Like many writers, I struggle to manage accounting. The only inventory that comes naturally to me is writing books, this interior work of zero use to the local council. I was young when I learned how alarmed one should feel by the arrival of bills, any letter without a handwritten address experienced as body shock. But through my parents I learned that female artists can process these sorts of anxieties through their work. My dad took me, as a kid, to see Tracey Emin at the Tate. My mum accompanied me to Alice Neel, Louise Bourgeois and Sophie Calle.
A decade ago, at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, I went alone to see Kara Walker’s My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love. I sat on the leather bench reading her righteously wounded break-up letter, and sobbed. Because it was on the wall. So it must mean something. I didn’t mean anything in the world yet and I didn’t mean anything any more to the person I’d loved. But her devastation was in a museum, framed. And that was a big piece of getting me through. Art can do that. You can ride its coat-tails until you find your feet. I went home and started writing my memoir Your Voice In My Head, a call and response – even if she never reads it.
I later returned to the exhibition with my mum. This was before Walker made her installation A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, when the attention of Jay-Z and Beyoncé and making art in the age of Instagram took Walker to another echelon of fame.
The centrepiece of that earlier Hammer show was a series of decoupage depictions of the rape and violence key to the slave trade. The cutouts had nightmarish stereotyped “negroid” features – like a black man floating by his enormous genitals. There were short films with shadow puppets. In terms of “the medium is the message”, using this painstakingly delicate art form to capture the chaotic evil of slavery was both disturbing and brilliant, and had an influence both on Donald Glover’s This Is America video and the 2021 reboot of Candyman. In other corners of the show, the art was about sexuality so personal as to feel (at least to some) mortifying.
Back then, my mum could still walk well and we each walked a circle in different directions, meeting back at the start.
“I think she’s a genius and I think … she might actually be mad.”
I noted the hesitation in her voice at raising this possibility – she who had witnessed my eyes rolling in the back of my head when I was 23, having been sectioned. I remembered, before I ended up on that ward, how I’d burned my hand on a restaurant radiator during a dinner because I couldn’t feel anything, and again how I had destroyed the family bathroom, really effectively bringing destruction even to its ceiling – a kind of unwanted performance art. Dad, who emerged from this installation, crying, held me and said, “It’s just objects.”
In the notes from various doctors of what was actually wrong with me, the thing I wrestled with hardest was being diagnosed with having dissociative personality disorder. When I was in a period of stress, it could be hard to tell what was happening to someone else from what was happening to me. This could be bewildering and dangerous, since the point of reading a book or seeing an art show or listening to an album is to be absorbed. Family and friends still pre-screen things for me. I can’t watch Black Mirror. I found that out the hard way mid-episode (Fifteen Million Merits, starring Daniel Kaluuya).
My earliest memory of this cellular reaction to art was reading Raymond Briggs’s Fungus the Bogeyman late at night, the pop-up snot stretching between my hands and, though I was eight, thinking “this is actual derangement”. I was nervous that the snot was infected with madness.
At 13, David Lynch’s Twin Peaks meant so much to me that when, in the finale, Agent Cooper was trapped in the underworld, I had a breakdown, was given Valium and kept off school. Lynch is, of course, a famously midwestern, even-keel meditator. I don’t know what Walker’s life is like, how settled she feels in herself. But I do know that when older black artists criticised her for being married to a white man, she went and made art about that.
In my early 30s, I walked into one of my favourite LA landmarks, Astro Burger, and as my boyfriend of the time, who was a soothing schoolteacher, held the door for me, he paused and turned.
“When you walk through the door you’re going to see someone who means a lot to you. Take a breath.”
On the other side was Lynch. Of course he loved Astro: the red vinyl banquettes, Formica tables and jukeboxes were so Twin Peaks. I thanked him for all he’d given me through his films and told the story of why I never finished the season finale of Twin Peaks. Lynch held his hamburger in the diner air, locked eyes with me and said: “And I want you to promise me that you never will.” I never imagined that the creator of the disturbing images would also protect me from them.
What I understand, as the years have passed and my mental health problems have come and gone, then come back again, is that there’s art that can make you feel seen in a comforting way – and there’s art that to see yourself in can be confronting, an emotional inventory too far.
So when I joke that “I have a hard time with accounting!”, there is within it for me, the possibility of madness and no return. I don’t feel that day-to-day but I feel it in some domestic moments and in some art. And then I go to the supermarket, because we need milk for breakfast, and that was what art was for, and this is what milk is for. They are not the same.
