Your Voice in My Head - Rilegato

Forrest, Emma

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 030735931X ISBN 13: 9780307359315

Casa editrice: Random House Canada, 2011

Riassunto

A dazzling and devastating memoir — Girl Interrupted for the Juno generation.

Talented, prolific and charming, Emma Forrest was settled in Manhattan at twenty-two and on contract to the Guardian when she realized that her quirks had gone beyond eccentricity, past the warm waters of weird and into those cold, deep patches of the sea where people lose their lives.

Lonely, in a dangerous cycle of cutting and bulimia, and drawn inexplicably to damaging and cruel relationships, she found herself in the chair of a slim, balding and effortlessly optimistic psychiatrist — a man whose wisdom and humanity would wrench her from the vibrant and dangerous tide of herself, and who would help her to recover when she tried to end her life.

Emma's loving and supportive family and friends circled around her in panic. Like Ophelia, Emma was on the brink of drowning. But she was also still working, still exploring, still writing. And then she fell in love.

One day, when Emma called to make an appointment with her psychiatrist, she found no one there. He had died, shockingly, at the age of fifty-three, leaving behind a young family for whom he had fought to survive. Processing the premature doorstep, a failed suicide, she was adrift. And when her significant and all-consuming relationship also fell apart, she was forced to cling to the page for survival.

Your Voice in My Head is spiked with wit, humour and unique perception. It not only explores the crashing weight of depression, mania and suffering, but also the beauty of love and the heartbreak of loss. It is also, fundamentally, about our relationship with ourselves.

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Informazioni sull?autore

EMMA FORREST wrote her first novel, Namedropper, when she was twenty one and has since published two more: Thin Skin and Cherries in the Snow. She has also written for Vogue, Vanity Fair, the Times, the Guardian and the Independent. Emma Forrest lives in Los Angeles.

Estratto. © Ristampato con autorizzazione. Tutti i diritti riservati.

A man hovers over me as I write. Every table in the Los Angeles café is taken.

‘Are you leaving?’

My notebook, coffee and Dictaphone are spread out in front of me.

‘No,’ I answer.

‘I’ll give you a thousand dollars to leave.’

‘OK,’ I say, as I pack up my things.

‘What?’

‘Sure. A thousand dollars. I’m leaving.’

He looks at me like I’m mad and beats a hasty retreat. I meant it. He didn’t mean it. My radar, after all these years of sanity, is still off when it comes to what people do or don’t mean.

My mum calls my cell phone and I go outside to take it.

‘How do you pronounce Tóibín,’ my mother asks me, ‘as in Colm Tóibín, the novelist?’ This is our daily call, me in America, her in England, every day since I moved here at twenty-one. I’m thirty-two now, and she’s seventy-one, though she sounds like she’s seventeen.

‘It’s pronounced toe-bean. Like “toe” and then “bean”.’

‘That’s what I feared,’ she says. She lets this marinate a moment. Then, ‘No. Not acceptable.’

‘But that’s his name! That’s how you say it.’

‘I can’t be going around saying “toe-bean”. It simply will not do.’

‘Why don’t you just not say his name?’

‘He’s a popular writer.’

‘Read his books but don’t talk about them.’

‘No,’ (I can sense her shaking her head) ‘some situation will arise that requires me to say his name.’

I think my mother has the sense of doom, and guilt about the sense of doom, of Jews her age who weren’t directly touched by the Holocaust. When she was growing up in New York, the fi rst bad thing that happened to her was that Irish children moved into the Jewish neighbourhood and stole her kazoo and her sailor hat. She was a fat little girl, guarding the cakes she had hidden in her sock drawer. What was a fat child in 1940s New York, without her kazoo?

The second bad thing was that her dad died and then, soon after, her mother, and she was only a teenager and she didn’t know how to make toast. So she got very thin – deliberately, not through lack of toast – and married a much older man. It didn’t last. The best thing that happened was she fell in love with my dad.

Once, when Mum and her first husband had long since lost touch and I was new to mania, I tracked down an address for the man, whom I had only heard about, and sent him a letter asking him whether or not he was dead yet. Not to be mean, just curious.

Mum gets anxious very esily. Something that is a source of calm (she watches her cat as he laps the water bowl. ‘Good boy, Jojo! What a good boy!’) can turn, like the weather (the cat keeps lapping. Her smile fades. ‘Why are you drinking so much water, Jojo? What’s the matter, Jojo? Are you sick?’).

I talk to myself a lot because I’ve seen her talk to herself a lot, generally in the kitchen, where she’s been overheard saying, with real enthusiasm:

‘I’m feeling tremendously optimistic about gluten-free bread!’

and:

‘I fear George Clooney’s teeth may be his downfall.’

I see my mum everywhere. From certain angles, the Brazilian supermodel Gisele Bündchen has her face, and from other angles so does the black comedienne Wanda Sykes. I think all white people have a black doppelgänger and vice-versa. My dad’s black doppelgänger is the father in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. His Celtic doppelgänger is Sean Connery.

A lady came up to him at a hotel in Jamaica and said ‘Last night we thought you were Sean Connery’ and Dad said 'Last night I was Sean Connery.’ My dad seems to know everything, so I never use Google. I only use Dad. I email him a query and he figures it out, and then responds in the guise of the billionaire Google
founders:

‘London to Cardiff: is it expensive? How long is the trip?’

‘2–3 hrs by train. Expensive if you don’t book in advance.
xx Larry Page and Sergey Brin.’

When I was fourteen and wanting to get out of gym class, Dad wrote the teacher a letter in the shape of a perfect
triangle:

to
Miss
Jensen, please
do excuse Emma from
gym today as she is feeling
unwell. Kind regards, Jeffrey Forrest

He wrote it like that for nothing but his own delight, meticulous, making me late. When I handed it to her, Miss Jensen ripped it up, threw it on the floor and said she considered it a personal insult from my family. He once got a credit card saying ‘Sir Jeffrey Forrest’ because American Express was dumb enough to send him an application form with the statement ‘Print your name as you would wish it to appear.’

The last forwarded flight details he sent me were:

Your special requests

SIR LOVELY JEFFREY FORREST    Requested Seat: 12J
MS GRUMPY JUDITH FORREST    Requested Seat: 12K

I asked if it was really wise to ticket himself and my mother like that, and he replied, as if it were out of his hands: ‘Under the new homeland security rules the ticketed names must be a combination of how they are printed in your passport and your likely appearance at check-in.’

I like to think my parents have complementary eccentricities, two perfect jigsaw pieces of neurotica. It’s all I ever wanted for myself.

I have one sister, Lisa, younger than me by three years. She had an invented childhood friend she called Poofita Kim. Her imaginary friend, as she explained in a drawing, was on the run for drowning six kids. Lisa, then five, was sheltering him. This is the same time frame in which she penned a letter to Margaret Thatcher:

Dear Margaret Thatcher,
Why are you so mean? The devil is not so mean.
Please come to tea, Saturday, at four, to discuss your mean-ness.
Please wear a hat.

I used to pour cola on Lisa’s piano and take all of the stuffing out of the toy seal she slept with, so it would look like he’d deflated. Throughout childhood, she surreptitiously kept a diary of my transgressions:

3 December 1987 – Emma pulled my hair.

14 March 1988 – Emma poured cola on my piano.

1 September 1988 – When Mum wasn’t looking, Emma stared at me with strange eyes, then denied that she was
staring at me with strange eyes.

She’s had the same boyfriend for twelve years. I haven’t. Lisa gave me The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins-Gilman and sewed me underpants with a picture of Jon Stewart on them. I love her like crazy – unless Mum sets one foot in the room and then we cannot abide each other.

My grandma is ninety and has recently adopted a Yiddish accent that creeps in when she’s tired or tipsy. Otherwise she sounds just like Prunella Scales in Fawlty Towers, except with curse words. One year, during Wimbledon, I said I thought Steffi Graf was attractive and my grandma shrieked ‘She’s an ugly bitch!’ Lauren Bacall is also on her list of enemies, though the backstory remains murky.

Perhaps because my family are how they are, it took a little while to realise – settled in Manhattan at twenty-two, on contract to the Guardian and about to have my first novel published – that my quirks had gone beyond eccentricity, past the warm waters of weird to those cold, deep patches of sea where people lose their lives. They were in England. They didn’t know I was cutting my body with razors – my arms, legs, stomach – and they didn’t know I was bingeing and purging six, seven, eight times a day. Even through the darkest times, even knowing how much they loved me, I was afraid to tell them.

I was scared they’d make me leave New York, whose own eccentricity brought me the splashes of joy I still felt. Once, as I was walking on Avenue B with my friend Angela Boatwright, a bike-riding boy, of maybe eight or nine, said, as he cycled past: ‘I’m going to fuck you in your asses!’ He said it industriously, proudly, like a man with a work ethic. Later that day came the most genteel catcall I’ve ever received, when a construction worker yelled ‘Damn girl! I’d like to take you to the movies!’

I was incredibly lonely. I imagined accepting the construction worker’s invitation and us going to the movies together, me putting my head on his shoulder and him squealing ‘Eww! Get off me! I said I wanted to take you to the movies! I didn’t say you could touch me!’ I did have a boyfriend – the Bad Boyfriend – and he was a huge part of the loneliness. In hindsight, I have no idea why he was ever with me. He thought highly of my breasts. And . . . that’s it, I think. They were high. He didn’t want to meet my parents (‘I’m not really into parents’). Also on his list of dislikes:
1. Cake
2. Poetry


I really like those things. I am even quite good at making them. All I can say is: I was new in the city. I barely knew anyone. He was tall and handsome and had all his own teeth.

The first time I went to see Dr R was in 2000, a good year to have your life turned around. I’d ridden the 6 train from the emergency room, where I had been all night. I had become so numb, in my life, that sex didn’t register, unless it hurt, and then I very distantly could see that it was me on the bed. Despite the cutting and bulimia, I couldn’t work  fast enough to harm myself, so the boyfriend was helping out. This night he’d gone too far. Though th...

Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Random House Canada
• Data di pubblicazione: 2011
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 030735931X
• ISBN 13: 9780307359315
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 224
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: Yeepin GmbH; 492000000000; sunshine12232@outlook.com; ; Alleestr.11; Kaiserslautern; Rheinland-Pfalz; 67655; Germania