Missed steps on painful and tormented path
The Age
Saturday February 19, 2011
YOUR VOICE IN MY HEADBy Emma ForrestBloomsbury, $29.95REVIEW LIZA POWERTHE relationship between a patient and her therapist can be a difficult one to articulate. Their exchange is based on shared endeavour; in essence, to untangle the former's patterns of behaviour and help them understand why they do the things they do. While the therapist has the luxury of distance, the patient must interrogate her own actions. It's an exercise that's intimate, complex and intense, driven as much by confusion and frustration as desire, helplessness, hurt and relief.This process makes compelling fodder for the brilliant HBO series In Treatment, whose protagonist, a psychotherapist (played masterfully by Gabriel Byrne) sets about excavating the force and frailties of human nature, unpacking layers of emotion and dimensions of his patients' characters as he goes. And while it would be foolhardy to expect a biographical tale to deliver the same level of coherence, epiphanies and neatly tied loose ends as a television series, it's not too much to expect a story based around a patient and her therapist to deliver insight how else should a reader relate or empathise with the tale at hand?Described variously on its jacket as a "memoir" and a "modern-day fairytale of New York" (it feels more like a harried nightmare), the "voice" in the book's title is that of Emma Forrest's long-time psychiatrist, Dr R. The two met in New York when London-born Forrest, a talented, witty and accomplished journalist (and later novelist and screenwriter), was 22, suicidal, bulimic and cursed with a penchant for self-mutilation and cruel men. Dr R "rescues her", although the nature of this rescue is not meaningfully discussed, and then later dies; the book is an ode to the eight years she spent as his patient, the feelings of loss and betrayal she felt upon hearing of his death (he never told her he was ill) and the discovery that hers was not the only life he had saved.But you can't write an ode to a man about whom you knew nothing a therapist's plight is to listen rather than divulge and while Forrest sketches a faint silhouette through tributes written by his friends, colleagues and former patients, we're never left with a tangible sense of who he was. It's a risk to anchor a book on an unknowable, absent hero, just as it is to fill in the gaps with alternately graphic recountings of your life crippled by depression, Forrest swims from incident to accident, thought to despair, face to face, often leaving her reader in a state of seasickness. No help is the book's chronology, which unfurls much like a film script, splintered with flashbacks and collapsed notions of time; her relationship with Dr R lasted eight years, and yet her affair with a famous film star, referred to as GH (consult Google if you must) consumes just as much of the book's time and energy, despite lasting less than 12 months.The book has its strengths; Forrest's writing unfurls with an engrossing, albeit claustrophobic momentum. But between the Hollywood name dropping, the loving portraits of family members, the pain and the personal torment, there needs to be more.In an episode of In Treatment, the two minds seated across from each other on a couch would wrestle the whys and wherefores; the finale for Forrest's book simply sees its flawed princess riding the Staten Island ferry, imagining herself as Ophelia, shaking out her hair and unconvincingly announcing in the third person: "She's stronger than anyone knew." But how did she arrive here? Something's missing.
© 2011 The Age
