A conversation with the author of Dispatches From The Couch: A Neuroscientist and her Therapist Conspire to Reboot Her Brain.
When including flashbacks to childhood sexual abuse, Stacey included questions she had at the time. These questions perfectly captured the confusion of the experiences, while at the same time showed just how young she was.
Was I wearing my hair in pigtails? Or did he brush the shimmery strands aside. Was this after my Dorothy Hamill haircut?
There’s a fair amount of self-loathing for her childhood self. Rather than tell the reader this, Stacey lets us into her mind to see the self-loathing for ourselves:
Why can't there be a surgical option to cut any remnants of that chubby little misfit out of my adult self?
Within the walls of our house, the overarching sense that we were a healthy, stable family dissolved overnight when fifth grade Stacey opened her goddamned mouth.
If I could go back in time, I would let him do even worse things if I could tell myself to keep my fucking mouth shut.
So much healing came after the book was published. Stacey’s older sister, at first, said she had no plans to read it because “she already lived it.” Once the book was published, though, she did read it, and the two spoke openly in a way that Stacey said it was the start of a completely new relationship with her sister.
Stacey was most nervous to share the book with her mother. In one scene towards the end, she writes about the time she was in kindergarten and had been recently, repeatedly, sexually abused by her perpetrator, a dean at their church and family friend. The abuse had been going on for some time. On this particular day, Stacey seemed fine in the morning but once she got to school she felt sick, and her mom had to come pick her up.
In the scene, Stacey’s mom is livid with her. She keeps up appearances with the teacher but once their in the car she unleashes on Stacey:
"Why do you keep doing this? Who are you lying to, her or me? What kind of mother sends her daughter to school only to have her say she is sick this many days in a row? If you are sick, you need to stay home in the first place. Why ride all the way on the bus if you are going to tell her your stomach hurts as soon as you get here?! Now Mrs. Conway thinks I am a bad mother!!"
I found Stacey’s mom in this particular moment to be completely relatable. Only Stacey and the reader knew about the abuse. I felt myself in her mom’s shoes, expecting to go about my day as planned and then getting a phone call from the school, and then losing my patience with a kid who claimed to be sick but just seemed fine when she was at home.
I think, in memoir, you have to go all in on sharing the ugly or unlikeable parts of another character. When you try to protect them by skirting around the truth or caveating with explanations and excuses—or worse, skipping parts altogether—it makes those characters less relatable. This one scene and this one paragraph made my heart break for little kindergarten Stacey, yes, and it made my heart break for a mother who did not yet know what was going on, and did not parent perfectly on that day, just like I don’t on so many days. This scene made her mother human.
Books that inspired the writing in Stacey's memoir:
Body Work by Melissa Febos
Whip Smart by Melissa Febos
Wintering by Katherine May
Dispatches from the Couch is now available as an audiobook from Barnes & Noble and will soon be available on all major platforms.