The Monster Within
Mikaella Clements & Onjuli Datta
It’s hard to pick when the voice changes — that’s the problem. We are both writers, and anxious ones at that, with sprawling internal monologues, a cacophony of different opinions and versions of ourselves all eager to assert their point of view. Everyone has some kind of internal monologue, albeit in surprising variations (one of our mothers once said that her internal voice speaks in third person, like an abstract observer narrating her thoughts). They’re lifelong, familiar companions. So it’s difficult to pick out the wrong thread, the moment in our rambling first person when another voice creeps in. Sometimes we only notice a shift when we realize that for the past little while, most of what we’ve been thinking about is how terrible we are.
The monster in our new novel, Feast While You Can, first appears as a voice in our heroine’s head. Angelina, like all classic horror protagonists, is playing with fate: larking about in a cave, calling over the edge of a deep pit, urging whatever lurks below to come up and say hello. And then the pit replies. Good Joke, it says. Only she can hear the tremor, sonorous and oily, lodged in the back of her skull. Once it starts talking it doesn’t want to stop.
Our monster becomes many things and exerts its force in different ways. But first and foremost it is a voice, held somewhere in the back of Angelina’s mind: conversational, sometimes even friendly. It cannot be trusted. It knows everything about her and takes a cruel delight in her darkest memories, with a knack for finding the worst and most humiliating moments from Angelina’s life and forcing them up to the surface.
We knew, as we were writing it, that this voice didn’t come out of nowhere. Perhaps it sounds familiar to you, too. The most accurate term we’ve found for it is depression brain: the bleak voice that creeps into your head during a downward spiral, when everything is dark and hopeless and cold. The one that pokes and prods at your failings and then speaks comfortingly of self-destruction, punishment and pain. It’s a companion that arrives at two a.m. with a long, cheerful list of your missteps, your embarrassments, your cruelties accidental or not. It’s the low, nasty sneer inside of your head, and the morning that started so bright has turned into gray, and now the afternoon is gray, and everything is gray, and it’s your fault.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, we wrote this novel deep in lockdown, and while the pandemic never appears in our 90s nostalgia ride, it makes its presence felt. We tend to conceive new projects around a central mood, an impulse that will form a baseline for all the other impulses and motivations that will follow from that initial trigger point. For our first book, The View Was Exhausting, that mood was exhaustion (shocker!). Another project became quickly focused on anxiety. As we wrote Feast While You Can, we were fixated on dread.
And no wonder! Like everyone else we were locked up, alone, far from our families and isolated from our friends. The future, that clear and thundering path we had been sprinting on for our whole lives, had suddenly sunk into an abyss. There was no clear way forward, no clue as to what the world might look like in a week, or a month, or a year. Depression seemed an unavoidable state of mind. In the deep Berlin winter, we both sank into our ill feelings, separately and together. One of the saving graces of our situation was the ability to commiserate with each other and admit out loud: I have this voice in my head telling me that everything’s not going to be okay. It says everything is my fault.
The monster’s voice in our novel reminds us of the ones we were both hearing around that time. It follows Angelina home and to work, it hovers in the background of her interactions with her friends and the woman she’s falling in love with. It mocks her when she’s scared: Don’t Be Such A Baby. It takes claustrophobic control of her surroundings, refusing to let her leave her increasingly threatening hometown (there’s those lockdown vibes again, creeping into our prose). At the same time, it can provide comfort, play at kindness, make her offers that are hard to refuse, make her want to please it. It takes control when she is too frightened to think for herself, and then it instructs her how to respond. You Can Say Thank You For Helping You Out. Toward the end of the novel, when things are starting to fall apart, the monster calls her a good girl. More than one reader has found it tantalizing. Is it weird that I think the monster is kind of hot?? one friend texted us. It was not weird at all, really; the monster is controlling and quick-witted, playful and dangerous—qualities that we tend to find reluctantly appealing.
Writing a book is hard but our monster’s voice came easy, probably because it had been bitching at us in one way or another all our lives. Once it arrived, we became strangely infatuated with it. As our heroine Angelina discovers, it is a wonderful thing to confront your demon head on. We let it get sharper and fiercer. We gave it all the powers we feared our depression might have over us, hurting us and the people we love, stealing our memories and our futures, cutting off our voices and controlling our bodies. We threw it into the world of our lesbian pulp novel, where it seethed among all of the things we adore: feral femmes, hot girls in white T-shirts and blue jeans, buzzcuts, driving too fast on country roads, getting drunk at casinos, eating cherries, fucking in secret, all the things that make life worth living. It felt good to put our depression voice in there, amidst the list of other good, dangerous things. It felt mildly cathartic. Plus, we knew that it could be scary, because sometimes that voice scares us.
It’s lovely to imagine that transforming our depression brain into a fictional monster could defeat it, a kind of imaginative antidepressant, a magic cure. Of course, it didn’t work out like that. But there’s something satisfying about having had it under our grip, three hundred-odd pages where it belonged to us, instead of the other way round. A brief, frightening rodeo, turning the thing that most regularly upsets us into something frightening but also campy and amusing and even meaningful. And then it slunk sulkily back from whence it came. You’re A Bad Person, it says. Yeah, yeah. We know.
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