LITMIR.BIZ

PROLOGUE

      The woman’s adventure story—unlike the man’s—often involves an episode of coma, a kind of prolonged death-in-life. From the moment I noticed this, as a young woman, it worried me.

      In Psyche’s version, which I discovered in my early thirties when I myself felt lost, the woman falls into an enchanted sleep. In Dorothy’s Hollywood portrayal, the Kansas girl collapses while crossing a field of poppies. A saturating torpor descends just after the woman has won her prize—exactly when everything ought to be perfect. After all, she’s achieved what the authority figure said was required. Psyche is supposed to fetch a box of underworld beauty. And she does! Dorothy possesses the witch’s broom, at last! So why does their success trigger an annihilating stupor, this triumph of the unconscious, or rather, of unconsciousness?

      And why, for many real women, does something similar still occur, although it’s certainly no longer supposed to, not after the very real alterations that feminism’s achieved? Because, despite everything, it still happens to some of us that we land the job, win the award, celebrate the marriage—and succumb to a certain bewildering joylessness, a familiar sense of fraudulence, an inability to feel the anticipated pleasure. The sensation of being insufficiently alive, of being internally even quite blotto, can afflict a woman, and a man too for that matter, for a month or a decade or an entire adulthood.

      This book concerns experiences of awakening from a numb condition and springing into an enlarged awareness. It is a work of personal (often intensely personal) essays, not academic scholarship, and its focus is the disturbing, buried, radiant aspects that have been disavowed, and what happens when one repossesses them. In my own life, over and over I have struggled to accept emotional reality, tending to choose what I think ought to be true over what is true, as if I would perpetuate a soothing dream. I tend to defer anger, mourning, outsized craving, mess, whatever destabilizes, whatever demands a confrontation because in some profound way I don’t

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