Emma Forrest - Your Voice in My Head

Copyright Emma Forrest 2011
First published in Great Britain in 2011
by Bloomsbury Publishing
Other Press edition 2011

Lines from On Raglan Road by Patrick Kavanagh are reprinted from Collected Poems, edited by Antoinette Quinn (Allen Lane, 2004), by kind permission of the Trustees of the Estate of the late Katherine R. Kavanagh, through the Jonathan Williams Literary Agency.

Gee, Office Krupke and Jet Song from West Side Story, words by Stephen Sondheim, music by Leonard Bernstein Copyright 1956, 1957, 1958, 1959 by Amberson Holdings LLC and Stephen Sondheim. Reproduced by permission.

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The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Forrest, Emma.
Your voice in my head : a memoir / by Emma Forrest.
p. cm.
First published in Great Britain in 2011 by Bloomsbury.
eISBN: 978-1-59051-447-4
1. Forrest, Emma Mental health. 2. Mentally illNew York (State) New YorkBiography. 3. Mentally illFamily relationships. 4. Love. 5. Psychotherapist and patient. I. Title.
RC464.F67A3 2011
362.196890092dc22

[B]
2010030930

Although the events described in this memoir are true, I have changed or omitted the names and identifying characteristics of certain individuals to protect their privacy.

v3.1

This book is dedicated to:
Joe Wright (a voice on the phone)
And to Jeffrey Rosecan, his wife, and his children.

Settling his bill, he said: Theres a woman still in my room. She will leave later.

M ILAN K UNDERA , Ignorance

I WAS LOOKING FOR WEEKEND WORK , and though it was a Saturday job at a hairdressers I was after, somewhere in my teenage mind I thought that Ophelia might need a handmaiden. So, every day after school, before my mum got home, I would cycle to the Tate Gallery to visit Millais muse.

I didnt want a Saturday job at a hairdressers and bike riding was not my forte, but I was conscious that I was a thirteen-year-old and thirteen-year-olds ride bikes for fun and wash hair for tip money. Later I would understand that disconnect: This is how and what I am supposed to want, and so I will try.

Approaching the Tate, I knew what was coming. I could see Ophelias Titian hair, her white body floating down the river, the flowers around her. Sometimes, when I got there, she was dead. Other times she was still dying and could be saved by someone on the riverbank Id never seen before. Someone Millais had sketched and then painted over, under the pigment, taking shallow breaths so as not to be seena man whod let her act it out, but who wouldnt let her drown.

Though Id never had sex, there were days when Ophelia seemed to be caught in a sexual act, her arms reached above her, her mouth open, beneath an invisible lover. A long time laterafter Id been in loveI knew that she could not let go of his postcoital scent, stronger than the smell of the flowers on the banks as she drifted by. The flowers beg her to stay in the moment. His scent keeps her locked in the past.

Those afternoons, the Tate was populated by a combination of the brightly patterned elderly and young, hip gallery patrons in black (the former keeping out of the rain, the latter longing for rain to get caught in). There was always at least one pickup going on. But mainly, on the leather banquette, in the center of the grand room, Id sit in front of Millais painting, eating a secret bag of crisps, and cry. Salt and vinegar was my downfall. Before the year was up Id be rushed to hospital after eating twenty-three packets in a row. Even today, salty foodsalt and vinegar crisps, marmitetastes of regret.

I knew the painting would make me cry and yet I kept going back. I doodled her name on my notebook at school: O PHELIA , in bubble print. I wanted to be with her constantly, and when I woke up on Saturdays, Id go there again and cry some more. I could never gauge whether I was crying for her or crying for me. It is easy to say in hindsight: I believe that she infected me. I was afraid, at thirteen, that I saw in her my own destiny.

A MAN HOVERS OVER ME as I write. Every table in the Los Angeles caf is taken.

Are you leaving?

My notebook, coffee, and Dictaphone are spread out in front of me.

No, I answer.

Ill give you a thousand dollars to leave.

OK, I say, as I pack up my things.

What?

Sure. A thousand dollars. Im leaving.

He looks at me like Im mad and beats a hasty retreat.

I meant it. He didnt mean it. My radar, after all these years of sanity, is still off when it comes to what people do or dont mean.

My mum calls my cell phone and I go outside to take it.

How do you pronounce Tibin? my mother asks me, as in Colm Tibin, the novelist? This is our daily call, me in America, her in England, every day since I moved here at twenty-one. Im thirty-two now, and shes seventy-one, though she sounds like shes seventeen.

Its pronounced toe-bean. Like toe and then bean.

Thats what I feared, she says. She lets this marinate a moment. Then, No. Not acceptable.

But thats his name! Thats how you say it.

I cant be going around saying toe-bean. It simply will not do.

Why dont you just not say his name?

Hes a popular writer.

Read his books but dont talk about them.

No,I can sense her shaking her headsome situation will arise that requires me to say his name.

I think my mother has the sense of doom, and guilt about the sense of doom, of Jews her age who werent directly touched by the Holocaust. When she was growing up in New York, the first bad thing that happened to her was that Irish children moved into the Jewish neighborhood and stole her kazoo and her sailor hat. She was a fat little girl, guarding the cakes she had hidden in her sock drawer. What was a fat child in 1940s New York without her kazoo?

The second bad thing was that her dad died and then, soon after, her mother, and she was only a teenager and she didnt know how to make toast. So she got very thindeliberately, not through lack of toastand married a much older man. It didnt last. The best thing that happened was she fell in love with my dad.

Once, when Mum and her first husband had long since lost touch and I was new to mania, I tracked down an address for him, whom I had only heard about, and sent him a letter asking him whether or not he was dead yet. Not to be mean, just a manic need to know.

Mum gets anxious very easily. Something that is a source of calm (she watches her cat as he laps the water bowl: Good boy, Jojo! What a good boy!) can turn, like the weather (the cat keeps lapping; her smile fades: Why are you drinking so much water, Jojo? Whats the matter, Jojo? Are you sick?).