About Marianne Eloise's Response to My Review of Her Memoir, Obsessive Intrusive Magical Thinking

I want to apologize for not having a substantive subscriber-only piece today. Something I have been working on was scuttled by developing events, and I’ve also been caught up with a big important post for Monday. I will have two subscriber-only posts next week, one on Wednesday and one on Friday.

A couple of years ago I wrote a review of Marianne Eloise’s memoir Obsessive, Intrusive, Magical Thinking for UnHerd; you can read the piece here. I did not think much of the book, a memoir that was published when its subject was 28 years old, and said so in the review. (Generally speaking, that is the purpose of reviews, to say what you think.) This past September I posted on the Goodreads page for the book, linking to my original review, as many do. This is, obviously, the function of a Goodreads page, to house community reviews of books. Eloise has responded by accusing me of an inappropriate fixation on her and factual inaccuracy, which are accusations I take seriously.

I had hoped you would grow out of your fixation on me but considering you’re posting this a year and a half after the original piece, that seems unlikely!

Couple of massive factual errors alongside the weird personal attacks in this piece:

- I have never done “loads of drugs” nor does it say I have in the book. Maybe a reading comprehension issue?
- I never moved to LA to become an actor
- I have never dealt with alcohol abuse
- I never shopped around for a diagnosis. I saw a psychiatrist who diagnosed me after multiple days speaking to me and my parent. I barely discuss this process in the book or any difficulties I had growing up because it’s none of your business!

I am a happy autistic adult. I am also happily recovered from OCD and some other issues named in the book. I never once say in the book that I have a bunch of ailments I don’t want to cure, but either way it’s not really affecting you. Get well soon!

I am genuinely surprised by some of these, as they are demonstrably false - I have a searchable copy of the PDF of her book right in front of me. I want to take these claims one by one. First, let’s address the simple claims of factual inaccuracy.

- I never once say in the book that I have a bunch of ailments I don’t want to cure

There is very little else in the book other than recounting mysterious medical problems and expressing ambivalence about them.

Page 177: I stopped eating, really. Everything that passed my lips was meticulously recorded, and I spent hours scrolling through pro-anorexic forums and Tumblr blogs for ideas and motivation. I took cruel photos of my own body that I used to compare with myself, exercising every second I wasn’t working or doing my schoolwork. I withdrew from my friends, avoiding any social occasion that might mean consumption

and

I committed to my blossoming eating disorder with the diligence of a pious saint

Page 13: I’ve had chronic migraines since around the time I started school; blinding, debilitating episodes that made my nose bleed and sent me to bed for days. While these are under better control now, I can’t recall a single headache-free day in my life. Very recently, I was diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a genetic disorder common in autistic people. It affects our connective tissues, and basically means that I’ve felt as if I have the bones, muscles and joints of someone much older for a long time. These things have never not been with me, but in the winter, they all conspire to put me totally out of action.

Page xvi: I will never be able to think about anything once or in a linear, not all-consuming way. It’s all or nothing, baby, it’s Scalextric or it falls straight out of my ears and into a lake below. So I embrace it. My obsessions, especially my special interests, saved my ass through a difficult childhood and a painful adolescence. If I wasn’t able to hyper-fixate on topics, particularly movies and TV, I wouldn’t have a Master’s degree and something some people call ‘a career’. I have ADHD and I’m lazy. I’m a shit student and a worse employee. Without obsession, I have nothing. It’s taken me on journeys across the world in pursuit of the things that interest me, and it always wins against the things that I find hard about being alive

Literally, “I embraced this disorder” is right there on the page.

- I have never done “loads of drugs” nor does it say I have in the book. Maybe a reading comprehension issue?

Perhaps this one was somewhat garbled in the editing process so that illegal drugs and Eloise’s many medications became confused, in which case that is one regret I do have - I can see that the sentence implies a lot of illegal drug use, which is not fair. I would amend that line if possible. There is instead a lot of talk about general licentiousness:

Page 54: I was a walking cliché of a naughty, unhappy teen, a veritable bingo card: self-harm, drinking, smoking, skipping school.

There’s certainly a lot of drugs in terms of medications, as Eloise herself states

Page 179: I have tried every medication, every treatment, every cure

She does smoke weed, which of course is no big deal, but is worth mentioning:

Page 216: We played video games, and drank, and smoked weed, and rolled around in the grass on the Berkeley campus at sunset, whistling through grass and laughing.'

- I never moved to LA to become an actor

Page 89: I first saw acting as a way to get to LA, so I threw myself into it.

So… yeah.

The entire chapter “City of Angels” is about trying to make it in LA. There’s also some Hollywood namedropping, such as page 102, “The next morning, my most unlikely of friends, PJ, better known as Johnny Knoxville, texts me.”

- I have never dealt with alcohol abuse

Page 78: He touched our water bottles full of vodka and coke, but in his lack of diligence or perhaps a small kindness, he didn’t open them to have a sniff.

Page 99: We pick up some vodka and cigarettes and pack, quickly, but the two guys have little patience for my dithering and sack of toiletries

Page 263: I started drinking and shoplifting and skiving school and all the other things bad kids do. I ran out of places to hide.

Etc.

- I never shopped around for a diagnosis. I saw a psychiatrist who diagnosed me after multiple days speaking to me and my parent. I barely discuss this process in the book or any difficulties I had growing up because it’s none of your business!

This one is quite inscrutable - the book is almost nothing else than a discussion of the great difficulties she had growing up; the entire memoir is built out of what she here says is none of the reader’s business. The majority of the text in the book is devoted to those exact difficulties. It’s such a transparent falsehood that I hardly know how to being - just consult the opening chapters and you’ll find the whole thing is about “difficulties I had growing up.” To pick one sentence that puts the lie to that idea, I could go with this sentence, referring to a period in her young adulthood:

Page 94: I had struggled to reconcile my complicated past with having any kind of future, and it had taken everything in me just to not die.

As for the claim that she never said that she shopped around for a diagnosis, here:

Page xv: After years of struggling at work, I sought a diagnosis, and I got one.

And, in the New York Times:

I expected to be ambivalent [about a diagnosis], but I wasn’t: I was euphoric… After pursuing it for five years, the diagnosis gave me certainty, solidity and the strength to articulate my needs to others. I looked back on the past anew, seeing my own behavior through a softer lens and pinpointing where others could have been kinder.

I do not quite know what to do with a woman who directly acknowledges pursuing a diagnosis for five years but also denies ever engaging in diagnosis shopping. I can’t decide if this is deception or delusion.

Now for the overall complaint of fixation. I find this claim unsupportable and unfair. Having never heard of Eloise or her book, I was commissioned by UnHerd to review the memoir. I said yes because I am a writer, I frequently write about mental illness, and they paid me money. Meanwhile, Eloise is an adult professional who wrote a professionally-published book, put out by a legitimate publishing house. By definition her work is subject to review, including critical review. None of this amounts to fixation. Later that year I mentioned the review in my post “The Gentrification of Disability,” because Eloise’s memoir so perfectly fits in with a vision of mental illness that I think is insidious and destructive. That’s how this works! You write a book to share ideas with the world, and a consequence is that other people interact with those ideas, including in ways that you wouldn’t enjoy. It happens to me all the time. To publish a review because I was paid to do so, link to that review in a future piece on similar topics, and years later using Goodreads as it is intended to be used by sharing my review there - that cannot constitute fixation.

The review is linked here, and you can agree with it or disagree with it. If you feel strongly enough, you can write a piece taking it down, go for it. My overall problems with Obsessive Intrusive Magical Thinking are simple.

• It advances the now-inescapable vision of mental illness and neurological disorders as adorable quirks that help people live fuller and more adventurous lives, rather than as debilitating illnesses that cause deep human suffering

• This perspective is made more frustrating and insufferable by Eloise’s immense material privilege - her parents are obviously wealthy and the book amounts to a series of journeys she takes all across the world without any care for the expense involve, while so many people out there struggle under the weight of crushing psychiatric and neurological disorders that they lack the resources to treat (Note: See update below.)

• The entire book is premised on the popular but incorrect notion that being autistic, or having any other neurological or developmental or psychiatric condition, is inherently interesting, when that is never the case; only the expression of these conditions can be interesting in the hands of a skilled and self-aware creator. Obsessive Intrusive Magical Thinking did not meet the standards of skill or self-awareness that I have as a reader.

Here’s a fairly typical passage.

Page 216: In the mornings, I sunbathed and walked to Whole Foods and FaceTimed my new boyfriend, feeling the gap between England and California close. In the afternoons, I went to the comedy festival, where I felt more me than I had in months, indulging the person I was and the things I liked. One night, I watched comedy band The Lonely Island, laughing in a crowd alone as they brought out Michael Bolton and T-Pain.

This, and many more moments like it, in a book which takes as its central premise that Eloise has suffered to a degree so great that her story deserves to be captured in a memoir, written when she was barely more than a quarter-century old. On page 187, returning to a central motif, she writes “I will always be in pain, and I will always resent having a tether to this earth at all.” Well, that’s human, and of course pain itself can be worthy of capturing in a book, no matter what’s causing that pain or how privileged the author is. You can certainly write a book with that theme no matter how rich you are or what conditions you may have. But you have to do it well.

I just think you wrote a shitty book and that your vision of mental illness is corrosive, Marianne, that’s all. The only fixation at play here is yours for yourself. A lot of people seemed to like the book; meanwhile I’m just one obscure and largely-disgraced writer. You are still writing your story. I will read your next book with interest, but I hope you’ll take my sincere advice: write about something, anything, other than yourself.

Update: Eloise objects to many of my characterizations. I will let her have the last word, here:

“Fredrik is free to criticise the content of the book and to find me as annoying as he likes, I have only ever asked him to be accurate and precise in his reading. I never state that I do “loads of drugs”, that line is taken from me talking about a dream wherein I did loads of drugs in a burning hotel. I never moved to LA to try and “make it” as an actor, it says in the sentence Fredrik references that I acted as a teenager and gave up during my A Levels. I don’t drink, but I have ever enjoyed a drink with my friends and drank heavily during sad periods as a teenager, so I suppose you could characterise me as an abuser of alcohol if you were being ungenerous. I am not wealthy and do not come from wealth. Nobody has ever funded my trips but me, and a couple of my friends’ families as a teenager. My mother largely brought me up alone on benefits and I went on a couple of holidays as a teenager thanks to my friends’ kind parents but didn’t start travelling until I was in my 20s and writing regularly. I have been working since I was 16, full time since I was a little older, and have been a full time freelance writer funding everything I do myself since 2018. I don’t even speak to my parents, neither of whom are wealthy. My dad left when I was a toddler and I moved out as a teenager. Any characterisation of me as a person who has parents that can fund their lifestyle is false.”