Reviews tagging 'Mental illness'

Commute: An Illustrated Memoir of Female Shame by Erin Williams

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nmcannon's review

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dark reflective slow-paced

3.0

My local library has a teeny tiny nonfiction graphic novel section, and, for whatever reason, my brain decided it wanted to shove all of it into its mouth and find out what it is. Thus, lots of impulse borrows of books I may or may not have heard of before and lots of bookish weightlifting added to my exercise routine. Commute was one such impulse borrow.

Illustrator Erin Williams’ memoir chronicles her typical work day, with special emphasis on travel to and from. As she walks and rides the train, various people and objects remind her of her past struggles with self-destruction and self-sabotage. The book uses the misogynistic reality women must navigate to get to work as a spring off point to discuss Williams’ specific struggle within our rape-positive society. 

Commute is…an odd duck of a memoir. I keep thinking back on the title and its mention of “Female Shame.” The dangers of simply being a woman in public are addressed—there’s an especially chilling section where Williams is left with two men alone on the train. What she thinks in this scene is exactly what I’ve thought before. However, travel isn’t the focus of the book. She doesn’t explicitly talk about rape culture, or how it’s a public health crisis, or how men are the #1 health threat to women. Hell, she doesn’t mention the contradiction in how women fear violence from strangers when, statistically, violence comes from people we know. Reading Commute felt like a missed opportunity to me in this regard. Maybe because it’s wisdom I seek. Maybe these are better topics for an essay collection than a memoir.

For every page of train riding, there’s many more pages of Williams’ past attempts at self-annihilation. These parts are where the female shame comes in. Yet, there didn’t seem to be a lot of shame or anything specifically female about it. In the deepest throws of her alcoholism, Williams exhibits a lot of risk-taking behaviors. Is that shame? Is it shameful to have a lot of sex? Is it shameful to have bad things happen to oneself? Obviously not, and it was unclear if Williams thought so. Even in the moment, Williams didn’t want to be doing what she was doing. She wanted to be better. As someone who has tried to yank out any anti-sex sentiment by the roots, these segments felt like they were in a foreign language. I felt like…idk. Yeah, it sucks that happened. But you were really sick and had no family or friends to help you. You were literally insane. Does Williams feel bad all that happened? Is she ashamed? No idea. She definitely feels sad. Understandably.

This potential shame didn’t feel tied to gender either. Anyone would feel embarrassed by nightly blackouts. Left unsupervised, the body does all sorts of goofy things. Once I wouldn’t shut up about how to operate a DVD player. Obviously, what Williams’ unsupervised body did was more dangerous than boring people. Her actions veered into sticky situations of dubious consent, consensual non-consent, or rape. But again, those situations are sticky no matter people’s gender, and nothing to be ashamed of. She was sick! If anything, her male sexual partners should be ashamed for initiating intimacy with someone not in control of her faculties. 

There’s an unaddressed, interesting mental knot Williams wraps herself in. She wants to be “seen” by men (as like, a viable sexual partner, I think?), but men have hurt her more deeply than anything else on the planet. If memory serves, she doesn’t have one positive interaction with a man in the whole memoir. Why would anyone want to be casually acknowledged by people who hurt them? Wouldn’t it be better to be invisible? This bizarre paradox is something many women-who-love-men (wlm) face, but Williams doesn’t delve deeper. These desires and anti-desires are what prompted second wave feminists to write all those separatist treatises and islands full of exclusively women. It’s a whole quandary that I completely side-stepped by marrying not-at-man. Meanwhile, my single wlm friends struggle to find “one of the good ones.”

By the end of the book, I was frustrated. What was the point of sharing she had sex with all these men? What am I learning here? Is this book actually meant for men, so they can learn the effect they have on women? So they can learn the importance of explicit, continuing consent? Or is this sharing story for story’s sake? A “hey guys, check out my cool emotional and physical scars” story? Or a triumphant “you were ill and eventually you got help” tale? Or is it a moral fable for her infant daughter? Reviewer holladazzle summed it up nicely: “I had a hard time reading this and was left wondering why we went a mile wide and an inch deep rather than an inch wide and a mile deep.”

Read Holladazzle’s full review: https://app.thestorygraph.com/reviews/67a1eb56-490c-4e81-bbec-5acbd26d84d5

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