Emily's April Recommendations

Notes from a restless month

I am sick of having dreams about this one particular man. A man who I haven’t had an actual conversation with in at least a year, probably longer. Sometimes we run into each other at the pub. Actually, we don’t ever really run into each other - the two of us just stare vaguely above a sea of merry heads. Never making direct eye contact. We are only ever direct with each other in my dreams.

It is an infuriating kind of preoccupation, because I know there will never be any external resolution. I am in a happy relationship, and so is he (at least, I assume it’s a happy one, though of course I would have no idea), so why do I feel the need, after all of this time, to say, hey, can we talk about what happened? I can’t sleep, can we please talk about it.

As such, I have been having restless nights. And I have been doing everything in my power not to race down to the servo, still in my nightgown, to spend about a hundred dollars on a pouch of glorified sawdust that would very quickly go stale, in a shoddy attempt to try to quell the buzzing in my brain. These are the things that have kept me from making bad decisions, and have kept me company on those long nights - and those long days too.

The Kick Inside by Kate Bush

My father came to visit me recently (he lives in Japan; I live in Australia) and he came bearing many gifts, mostly in the form of CDs. Over the past couple of weeks, the CD I have returned to, again and again, is The Kick Inside, Kate Bush’s enrapturing debut album. (Sometimes I listen to it on my portable CD player while walking around town, and it is near impossible to not jig along to her wild musicality in public.) She remains the only artist who can create a worthy adaptation of Wuthering Heights.

Connection by Mary Gaitskill

Whenever I come across a picture of the girl who used to be my best friend on social media - which is always a humiliatingly cataclysmic experience - I return to this piece of short fiction. Connection follows a middle-aged woman called Susan returning to New York, the city she spent her youth running amok in, and reminiscing on the girl she used to be best friends with, Leisha. Their relationship is jagged, intoxicating, beautiful, unhealthy, and, ultimately, doomed. No one writes about the inherent ugliness of being a human being with the same sympathetic clarity as Mary Gaitskill.

Twin Peaks: The Return

This is a flooring dissection of evil, of the cyclical nature of trauma and destruction, of the inability of the modern world to grapple with the irrevocable damage it has done. The Return is a brutalising watch, especially in comparison to the original show. The grainy haze of 35 mm film, the quirky Americana, and the boundless optimism that so defined Twin Peaks, is all gone. Lynch leaves us wondering if it ever really existed in the first place. As such, we are forced to grapple, without respite, with the insidious long-term consequences of misogyny and capitalism, and the marriage of the two. It isn’t an easy watch, but it is forever affecting.

Songs of Love and Hate by Leonard Cohen

My brother bought this for me recently, (I am blessed with family members who find it impossible to walk past a record shop without buying at least one piece of physical media) and it has been the perfect soundtrack to my moody nights: a cold, dark, haunting collection of songs. I was, unfortunately, introduced to this album by An Idiot I Once Dated. He was incredibly bad at showering properly, and at washing even one single dish ever, but he did have an excellent record collection (including a copy of an original Australian pressing of Joni Mitchell’s Hejira which he gave to me for literally no reason). He was the one to first show me the song Famous Blue Raincoat, and I have loved it ever since.

Dead Weight: On Hunger, Harm, and Disordered Eating by Emmeline Clein

Whenever I am in the Bad Zone - which essentially means I am thinking to myself, Hmm, time to start counting calories again and Hmm, time to start saving snapshots of models from the heyday of heroin chic as inspiration - I read excerpts of this book. It is compassionate, urgent, acutely perceptive. Most importantly of all, it always manages to convince me to delete all those evil little calorie-counting apps.

Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen

Anyone who has ever met me in person knows that I absolutely loathe James Mangold’s movie adaptation of Girl, Interrupted. (I wrote an essay about it here.) This is why I am so passionate about recommending Susanna Kaysen’s memoir to as many people as possible. Where Mangold’s film is trite, offensive, sensationalist, and dangerous, Kaysen’s book - about being institutionalised in a psychiatric ward as a nineteen-year-old at the height of the disaffected 60s - is groundbreaking and intelligent. It is so much more than what people would associate with it. And it has been the perfect companion for me when it is dark out, and my mind won’t let well enough alone.

Emily Wilson is a writer and journalist who was born and raised in Tokyo, Japan, and is currently based in Australia. She is a regular contributor to Scarleteen, The Note, and The Music, and has been published online and in print in a range of prominent journals including Overland, Jaded Ibis Press, Hobart Pulp, and more. She is currently writing Beware of the Dogs, a book of musical criticism about the indie-rock artist Stella Donnelly, for Bloomsbury. Read more of her work here.