Things That Helped: Essays

Jessica Friedmann

Things That Helped: Essays
Format
Paperback
Publisher
Scribe Publications
Country
Australia
Published
3 April 2017
Pages
240
ISBN
9781925321968

Things That Helped: Essays

Jessica Friedmann

Through the tide of hormones surging within my body, and the little runnels of blood, and the sour tang of my breasts, I lay awake, listening, and thinking of breath and of water. I had broken my relationship with sleep.

In this stunning collection, Jessica Friedmann navigates her journey through postpartum depression after the birth of her son. Drawing on critical theory, popular culture, and personal experience, her wide-ranging essays touch on class, race, gender, and sexuality, as well as motherhood, creativity, and mental illness.

Occasionally confronting, but always powerfully moving and beautifully observed, Things That Helped charts Jessica’s return into the world: a slow and complex process of reassembling what depression fractured, and sometimes broke.

Review

Last year I was challenged by Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, a book its publisher categorised as ‘autotheory’, a kind of hybrid of autobiography and critical theory. Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick (which I read when it was republished last year) could also fit this category, though Kraus herself considers her work to be fiction despite the fact that everything that happened in the book ‘happened first in life’. I think I would also place Jessica Friedmann’s collection within this ‘genre-bending’ category.

In this collection of candid essays, Friedmann weaves thinking from the likes of Lacan, Kristeva and Cixous into her own lived experience of postnatal depression, to more broadly consider the onerous challenges of being female, a writer and a mother. While Things That Helped does not push at the boundaries to the same degree as the writings of Nelson and Kraus, it is more accessible in its structure. Friedmann’s deeply personal story takes the reader on captivating digressions, from the intergenerational trauma of Holocaust survivors, to the latest cross-cultural research on postnatal depression. She deftly weaves in popular culture references from Antony and the Johnsons lyrics to her anxiety-induced obsession with the American teen movie Centre Stage. She is careful not to try and speak for all women and I strongly admire her determination to make it her ‘life’s work to bear witness’ to the suffering of other women who have been similarly rocked when their bodies and minds seem to turn against them, or whose stories do not conform to the typical narratives of motherhood.

Autotheoretical literature is an exciting genre and I hope to see more works like Friedmann’s collection reach a mainstream audience in the future.


Kara Nicholson

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