Book Review : Elle Nash - Gag Reflex (2022)
I tend not to trust people if I don’t see their kid within. It’s not that I want to surround myself with only boundless and whimsical individuals. Being young can suck and it comes with its own brand of melodramatic suffering. Since you don’t have any experience, everything hurts more than it should. Since you have no real responsibility, it feels like you don’t have control over anything. I recognized this peculiar brand of suffering in Elle Nash’s upcoming novel Gag Reflex. It did because she lived it too.
Gag Reflex tells the story of Lucy. An anoexeric teenager living in 2005 who is trying her damnedest to survive her day-to-day existence and chronicling her easting disorder through livejournal entries. Lucy is in love with Brian, but she’s attracted to Mike. She wants to be loved and lifted over her ordinary misery, but she doesn’t love herself enough to make it work. With every entry, Lucy digs deeper and deeper for answers within herself, while her eating habits spirlal out of control.
Obsession, Repetition and Fragmentation
One aspect of Gag Reflex that stands out is the blend of form & function. I wouldn’t call it a proper novel because it has such a threadbare story it keeps jumping in and out of and I wouldn’t call it poetry because it’s not focusing on language, but it’s a happy hybrid of both. Elle Nash shrewdly uses repetition as a mean to underline her protagonist Lucy’s obsessive behaviour patterns. Something as simple as daily calorie count, if repeated enough, eventually tell their own heartbreaking story.
Same goes for the chat sessions with the other teenagers suffering from eating disorders. Reading one of their shared imaginary food orgies feels voyeuristic and exploitative, but reading them over and over again gives you a different perspective on their suffering. It highlights the disconnect between their body image and their physical needs. Self-deprived of food, their minds wander onto psychedelic feasts that sounds increasingly more gross. They start sounding creative and end up sounding like what they are: sick.
Last, but not least: fragmentation, I believe, is an important part of what makes Gag Reflex work so well. Lucy keeps hopping between three identities: lovesick teenager, disciplined self-destructor and compassionate friend. This is how teenagers are. They’re experimenting with who they want to be. How they want to act with the world and what makes Lucy so interesting is that one changes the other, which changes the other over time. Her personality is not static and her mind and body end up on collision course.
The Breathtaking Agony of Being Young
Outside of Elle Nash’s masterful usage of literary form, Gag Reflex is moving simply for its emotional understanding of what it means to be young and why it’s so difficult. I never had an eating disorder, but I understood what tore young Lucy apart. Teenage years aren’t an endless bacchanalia of house parties and awkward sex. At least not for everybody. Sure, it can feel great not having any meaningful responsibilities, but it also means you don’t have anything meaningful either. You don’t have anything to invest yourself in.
What happens if you don’t like that self and you don’t have anything to challenge your perception? Well, you start attacking it. You attempt to transmogrify your reality by any means necessary and Lucy chose to alter her body. She tried to manifest the reflection of another person in the mirror. I’ve never chose food deprivation to make it happen myself, but I can’t say that I haven’t tried to do it in other ways. Being young fucking suck if you’re not born around the right people and Elle Nash knows a thing or two about that.
*
I really liked Gag Reflex. It has some very powerful passages (especially in the livejournals) and some overarching arguments that are almost just as deep. Its eclecticness and manic identity won’t be everybody’s cup of tea, but has a strong heart amidst of the insecurities and the food splurges. Gag Reflex is an emotional whirlwind that will quickly lose those the-plot-and-entertainment people, but that will draw in the people who are meant to be drawn in. It’s lean, loud and emotionally on the edge. Pre-order it here.
Elle Nash, I see your kid within.
