I think I've lived every life on display here, for nearly three decades of my life. Reva's desperate need to conform and be desired by others, Trevor's self-absorbed fuckboy psychosis, the narrator's hatred and disgust towards the world, her father's detached escape into hyperrationality, Ping Xi's tired closed eyes in a photo from an unrecognisable scene. The excruciating pain of loneliness, emotional neglect. The collapse of desire, symptomatic blackouts, void of bitterness.

I hated this book. I hated the narrator's complicity in generating her surroundings. Her disgust in peoples' lack of genuine connections with one another, while she did nothing to engender genuineness in her own relationships. How she acted as if standing apart from the world absolved her of all responsibility to the world.

I hated how much she reminded me of myself when I was twenty-five.

Overeducated and critical, but without the life experience or emotional intelligence to understand others in their banalities, their hypocrisies, their stupidities, dreams and terrors. Judging from afar, whilst building towards nothing positive. Negation without substance. Disgust without honesty.

But, perhaps, this is the point. Perhaps hatred is what drives this book. Hatred of critique as complicity without change.

Near the end, the narrator completes her year of rest and relaxation. She finds calm in nature, lets go of her resentments, and affirms her love for Reva who stuck with her despite years of being treated like shit by the narrator. Yet despite all this,

Spoiler

Reva dies on the 9th September 2001 at her new job in the Twin Towers.

Despite the narrator, supposedly, healing from her trauma, she finds the world worse than it ever was. She finds herself in a new nightmare—and can do nothing but state how beautiful it is.

If that's the point of the book, that the narrator is even more despicable after her re-emergence into the world, then this book is a blinding success.

I'm unsure, however, if others will understand it this way.

—

Edit: I can't stop thinking about this damn book and how much it's worsened my wellbeing.

There's a concept that circulates trauma discourses called learned helplessness. Its common depiction is of a dog or a bird who, having been kept in a cage for an extended period, will remain within the cage after the cage has been opened. There's a related experiment of monkeys in a depressed space, with a ladder leading out. Any monkey who tries to climb out leads to the electrocution of those at the bottom. Subsequently, the monkeys at the bottom learn to attack any monkey that tries to escape, for fear of being inflicted with pain. When the the electric floor is disabled, new generations of monkeys keep attacking the ones who try to escape.

I can't help but feel that this book is a continuation of these discourses. Of entrapment by pains that have settled so deeply into, not simply your own body, but that of your family's, your friends', and your generation's. Pains so intimate that you feel you'd vanish if they were ever addressed. The fear that all you are and ever will be is pain.

But if you believe that all you are is pain, then the only pleasure you could ever obtain is through pain. Spite, cruelty, bitterness, mockery—and disgust, radiant all consuming disgust. Disgust of those that surround you. Disgust of yourself, inextricable from the banalities you hate in others. An endlessly tightening knot of disgust, bound by the traumas of the past.

My cousin in law once said something quite profound to me. He said that despite him and his brother being raised by the same abusive parents, he had succeeded in life where his brother had not. When he asked his brother why he thought this was, his brother had said he'd gone nowhere in life due to their parents. My cousin realised that his brother's resentment had trapped him into a sad, bitter repetition of his parents' lives. That by focusing so much on what others had done to him, his brother had failed to live in the joy of his own life, apart from his upbringing.

I know it's hard to let go of certain injustices, but some of them only persist in harming you when you hold them tight without resolution, change, or end. I just don't want anyone to ever live in this space of unlife, where everyday we die the death of yesterday anew.