By Chloe Pingeon.
Stephanie LaCava, I Fear My Pain Interests You (Verso Books, 2022)
Stephanie LaCava’s I Fear My Pain Interests You opens with jarring corporeality. LaCava’s second novel is small: 181 pages of large font. Its unpretentious appearance is mirrored by the narrative’s clipped directness. The book opens with a blank page, then an epigraph.
“Cows are not sentient beings” – Reddit
Beyond this, the story begins. Margot Highsmith is on a plane, and she’s gushing blood. She’s fleeing an older ex-boyfriend named only as “the director” as well as a web of familial attachments, notoriety, and abandonment in New York. She calls herself an actress, although her own public identity is almost entirely derived from her rock star parents and their cult following. Outside of that charmed circle, Margot embraces a self-punishing passivity. Now, she’s on her way to Montana, and she’s bitten her lip to the point of an open wound.
In an uncharacteristic instance of self-perception, the novel opens with a mirror. Margot is in the plane bathroom and through a dirty reflection, she’s observing her own face, marred by the self-inflicted injury. There’s a rare sense of self-recognition as Margot, alone, watches herself bleed, her reflection answering to no one but herself, and her wound existing only in her own awareness. She can’t feel the injury, a condition ultimately diagnosed as congenital analgesia by another pseudo boyfriend who finds a fascination with Margot in Montana, but she seems more irritated than neutral to the gore. If she exits the bathroom bleeding, she will garner unwanted attention. Even alone, she detachedly observes her physicality with only an eye for how it will exist in terms of outside perception.
Sure enough, when she haphazardly cleans herself up and returns to her seat, a woman nearby watches Margot with disgust.
“Lady, your chin, or maybe your nose is bleeding.”
“Lady, you should deal with that.”
As Margot orders food on the plane, she recalls her childhood in a succession of tabloid-like pictures. An outsider’s vision of herself as a child in her mother’s arms being toted, as she describes “like luggage”. These reminisces merge into the narrative of Margot’s childhood, which occupies the first half of the novel.
In the childhood scenes, Margot’s descriptions are vivid and sensory. Remarkably attuned to the nuanced reactions of others to her preformed physicality. Her father holds her in public but leaves her alone on his soundproof stone floor when they are at home. Her mother lets Margot sit on her lap, but any comfort this offers is dimmed by Margot’s awareness of the woman’s frailty. As Margot grows up, and as the flashbacks meet up with the present, LaCava’s writing becomes increasingly disassociated. Margot’s voice and its relationship to the world becomes increasingly distanced. I Fear My Pain Interests You is a vision of a nihilistic/masochistic sensibility. The expected co-opting of her body as a young woman born into a fame that is not really hers is magnified by the fact that Margot lacks her own internal sense of what is right or wrong within her own physical body.
It makes sense, therefore, that where the narrative meets Margot in the present, on the plane, arriving in Montana, she has almost wholly come to embody an essence of self-protective removal. The character that we are met with seems to have gone cold. As she recounts her expulsion from Brown for possession of drugs that she she never really cared to take, her increasing distance from her family, and even her gut-wrenching pinings and betrayals for and by “The Director” and her later boyfriend who she refers only to as “Graves”, she speaks with the passivity of an observer. In the later chapters of the book, as Margot eerily drifts through days alone in Montana subsisting on benadryl and the occasional ice cream bar, she appears to have never been more removed from her own corporeality.
The narrative, too, focuses heavily on Margot’s detachment from her own sensory existence and vulnerability, hovering only briefly on the lapses in her stone façade. Much of the appeal of I Fear My Pain Interests You lies in its sparseness and in its depiction of this very façade, and yet there are times when this façade breaks, and there are times when these breaks feel like the most interesting element of Margot’s otherwise constant coldness. If there is a gap in the novel, it is where the story skips a beat on Margot’s softness, seemingly uneasy about settling on moments that reveal the vulnerability of a protagonist that is characterized above all, as invulnerable.
Margot, for example, is shown to maintain daily phone calls with her best friend, Lucy, who offers Margot poignant advice. Though abandoned by family and acquaintances, Margot is staying in Lucy’s Montana home, and when things become unbearable, it is Lucy who flies to Margot’s rescue. This friendship seems to be genuine and compassionate. It is one of the only things in Margot’s life that feels solid. Lucy, too, is the child of a famous parent (a deceased filmmaker and the original occupant of the Montana lair where Margot is hiding out). Lucy and Margot were briefly classmates at Brown. And yet beyond the bare bone facts, this friendship is never really explored. The phone conversations are referenced, but never, in detail, depicted. And so a degree of dissonance is created between the almost unflinchingly withdrawn Margot that is presented throughout the novel, and the character that is capable of the almost complete openness and vulnerability that is referenced, but rarely truly shown, in her relationship with Lucy.
At times, it seems that Margot’s cool reserve becomes more a matter of authorial convenience than an honest vision of psychological trauma. Margot’s moments of normalcy, desperation, and self-recognition detract from the fated demand for icy withdrawal, and so while LaCava does not entirely deny the existence of these moments of vulnerability, she also refuses, sometimes unnaturally, to settle on them.
Still, the narrative gaps surrounding Margot’s weakness are paralleled by the way in which this vulnerability seems, in her reality, to exist in a void. Margot lacks the ability to feel pain, and so, too, she lacks any internal awareness of what is physically right and wrong. Her physical weakness only exists insofar as it’s perceived by those around her. In Montana, Graves tells her that this numbness is emotional too, and while Margot disagrees, the fact remains that her pain is not her own. Her corporeality becomes entirely disembodied.
I Fear My Pain Interests You gives us a woman who is disengaged from existence, experiencing her life as if she was a bystander. The result is a protagonist whose distance renders her almost neutral. Neither unlikable or particularly sympathetic. Neither healed, or, as the story ends, particularly suffering. There is a nihilism in the lack of resolution. When a person who cannot feel is ignored by the world, does her pain cease to exist at all? LaCava doesn’t seem to think so. The novel ends somewhat suddenly. There is a cautious sort of hope in its abruptness. Margot is still here. Things go on.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chloe Pingeon is a writer and recent Boston College graduate based in New York. Her work focuses on contemporary art and culture, and she is particularly interested in how art can give voice to wider cultural moments and trends. Her work has been published in Expat Press, Maudlin House, Despair Books, Exberliner Magazine, and The Artsfuse, among other publications. You can find her on Twitter @chloepingeon
