And Speaking Of Sophia Tolstoy, Her Diaries Are Just So Depressing.

And speaking of Sophia Tolstoy, her diaries are just so depressing. 

“I am to gratify his pleasure and nurse his child, I am a piece of household furniture, I am a woman. I try to suppress all human feelings. When the machine is working properly it heats the milk, knits a blanket, makes little requests and bustles about trying not to think […].“

She wrote this when she was 19, one year into her marriage to Leo and as she was pregnant with the first of his 13 children.

A few years later, when she was 25 or so:

“I am so often alone with my thoughts that the need to write in my diary comes quite naturally … Now I am well again and not pregnant—it terrifies me how often I have been in that condition. He said that for him being young meant “I can achieve anything”. For me […] reason tells me that there is nothing I either want or can do beyond nursing, eating, drinking, sleeping, and loving and caring for my husband and babies, all of which I know is happiness of a kind, but why do I feel so woeful all the time, and weep as I did yesterday? I am writing this now with the pleasantly exciting sense that nobody will ever read it, so I can be quite frank with myself […].“

During her 12th pregnancy she wrote about taking scalding baths and jumping from high pieces of furniture to try and miscarry.  And at one point while reading her husband’s diary (which he told her to read) she found the sentence “There is no such thing as love, only the physical need for intercourse and the practical need for a life companion.” In her own diary she wrote “They ebb and flow like waves, these times when I realise how lonely I am and want only to cry…”

A few years before her husband’s death, she published a cycle of prose poems titled “Groans”, under the pseudonym “A Tired Woman”.

THIS IS THE HARDEST I HAVE LAUGHED IN SO LONG YOU HAVE CURED MY DEPRESSION

Can you tell us about your favorite writers and books, please? Your writing is the light!

Homegoing - Yaa Gyasi

Two sisters, separated before they even have a chance to remember the other. One is sold into slavery, the other becomes a slave-owner’s wife. Every chapter is written from the perspective of one of their descendants, spanning three generations and hundreds of years, crossing continents, beginning in Africa at the onset of slavery and taking us all the way to modern day America. The true glory of this book is that you only hear from each character once and yet you are no less emotionally invested in them. The writing is mesmerising, brutal; full of softness, and of spit. Fire and water - as the book references - fire and water, come together.

The Third Life of Grange Copeland - Alice Walker

Everyone reads The Color Purple (and rightfully so), but in my opinion, this is Walker’s better book. It follows three generations of a poor black family in the American South. It’s set after the abolition of slavery, when it was no longer legal, but the effects of it were still felt by black men and the black women they often took their feelings of powerlessness out on. It gives us ugly, brutal, abusive black male characters and without asking us to forgive them, makes us understand the cycle that made them so callous. Brilliant.

A Girl is a Half-formed Thing - Eimear McBride

Gutting. Like being suffocated within the narrator’s head. Written in an off-the-cuff stream-of-consciousness type style. It follows the life of a young woman who experiences a myriad of traumas. I have never felt such stifling second-hand grief, and for a fictional character at that. Devastating, perverse, and hard to stomach, but one of the most worthwhile reads in recent years.

Grief is the Thing with Feathers - Max Porter

A book without a genre. A mix of poetry, prose, and even drama. A semi-autobiographical account of a man left to struggle with his grief after his wife passes, leaving him to raise their two young sons. The most original format I’ve ever seen in a book. Heart-rending, darkly comic, and entirely absurd at times.

White Oleander - Janet Fitch

One of the most poetic novels I’ve ever read. A young girl navigates a series of foster homes while her mother is in prison for having killed her partner. Something about this book feels like leaving candy floss to melt on your tongue. The character of the mother manages to be simultaneously alluring and disgusting. As a reader, we buy into the enigma of her; we desire her; we almost forgive her. And we watch as Astrid, the daughter, emulates some of her mother’s mistakes, and makes some of her own. We watch her suffer, grieve, fuck, and start to bite back.

“Depression is humiliating. It turns intelligent, kind people into zombies who can’t wash a dish or change their socks. It affects the ability to think clearly, to feel anything, to ascribe value to your children, your lifelong passions, your relative good fortune. It scoops out your normal healthy ability to cope with bad days and bad news, and replaces it with an unrecognizable sludge that finds no pleasure, no delight, no point in anything outside of bed. You alienate your friends because you can’t comport yourself socially, you risk your job because you can’t concentrate, you live in moderate squalor because you have no energy to stand up, let alone take out the garbage. You become pathetic and you know it. And you have no capacity to stop the downward plunge. You have no perspective, no emotional reserves, no faith that it will get better. So you feel guilty and ashamed of your inability to deal with life like a regular human, which exacerbates the depression and the isolation. If you’ve never been depressed, thank your lucky stars and back off the folks who take a pill so they can make eye contact with the grocery store cashier. No one on earth would choose the nightmare of depression over an averagely turbulent normal life. It’s not an incapacity to cope with day to day living in the modern world. It’s an incapacity to function. At all. If you and your loved ones have been spared, every blessing to you. If depression has taken root in you or your loved ones, every blessing to you, too. No one chooses it. No one deserves it. It runs in families, it ruins families. You cannot imagine what it takes to feign normalcy, to show up to work, to make a dentist appointment, to pay bills, to walk your dog, to return library books on time, to keep enough toilet paper on hand, when you are exerting most of your capacity on trying not to kill yourself. Depression is real. Just because you’ve never had it doesn’t make it imaginary. Compassion is also real. And a depressed person may cling desperately to it until they are out of the woods and they may remember your compassion for the rest of their lives as a force greater than their depression. Have a heart. Judge not lest ye be judged.”

—

EVERYONE NEEDS TO READ THIS.

Depression is not a synonym for being sad or having a bad day/bad week.

(via stuck-in-the-labyrinth)

I totally forgot to post the whole thing ! Here’s my piece for @sibzine , the Sand Snakes from asoiaf. It was awesome sharing a feature with all those cool folks !