This collection of short stories, vignettes and remembrances, composed by the revolutionary feminist Shulamith Firestone at the end of a long period of hospitalizations for schizophrenia, was first published in 1998 by Semiotext(e). The avant garde American publishing house is known, in the words of McKenzie Wark, for bringing the ‘enlightened and benighted’ together under one roof.
The texts in the book are meticulous, delicate renderings of the small and absurd details that make up the hours, then days, then weeks and years of life lived either within, or on the boundaries of, institutionalized psychiatric treatment. We meet a cast drawn from Firesmith’s own experiences and encounters who, in their efforts to regain a little human control over their situations, bring to mind the assertion of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor: ‘I woke up and refused to serve madness.’ Their author holds objects and phrases like crystals, up to the light, rotating them until a ray catches the human hope contained within. A bar of olive oil soap, bought to make clinical showers more bearable. The theft of a thermostat dial, so that a patient can sleep coldly enough to pantomime a corpse. The hope of a good sandwich at the end of a case worker’s visit.
