Grab Instantly Your Voice In My Head Drafted By Emma Forrest File Format Copy
I wasI started reading every book about unhinged, self harming and/or eating disordered young women I could find, Once of them was Emma Forrest's second novel sitelinkThin Skin, I checked it out of the library a dozen times before buying a copy, which is still, well thumbed, on my bookshelf, All this is by way of saying that it's hard to evaluate Your Voice in My Head objectively,
A lot of the book will seem very familiar to anyone who's read sitelinkThin Skin, the main character Ruby was obviously based heavily on Forrest's own experience.
But while Thin Skin's chief failing was a its ending Your Voice in My Head takes us beyond that point to the necessary work of trying to get better properly.
Forrest is by turns both selfdeprecating and selfindulgent, I imagine that some readers will find this irritating but I find it quite charming,
I'm not sure why she bothered concealing Colin Farrell's identity, Maybe it was an attempt to be classy, I suppose it was somewhat successful, For a second I thought about giving this book a
higher rating, because man, it's a memoir and I feel like I am judging someone else's life here and who am I to do so I believe there are books that need to be written and Emma Forrest probably needed to write this book, but I did not need to read it.
Emma Forrest is an English journalist and screenwriter, who has been published by numerous magazines, she has interviewed many reputable people and even dated some.
Her biography reads like a fairytale, but she's also been diagnosed with a borderline personality and has experienced bulimia and selfharming behavior, In this book she writes about the death of her psychiatrist and her subsequent breakup with her partner aka Colin Farrell, as I found out later.
Forrest has a distinctive writing style, which unfortunately, isn't for me, She makes use of a very visual language, but sometimes I wondered if she just wrote something because of the way it sounded and less because of the meaning behind it.
The coffee shop Magnolia has coffee like muddy tears" or "Bulimia is the wicked twin of orgasm" for example, what does that even mean
Her narration is very jumpy, which made the writing feel somehow disorganized and like a ramble to me.
Somehow the book made me think of those people who'll fill every gap in a conversation with words, out of fear the silence that would otherwise follow will be awkward.
Like, she typed up an entire conversation in which her mom tells her how she disliked a cat she saw, because it looked like a snake.
The pointe of the story was that it actually might have been a snake,
"Right now you're depressed about one thing, Before you were depressed about everything, These are good times for you, Emma, "
Forrest is very selfinvolved, which you probably can't blame her for, after all, she is telling her story, It's not a selfhelp book in any way, she doesn't offer solutions or advise at any point, It's bold and brave, yet that leads me to think that this is a book that didn't need to be published, As this book has gotten some positive reviews, people seem to disagree, but I would have thought that there is nothing to gain from reading this story.
I'm left wondering why she wanted to share this with people, This memoir is a navelgazing train wreck of obsession and selfpity from a middleclass product of a tightknit family, Lacking sufficient external reasons to suffer, the author chooses to become her own worst enemy, Mired in narcissism and committed to selfdestructive behavior, Forrest details her cutting rituals and suicide attempts and her dependence on her therapist before building a monument to pain out of a failed romance with bad boy actor Colin Farrell.
Such confessional works only serve to promote stereotypes of women as emotionally disturbed creatures with love addictions,
This was another book I reviewed for Elle magazine, which seems to highlight literary wallows and promote memoirs by "victims" more than any other types of nonfiction.
Chaotic. At turns selfindulgent and sharp, After finishing Your Voice in My Head and perusing the Goodreads reviews, I was fascinated to see how many people found this book wildly offputting.
I think working with my own patients with borderline traits and having no context for the writer /her celebrity connections was helpful, This is one case where I wish we could give ratings in halfstar increments three is too much, two too little,
I'm attracted to memoirs, I'm intrigued by mental illness, it's debilitation and it's manifestation: namely, addiction, In the case of this book, said addiction is selfinjury and bulimia, It seems Emma's to call her 'the author' is too academic 'Ms, Forrest' too austere initial intention is to chronicle her battle with these compulsions, along with a touching homage to her late therapist, Dr, R, to whom she gives almost exclusive credit for helping her conquer her mania, Got it. Ready for it. Go.
I will admit, roughly the first half of the book had me hooked, Though it seems many other readers were not enamored with Emma's writing style, I liked it: as a whole I found it casual enough to invite but not insult, while many passages wooed me with voice and language complex enough to impress, but not patronize.
In terms of a writing opinion, I enjoyed Emma's tone and would read more of her work,
However, the content quickly became an issue, While I can appreciate the tragedy of loving amp losing who can't that's not why this book piqued my interest, And while I'm as interested in celebrity encounters as the next person I quickly sour from namedropping, Combine the two, and you have a great majority of this memoir: brief, ineffectual exchanges with local actors and musicians, and a tumultuous but tiresome love affair with a dashing, surreptitiously nicknamed actor.
I was hoping for a dissection of depression, or of cutting, or of bulimia, or of mania, I was hoping for an overview of therapy, or an analysis of Emma's specific relationship to Dr, R. I even hoped there might be a glimpses on writing itself amp it's involvement with depression, These components were depressingly absent,
Ultimately, I was compelled by her struggles but quickly alienated by the stories she chose to tell, Her bipolar disorder never throws her writing or success into question by her account, she remains wildly successful throughout the majority of the book, Her cutting is stark and severe, but she never discusses how it helps her, or why it is her recourse similarly, her bulimia quietly fades into nothingness.
What I DID learn, however, is that Colin Farrell text messages a lot, may or may not have some neurosis of his own, and at one point purchased a cute baby coat for a baby that didn't yet exist.
This is a book about a woman's struggles, and while she's absolutely free to write about whatever she wishes I almost feel manipulated, as if she used her mania as a cloak in order to pen a kiss and tell.
My boyfriend had a writing professor in college who said: "Don't write about your dead grandma because I don't want to give you a D on a story about your dead grandma.
"
I should maybe alter that to: "Don't read memoirs with mentally ill protagonists because I don't want to give someone a D on a story about suicide attempts, cutting and bulimia.
" Especially not someone who has already been pummeled with toxic internet sledge by Colin Ferrell fanatics who found her too fat, too ugly to be the actor's girlfriend in the latter part of thes.
Emma Forrest's memoir "The Sound of Your Voice in my Head" is billed as a love letter to Dr, R, the therapist who, for the most part, kept her off the ledge and helped her cope with lifelong demons that were pushing her to end it all.
It is also about those demons, But mostly it is about her relationship with a character she calls GH "Gypsy Husband", who is, according to the giant decoder ring in the sky, that easyontheeyes, hardontheheart actor Colin Ferrell with whom she she was in a relationship for somewhere between six months and a year.
Dr. R dies in a way that is sudden to his patients he hadn't told them about the lung cancer right around the same time that GH tells Emma he needs space and that, oh yeah, the baby they had planned on making, Pearl, is going to be a nogo.
Emma Forest's story starts with Ophelia, the painting she regularly visits at the Tate in London, She's a teenaged girl sitting in front of it weeping, Scanning the background of the painting by Millais for a super secret man in the bushes who will emerge and save the woman in the water.
This is an easy metaphor: Our protagonist will spend the rest of the book looking for a dude in the bushes to save her,
She's young, but already a rock journalist and novelist, when she moves to New York City, which seems to pull her issues to surface level in a way that her mother likens to a fever breaking.
There is bulimia and there are instances of cutting that are coaxed along by a boyfriend who shares this predilection and spends time with her in the bathroom and in bed carving into her flesh.
She lands in Dr. R's care, which is immediately followed by a suicide attempt which is followed by a more earnest attempt at healing,
The second half of the book is GHheavy, This long distance, text heavy relationship that had Mr, H sending her gifts from location, including a worn Tshirt with a poem written on it, They are talking through the building of a life together, despite the negative online critiques she is receiving from the kind of people who post anonymous comments on celeb gossip websites.
The writing is nice, Sometimes even funny. The story is interesting in that way that all stories about being one fistful of pills and a warm bath from a funeral dirge are interesting but also quite similar to everything that is shelved around it.
The protagonist, however, is a little hard to take, She never misses a moment to point out a chance meeting with an unnamed famous writer, a named famous former White House intern, or the story about the time she told Brad Pitt before interviewing him that her boyfriend was way hotter than him.
During a session with Dr, R, Forrest mentions the band Coldplay,
"OK. Fine. You're seeing one of them" He asks,
"Hell NO! Jesus, Dr, R! Why do you assume that"
"Track record, "
Barf. I've spent a lot of time this past week thinking about what it is about namedropping that is so insufferable and have come up with this: It isn't, per se.
It is when there is a feeling that the namedropper is using the roster of Page Sixers to somehow validate her story, In postpublication interviews Forrest has said things like: It's not necessarily Colin Ferrell that I'm writing about, I date a lot of movie,
Forrest is a good writer, descriptive and thoughtful, Sometimes even funny. At one point she writes about a random man she is diddling:
"The cat rescuer comes back for me, once, twice, We don't know each other's number, he just appears, Each time I am caught unawares and wearing something more schlumpy, bizarre and unflattering than the last, Like I have on a poncho and worms are coming out of my eyes and one of my arms is made out of Dudley Moore.
"
Dudley Moore. But she shoots herself in the foot by leaning too hard on the tellall side of the story, The I'm hanging out with a famous writer and we are writing together in this cabin and he's downstairs and I'm downstairs and he's famous and I'm singing and he comes upstairs and tells me to stop singing so loudly.
. . moments that she can't resist finding a way to drop into her story, I'd love to see something written by her and maybe this exists, but I doubt it that doesn't include a lick of her own life.
.