Customer Reviews

Sick Notes

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While living in the Manchester area, I've been trying to keep a catalogue of all the places in Manchester I go to: the restaurants, the bars, the book stores, shops, etc. I've been taking photos and notes of the various places I frequent on my day, marking up maps and tour guides, keeping tickets and souvenirs, trying as best as possible to make a complete inventory of everything, to tuck the entirety of the city into my pocket at neatly as possible for the long ride home. Silly me. All this time, I've been doing all this work, and really all I had to do was read Sick Notes.

Sick Notes is what The Bell Jar would have been if it was written by Elizabeth Wurtzel, had Lizzy been raised in Manchester instead of New York City--the same multi-syllabic vocabulary, the same self-centered point of view, the same strange and abrupt ending. The heroines even share the same name (Esther), the same career ambitions (writer), and are obviously thinly-veiled references to the author's real life. In fact, at one point in Sick Notes, Esther comments that she dislikes her long, cumbersome name--a description that hardly fits "Esther" but suits "Gwendoline" just fine. Both have absent fathers, demanding mothers, and estranged brothers. Both wander around in the same pallor of depression, others lives whirling about them, in Plath's original phraseology, "like the eye of a tornado". Both have a terrible taste in men, dating men that fancy them but which they don't fancy, with an eye for older men of loser virtue.

The difference is that Plath's was a neat and tidy package of a story, planned and worded pedantically. (Several biographies mention that when writing, Plath was anal-retentive about word choice, to a fault. She would pour over her work with a thesaurus, making sure each word was the perfect choice in tense and usage and that no other word would do in its place.) With Plath, everything happens because she intended it to happen, because it is symbolic or significant to the development of the character. Everything is crafted almost to excess. This may be her life story, but the details that need changing have been changed so that in the end, reality gives way to the story. Nothing is accidental; everything's designed.

Riley will have none of that sort of structure, thank you. Like Elizabeth Wurtzel's more drug-fueled writing, Riley just takes her life, changes the names, and runs with it. Sometimes, the narrative reads more like The Walking Tours of Manchester, detailing street names and book shops and cafes with anal retentive detail to which is on what street without much reason other than the character is walking this way, so might as well be as true to life as possible. By about the third time she mentions that the Central Library is on St. Peter's Square, you get it, but she mentions it again anyway because that is where it is.

Like Wurzel and Plath, Riley's Esther (and by extension, one can only assume Riley herself) has an unnamed, undisclosed mental disorder. She pisses on the carpet and calls it "expressing herself". She rolls plates down the hallway when she's bored. She smashes a tea kettle. She takes care to dress in the most vintage, indie-chic clothes she can find while gawking at the goths who dare to dress for effect. Her red ballet-shoes and green "Edith Wharton look" isn't about looks. Its about...well...not looks. Nothing superficial like that.

Like Wurtzel and Plath, she has a friend from school she gets along with, though unlike Plath and Wurtzel, this friend isn't ditched one third of the way through. She also has a bit of boy trouble. Like her namesake, Esther falls for a guy but cannot reconcile that he is a player (or, if Katie Couric is to be believed, a "man-ho".) So instead, she settles for a guy that's after her but whom she cannot really care less about. Along the way she stumbles, she blunders, she goes crazy and stuff, and that's the extent of it.

You see, the real difference between a coked-up Lizzy or electro-shocked Esther and Esther of Sick Notes isn't in the details, the names and places and times and substances abused. It's the resolution. Wurtzel and Plath try to leave you with some sense of resolution, with a sense of hope, that they're going to at least make the attempt to move forward, plow their way out of that tornado's eye and into the whirling, exciting world around them. But not Riley's Esther. She just keeps on standing still while the world buzzes around her, a static character that cannot or simply will not change.