Smart Dissatisfied Females

I met Haven Kimmel through Girl Named Zippy. Great memoir, right? Funny and sweet and with an eye open to imperfection and contradiction. Loved it.
I think I read The Solace of Leaving Early next which I also really liked and will talk about more in a sec, then She Got Up Off The Couch. Zippy plus. Good. I think Zippy seems her purest sort of effort.
I just finished her latest Iodine. The story follows Trace/Tracey Sue/Ianthe who is working through a repression-fraught and sexually charged (complicated) childhood, trying to make sense of the thing. Using a lot of Freud and Jung to guide her.

I don't want to do a book review necessarily, but. Kimmel does beautiful descriptions. She does great descriptions of ugly and good characterization based on surface details (Ianthe's transformation from goth waif to what comes next is pretty seamless and believable, even as it's extraordinary) and presents a pretty believable main character's head through which you swim. As she did in Solace she presents you with a really brilliant outcasty heroine. This novel is far less redemptive, however, but draws you deeply enough into Trace/Tracey Sue/Ianthe's head that by the time you realize just how broken this kid is it's too late and you're reeling right there with her. (It's like the time I watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind while half dozing and had to turn it off and go for a walk because I was pretty sure my mind was melting.

Issues with the book: 1. Because Kimmel played so much with hallucinations and repression and dissociation I'm not sure if she was cheating. And she could've been. Could all of this happen? Did it? What did and what did not? Most of the action (all of it I think after a certain point) is told as an extension to the heading Dream Journal. So each chapter starts with a dream and trolls through old memories and ends up somehow in the present tense of the book. And truth be told I'm not super motivated to go and piece this all back together so maybe it's my fault, but it seems to me like she was cheating. Ex deus machina-style pulling memories from nowhere and deleting years and it all gets pretty messy.

That being said, Ianthe is studying (or obsessed with or something) Freud and Jung and I think that Kimmel justifies the conceit she's using through tenets of psychoanalysis. Kind of cool. Actually kind of my favorite part: all of this mixing of dream and reality is germaine to the content of Trace's mind. And Kimmel plays a couple of very cool parlor tricks with psychoanalytic theory and she has the presence of mind to set most of the action in the vague late 80s when all of this theory was hot hot hot.

2. I resent being a demographic. I was reading--entirely engrossed, not getting my oil changed again this week because I was so taken in--aware of the traps she laid to appeal to me. She name drops (there was a tryst or at least a really great convo with Galway Kinnell, she delves and delves into theory and mythology) . She sets a good chunk of the action (and the main romance) in the English Department. She kind of condescends to middle class normal life livers (Trace avoids her classmates by shopping and showering at truck stops, where real people live). Aaach Haven Kimmel, I'm not a machine! The book is intellectual porn: enough intellectual to make you feel really smart, not enough to challenge you away. It's perfectly designed to grab smart dissatisfied females by their frontal lobes and not let them go until they're dizzy and tired and delighted.

So. Good at what it's trying to do. Enough problematic not to get involved. (And truth be told it took me a good month to get involved enough to finish it.) (And my mom gave it to me because she thought it was too weird.)

Read Zippy though, it's great.