Michael Lake Reviews:

Mike Barnes, Sleep Is Now a Foreign Country, Biblioasis, 2023
Steacy Easton, Daddy Lessons, Coach House Books, 2023

Mike Barnes’s memoir of madness begins with a scene of him reading about Picasso’s Guernica when ‘something caused [him] to look up from the book.’ He realizes the date is April 26, ‘[t]he same day as the Guernica attack, exactly seventy years later.’ He experiences some time-space vertigo, is maybe hallucinating and first mentions ‘going insane’ in a footnote. And so begins Sleep Is Now a Foreign Country, a mind-spiraling, free-associating book that eludes easy meaning making. 

The tricky business of writing about madness is whether to portray the going mad or the having been mad. The former runs the risk of inaccessibility, the latter of imposing order on what is inherently a disordered experience. Barnes’s book, to its credit and its detriment, is an attempt to do both at once. Merely 85 pages, the book depicts two psychotic breaks, decades apart. Before the first, the young Barnes knows as a matter of unquestioned fact that he will go mad, and he glumly accepts his fate:

I had left my parents’ house abruptly, taking my shaving kit and a few clothes. Not just to be free of them—I was eighteen—but to find a quiet place where it could happen. I felt a shame about what was coming and for as long as possible I wanted it to happen out of sight…. Something ancient knew all this, perhaps had coded it through millennia, and had procedures even in the midst of chaos.

The book proceeds according to this internal system of logic, where signs of approaching madness—Barnes calls them ‘transmissions’—are hints about an impending event, a big inevitable it. The nature of this event is the book’s main propulsive question, and Barnes builds up to it, or around it, through a series of memories laid out like clues. There is a broken watch, a dream of a childhood crush, another classmate’s markings in the dirt. These memories jump in time, and include seemingly unrelated footnotes, resulting in a disorienting kaleidoscope of anecdotes, each pointing from a different angle towards Barnes’s madness.

Despite the confounding cumulation of scenes in this book, there is a compelling momentum built into Barnes’s narrative, with all action marching towards this mysterious event and the narrator’s acceptance of its inevitability. There is a sense of suspense in the book’s early pages, although it soon becomes evident that a payoff will not be provided in the way we might expect. Barnes is not interested in recounting a linear tale of his descent into madness, where symptoms appear, a mental breakdown occurs and there is some kind of recovery or transformation. Instead, Barnes brings the reader on a journey outside of cause and effect, past and present, even sanity and insanity. The present-day Barnes seems to have no better understanding of his mind than the young Barnes waiting for madness to show up at his door. By the end of the book, it is unclear if the big event has happened, if it will, or if it even matters at all. Barnes has created an unreliable narrator out of himself, where symptoms have become literary devices, and even the most intriguing bits of writing point to an unsolvable mystery. Barnes, at least, seems wholly aware that his book’s framework makes slippery business out of its interpretation: ‘similes, like everything else, depend for their meanings on the frame that bounds them, on how far they’re allowed to go. Meaning is a bonsai operation.’ As such, the frame that bounds Sleep Is Now a Foreign Country provides a tenuous support for its psychic investigation. We learn almost nothing about Barnes outside of his psychosis; his diagnosis, treatment, sanity, personal or professional life are left all but unexamined. We have no context for who Barnes is outside of the mechanisms of his thinking about his own madness. Barnes writes early on in the book, ‘I needed to believe, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that my own life followed discernible patterns.’ However, reading Sleep Is Now a Foreign Country feels like attempting to penetrate a private experience governed by an incomprehensible logic. The prose is often elegant, and the subject matter of madness is rich terrain for investigating the human mind, but it’s ultimately a wild goose chase where the chase happens in a maze, the goose becomes a ghost and the past and present collide.

Where Barnes’s memoir is firmly rooted in impressionistic, elusory meaning, Steacy Easton’s latest collection of personal essays, Daddy Lessons, wants desperately for the reader to understand. The short essays (Easton calls them lessons) are depictions of a child having adult experiences: ones they shouldn’t, ones that are imposed upon them—sometimes violent, sometimes tender—but each functioning as a way to understand sexuality, love, joy and an immense amount of pain. Like many queer memoirs, Daddy Lessons is hyper sexual; the word ‘cock’ appears in the first sentence of the prologue and there are many graphic depictions of sex. However, Easton’s book seems more interested in synthesizing experiences into a sort of philosophy of queer living than in titillating the reader.

Easton’s essays tell the growing up story of a young queer body controlled by a very thirsty mind. We learn that Easton grew up Mormon, was sent to an Anglican boarding school as a young teenager and later sought further extremes of spiritual-cum-physical experiences in the world of rodeos and bathhouses:

I learned that my body was this dangerous feral thing, to be moulded by touch, by violence, and eventually by desire. I was sent away to make me a boy, in order to make me a man; aping the boy, aping the man, a set of ambitions that were shattered, then reassembled, then shattered, then assembled yet again. 

These essays make it at once shocking and relatable how a child can put themselves in so much danger yet still handle the often tragic outcome with such wonder and curiosity. At a young age Easton became aware they possessed ‘a body that seemed to come alive only in the seeking of pleasure,’ and that this pleasure often involved a degree of risk. This led to a life governed by desire, in a world full of men seeking to take advantage of it. 

Easton announces in the book’s prologue: ‘I am writing pornography here. Not only explicit references to sexuality, but a form meant to excite and entice the body.’ This isn’t the entire story, nor is it necessarily a misdirection. To label the book as pornography as such is to define what it does and doesn’t do, and even this categorization is an intellectual act rather than an embodied one. But by squeezing the pornography out of sexual trauma, Easton shows how the discrete parts do not add up to the whole, and the truth exists somewhere between the often contradictory components: 

The violence in the school—none of that I wanted, none of that was under my control, and I had no say in how the Dorm Master touched my body and usurped my desires. But in the privacy of my own head, in those sweet, quiet moments, I could imagine a life where fucking him was an act of liberation. 

All told, this book is incredibly horny and there is some great sex writing, but it is mixed with equal parts cultural references; Foucault, Barthes, Beyoncé and PJ Harvey are just as present as the bodies having sex.

With Daddy Lessons, Easton demonstrates that the body is a text with infinite ways to be read. Pleasure can come from pain, sex is ripe for analysis and it is all rich terrain for self-understanding. It is no spoiler to give away the final line of the book: ‘I know that Daddy isn’t good for me, and I want a Daddy anyway.’ It’s a closing line for the queer ages, pointing to the nuances, contradictions and ironies in a person’s sexual awakening.

—Michael Lake