Pain as personal as a finger print
‘When eating a well-seasoned dish, you are not supposed to taste the salt, it should be added only in a quantity enough to balance the other flavours... That is what life is like when you are loved by a wonderful person.”
There are so many more dramatic quotes I could have chosen from Corpsing — descriptions of savage grief, self-doubt, selfharm, mental illness, addiction, assault — because all of these things are discussed, in ways that are often electrifying in their honesty and originality. But in the end, I chose the above. Because while much of the book deals with profound physical and emotional agitation, it speaks, too, of love and the fixed points this has provided for Sophie White, columnist on Life magazine and author. Love for her children, for her husband, her mother and — subject of the quote — her father.
Corpsing begins with White’s father, Kev, dying “for the first time” the weekend her second child was born. His death — or deaths, if one counts the false alarms, and the appalling death-in-life that was the progress of his dementia — and the grief that followed are a kind of scaffolding for the rest of the book. From there, White loops around. Corpsing is a series of essays; each stands alone but is also linked to those before and after it. They weave in and out of each other, doubling back and meeting at points, only to diverge again but building throughout the book, to a profound laying-bare of the pains and aggravations of her life. White is both herself, very much so, and a cipher for a wider, societal aggression towards women.
She describes her first breakdown, after a “bad trip”, and “the new knowledge that my head was capable of such mad horror”. She recalls her teenage years where “I felt the fact of my ugliness as tangibly as a limb”; being sexually assaulted by a man she knew at a festival, and the way that brought back memories of the “Wrong Thing” that happened with two boys aged 10 and 11 when she was four: “They do things to me and make me do things to them,” she writes. No details. We don’t need details — the point isn’t so much what happened as the way White took the shame on herself, even into adulthood when her rational mind told her she wasn’t to blame.
There are lighter moments — not many, and not terribly light, but still — such as the craving for blood that overcame her when she was six months pregnant
(and iron deficient) — a yearning to drink blood, to gulp it, pour it over herself and wallow in it.
An essay about her tangled relationship with her mother that is both hilarious and one of the best attempts to dissect the mother-daughter maelstrom that I’ve read, but truth is, mostly this book is a devastating read. Because White acts out on the canvas of her self, so much of what’s wrong in the world.
There are shades of Emilie Pine’s Notes To Self and Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost In The Throat, but this is very much White’s own book — as personal as a finger print, as detailed as a cross-section. There are bits on the beauty industry’s historic mutilation of women, on art and millennial culture, but the strength and heart of the book is the personal, not the political. Although White is never less than alert to the inevitable intersection of those two things in the lives of women.
There are moments, as a reader, where you will want to reach out and put arms around this person who writes of being so lost, so blind to her own beauty and brightness that she truly, at a cellular level, cannot believe in it. But there is a rigorousness, an un-sparingness to her self-analysis that also demands you hold back.
Because White is not looking for anyone to rush in with props and endorsements, she is genuinely looking to explore, in difficult depth, the manifestation of these feelings. The things they lead her to, the ways in which they trip up her life, and, ultimately, the ways in which she learns to accommodate them: the hard way. Always the hard way.
There are sections I relate to strongly here: the loss of a beloved father at a young age, and White’s dissection of grief in all its pathetic, honourable misery; the insatiable demands of motherhood and the way you can love and long to escape that all at once. In these, I know how hard White hits and how on-the-nail she gets it, and so I am a willing follower into her accounts of things I don’t know — alcohol addiction; the sudden swoops into mental illness; the need to hurt herself that she tempers with a determination to do it in ways her children won’t spot.
So perceptive and rounded are these pieces that I come away feeling I know a great deal about White but also, a great deal more about the topics she writes on. And that, in a world that needs understanding, is something vital.