The Fear, a memoir by the author and artist Christiana Spens, opens with an account of the most Parisian of existential crises. A ‘newly heartbroken philosophy graduate’ in ‘the city of Sartre and de Beauvoir’, she is too depressed to get out of bed: ‘It was as if standing was falling, too pointless even to attempt.’ Finally driven outside by hunger, she ends up ‘wandering around a French supermarket wanting to die’. She finds temporary relief in stealing a housemate’s Diazepam pills, but the escape she longs for is love: ‘Nothing worked the way love did’; it was ‘the ideal, the solution, the cure’. Her consciousness of being ‘one more cliché in a city full of them’ only intensifies her agony.
But this book is anything but an assortment of clichés. It roams so widely – narratively, emotionally, intellectually – that it’s almost impossible to categorise. It is a memoir – a powerfully affecting tale of devastation and survival. But it is also a tour around a prodigious array of topics related to the theme of fear. On one page Spens explores the ways in which terrorism is ‘mythologised’ to serve the aims of the powerful; on another she finds a kind of spiritual dimension in masochism, calling it a search for ‘peace and the disintegration of our own egos’. She considers the work of figures from Jacques Lacan to Lana Del Rey, Edgar Allan Poe to Patti Smith. A formidable bibliography includes Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche (although, curiously, no Kierkegaard, the great philosopher of anxiety).
In case it isn’t already obvious, Spens trained as an academic. She recounts how, after completing a PhD on depictions of terrorists in the media, she realised she had been ‘using thinking as an escape from feeling’. Indeed, for all the cerebral energy in this book, its heartbeat is the intimate story that begins, for the reader, with that breakdown in Paris – and which began, for the author, with a series of earlier traumas.
The details are bracing. Her father, sick with cancer through most of her childhood, was ‘always on the verge of death’. One boyfriend was abusive; another died of a crack and heroin overdose. At 19, she was the victim of a serious sexual assault. No wonder she fell prey to what clinicians might call PTSD, but which Spens, giving the condition a philosophical inflection, calls ‘the Fear’ – a ‘haunting, compelling thing… rendering us passive and tormented… and yet fascinated by the depths of its darkness’.
Light begins to break into the narrative when, in her mid-twenties, just a few days after her father dies, Spens discovers she’s pregnant. Once addicted to the analgesic of destructive romance, she finds in her son a ‘new love’ that ‘transformed everything’. Little by little she learns to live with, and even sometimes transcend, the Fear. ‘We eventually find ourselves, and then one another,’ she comes to reflect. ‘The world does not have to be a terrifying place, at least not all the time.’
But Spens doesn’t patronise her readers with a glibly redemptive narrative arc. In one of the book’s most charged moments she goes back to the neighbourhood where she was assaulted a decade earlier, seeking catharsis but finding only a complex mixture of relief and disappointment. There is an allegory for the paradox of much memoir writing here: an attempt to leave the past behind by revisiting it.
‘So can we learn to live with our fears and wounds, and yet live victoriously and nobly?’ Spens asks. The fact she has survived to tell her sometimes harrowing tale, and to pose such a question in the form of this graceful book, is a victory in itself. But The Fear is ultimately brave enough not to provide any simple answers.
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