My week in books
And How Does That Make You Feel? Everything you never wanted to know about therapy,
by Joshua Fletcher
Piglet,
by Lottie Hazell (includes spoilers at the end of the blog)
Last week in a ballet class, I injured my hip: suddenly my schedule of daily exercise (the most significant method I use to find inner peace) went out the window. I tried not to panic, instead using it as an opportunity to carve out more time for reading. Wonderfully, I managed to choose two books that spoke to me profoundly, and I simply can’t move on without writing about them. So here we are, my thoughts on two exceptional books…
I read And How Does That Make You feel?, a memoir and a helpful guide to therapy by psychotherapist Josh Fletcher, and Piglet by Lottie Hazell, a horror/romance/literary novel about a woman’s hunger as she prepares for her wedding day.
Firstly, And How Does That Make Your Feel? The book reminds me of Adam Kay’s This Is Going To Hurt –emotional, funny, personal, informative, all at the same time. I laughed and I cried and I have recommended it to everyone. Josh Fletcher is a psychotherapist who specialises in treating anxiety. I have read a lot of books on psychotherapy, and Fletcher brings a unique, candid and refreshing perspective, deeply respecting his patients’ suffering as well as acknowledging his own struggles. He shares his inner dialogue before, during and after seeing his patients, accepting and acknowledging each voice, even when some of them threaten to derail a session.
There is his analytical voice, there is the voice of anxiety, biology, compassion, the critic, the detective, empathy, and many more. A particularly interesting one is his saviour voice – ‘the desire to ‘save’ a person outside the realms of professional duty’. With each patient he writes about, all of these voices spring to attention, and he has to work hard to navigate his way through them.
While taking us on a moving journey through his own struggles with anxiety, Fletcher humanises the figure of the therapist. By granting us access to his thoughts, the book itself becomes a kind of therapy for the reader. We learn to understand that battling with conflicting thoughts does not need to be self-defeating or self-critical: it can be an opportunity for insight, to learn about oneself. As someone who spends about 80% of my therapy sessions trying to work out what my therapist is thinking (he rarely tells me – or if he does, it’s usually a brief comment on what he’s ‘not’ thinking), to have a therapist’s thoughts presented so openly and courageously on the page was fascinating for me.
There are so many helpful and demystifying moments in the book, including some excellent sections on the origins of anxiety, introjections, emotional conservatism, and ending therapy. Fletcher helps the reader to see that good therapy doesn’t need to be mysterious, and that one is more likely to have a good experience of therapy if the therapist can be open about their modality and the treatment the patient is embarking upon. He writes that ‘a good therapist is one who can acknowledge the limits of their own knowledge and modality (e.g. different types of therapy such as CBT, psychodynamic, humanistic, transactional, metacognitive…), rather than blindly believing that their approach is the saviour of all suffering; and one who is secure enough to understand that a client’s lack of progress is not necessarily due to the client’s failure to engage with the modality.’ In other words, don’t blame yourself if you are feeling stuck in therapy – it doesn’t mean you’re beyond help. I read these words just when I needed them most – thank you, Josh.
On to my second read… I loved Lottie Hazell’s brilliant novel Piglet, even when it was traumatic and terrifyingly stressful. It is a difficult novel to categorise. I began reading the novel assuming it was a dark romance novel about a woman’s relationship with food and with herself, but when I reached half way, the tone changed. I read the second half in bursts of excruciating anxiety: compelling and horrifying, this book spoke to me in a deeply visceral way.
When Piglet (a nickname given to her by her family – alarming in itself and a sure sign that she is going to have a complex relationship with food) finds out that her fiancé has betrayed her, she starts to question everything she ever thought she wanted. As her wedding day draws nearer, she cannot stop eating. While her love of cooking in the first half of the novel fits neatly into her image of herself as an accomplished host, producing gourmet dishes in her beautiful home in a desirable part of Oxford, suddenly everything changes. Food becomes something for her alone, an insatiable hunger, tables groaning with burgers, ordering every dish on the menu, a constant search for food.
Piglet’s relationship with food is far more than comfort eating. It is a rebellion. She eats to assert a part of herself that has been repressed, the part of her that will not conform to societal expectations of what an ideal life looks like. It began when she was a child and she felt compelled to cover for her anorexic sister. But eventually she realises that ‘she had built a life that relied on the mirrors of others,’ and she refuses to accept it. In a deeply stressful scene, she struggles to fit into her wedding dress on the morning of her wedding. Her father is called up to the bedroom. His words are haunting: ‘Oh Pig, what have you done… this is three thousand pounds of dress, duck.’ Because her father has paid three thousand pounds, Piglet is expected to shrink. It gets worse. The dress strains at the seams, the buttons won’t do up, and her father loses it. ‘You couldn’t just control yourself, for once?’
I had to ask myself why this novel had such a powerful effect on me. Perhaps it is memories of childhood, how I was always surprising everyone with how much I could pack away, three helpings of trifle when all the other little girls were barely touching their food. How that was lovely and sweet and acceptable when I was small and thin; how attitudes to my eating changed as I got older, how it was only endearing to eat so much if I was also ballet-dancer thin.
There are so many pressures on women to look a certain way, to fit the dress, to assert oneself but not too much, to eat but stay thin, to be ambitious but in moderation, to desire but within limits. Piglet falls apart under the strain. I’ll admit there were times in the novel when I wanted to shout at her, to tell her to stop eating, to forgive her husband, to fit into the dress, to conform. But I’m relieved she didn’t. She is a stronger woman in the end.
