![]() ![]() “I was writing about fear,” she remarks with regards to her studies, “but the writing itself was a way to avoid feeling it fully”. The Fear, itself a survival strategy - a desperate attempt to “negate the pain” of an overwhelming, unbearable reality - keeps on producing new coping mechanisms and displacement activities. Spens discovers how devilishly difficult it is to face up to her demons. In a particularly poignant passage, she goes on a valiant “pilgrimage” to the suburban neighbourhood where she was raped a decade earlier. This book of disquiet orbits a sinister black hole that manifests itself through violent panic attacks on the London underground, however much the author strives to repress it. It is, she argues, bound up with patriarchal values that rely on “terror and everyday fearfulness to persist” as evidenced, closer to home, by her enigmatic, emotionally absent, and virtually mute, father. The Fear - this “perpetual flight or fight” mode - takes on a collective dimension at this juncture. Their essential function is to subsume all her “deeper fears” in a bid to bury them.īack in Scotland, Spens embarks upon a Master’s degree in terrorism studies - a natural choice given the personal war on terror she is waging. Having hit rock bottom, it becomes clear that these relationships are not so much doomed to fail as designed to do so. Addicted to the all-consuming melodrama (and attendant melancholia) of toxic romances, she eventually suffers a breakdown in Paris while working as an au pair: “I opened my arms to an emptiness I could not contain”. In The Fear, Christiana Spens maps out her existential journey through a trauma-induced underworld - a demimonde of the angst-ridden mind - looking to philosophy and politics, art and writing for an “escape route”. Here is my review of The Fear by Christiana Spens, published in The Irish Times on 1 April 2023.
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