There was little on offer in the way of psychotherapy
There was little on offer in the way of psychotherapy.Gradually, over two slow, dreadful years, Fiona Shaw discovered her own medicine, and this is it: her book. As she retreated deeper into an agony of despair, crawling into corners in raw terror, starving herself, drawing her own blood with her nails and teeth, she was hospitalised (with her baby) and treated with (mostly useless) drugs and (always appalling) ECT. Fiona Shaw’s account of her post-natal psychosis is painstakingly recontructed from the black, self-lacerating oblivion into which she sank after the birth of Jesse, her second little girl, and it is courageous, timely and necessary. You might like this state of things, but you are not abnormal if you don’t.
More severely, having a baby can cause a woman’s sense of herself to collapse altogether. Why should we – necessarily – feel happy when we have babies? Babies torpedo our freedom and our sleep, our identity, libido and earning power, our adult relationships and our last hope of keeping the bathroom tidy. Each cover sports a perfect, grinning, dimpled infant and a perfect, serene and joyful mother; from Hello to Vogue, a cute baby is brandished as the ultimate accessory, parenthood advertised as the ultimate joy
It is a preposterous distortion of normality.
LOOK in any newsagent, at the gleaming ranks of magazines dedicated to motherhood and babies. But there have been few books which have expressed so vividly the personal experience of war and its aftermath, or rendered so honestly the journey necessary to retrieve the human being from the ghost.. Even the issue of race is strangely submerged in French’s narrative. The larger issues of the war – like the Vietnamese themselves – barely figure in Patches of Fire.
Fuck it, I’m writing anyway.”There have been greater narratives of Vietnam, and of survival in post- Vietnam America. Vernon still has to die, the wind is going to blow through Glickman’s hair, I am going to be afraid again. “I want to see Vernon’s face in the night, make it into a portrait with words I want to bring that time back but I know I can’t change it. I want to draw it with words, draw the feelings out of it, draw the feelings into little words.” As a torrent of words flowed, French both resurrected and laid to rest his tormenting ghosts. Gets ugly yellow, green, purple, black lookin’.”Redemption came suddenly and unexpectedly One day he felt a compulsion to write “I want to put the stuff I see in my mind on the page. I don’t want to kill nobody but I don’t want to be dead like this Dead stuff just stinks, turns ugly colours. But he was no more successful in his next job in keeping back the demons of the past.By the mid-Eighties there was nothing left for him to drift into, and he simply shut himself into his room and his memories “I’m a ghost, fucked up my chance at livin’ I’m hurtin’ and I can’t make it go away.