. Slaven finished writing. She capped her pen. She read back to me everything I’d said to her.
She told me she had just the place.
Acknowledgments
All books are collaborations, but this one in particular owes its completion to a team of adult caregivers.
I would like to thank Vendela Vida for her savvy parts replacement help with an early Franken-draft. Ceridwen Morris turned her keen “why do I care” eye on those places where the caring was a little thin, and sent me important fashion links I always cared about. Telica Connelly held our family together when its founders became preoccupied. My Believer colleagues Andrew Leland, Ed Park, Vendela Vida, Dave Eggers, Andi Mudd, Sheila Heti, Ross Simonini, Karolina Waclawiak, Meehan Crist, Daniel Levin Becker, and Max Fenton picked up the slack when I was lagging, and made me feel that I was part of something exciting, even when I was by myself. I wasted far too much time writing e-mails to Cath Le Couteur, but in return she always made me laugh, so I guess it was worth it. Binnie Kirshenbaum and all of my students gave me a reason to wear the nice clothes in my closet, and graciously led me to believe that I was making a difference.
The gifted Henry Dunow intuited when I needed confidence transfusions and when I required tougher talk, but regardless he never bullshits me, and for that I am forever grateful. The team at Doubleday is comprised of the kindest, smartest, and most accommodating people — Melissa Danaczko, Emily Mahon, Alison Rich, Nora Reichard, thank you for humoring my ideas and thirteenth-hour fiddles.
The inspiration for this book came from another book—Psychic Self-Defense by Dion Fortune. I hope she won’t attack me for using, without her permission, an incident from her life as my springboard.
Bill Thomas cannot be “thanked” under the usual thanking rubric. Genuflection is the more appropriate acknowledgment of his editing wizardry. In his calm-stern way, he drove me to do way better and to push way harder, past my usual exhaustion point; he saw what I envisioned but could not execute. I am a different writer because of him.
Delia and Solly took me on essential daily head vacations. My parents allowed me to take essential vacations from Delia and Solly.
The Guggenheim Foundation and the MacDowell Colony contributed precious space, time, and validation.
Ben Marcus remains the best thing that ever happened to me.
About the Author
Heidi Julavits is the author of three critically acclaimed novels, The Uses of Enchantment, The Effect of Living Backwards, and The Mineral Palace. Her fiction has appeared in Harper’s, Esquire, and The Best American Short Stories, among other places. She’s a founding editor of The Believer magazine and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives in Manhattan and Maine.